It's stylish and cool, with gorgeous visuals and music reminiscent of Z-Out, but it's also very short and very easy: unless you want to handicap yourself and play without upgrades or the most overpowered weapons, getting through it will be an absolute breeze, a problem slightly alleviated by the hardcore difficulty level which removes shields and makes you die in one hit, demanding perfection in between checkpoints. Even like that the game remains quite forgiving and far, far from the peaks of difficulty of an R-Type, also thanks to the fact collisions with the scenery are not lethal.

The game would have benefitted from mapping the secondary weapons to a button separate from the stock laser gun, and tying them to a recharging ammo bar so they couldn't be spammed constantly, but I suppose the game's single button Amiga roots didn't account for that.

The result is a slightly disappointing shmup that doesn't put up enough of a fight to be fully satisfying to play. The only difficulty spike, and likely more than half of the couple hours you'll be likely to spend on this game, is the final optional boss, which dips its toe into merciless and borderline unreasonable bullet hell territory, though even it is easily bested by selecting the correct weapon for the job.

Worth a playthough, especially since it's good for pick up and play, thanks to a generous save system.