Whip Rush has all the makings to be a sleeper hit shmup for me, an oddly adorable player ship, an incredibly hype first stage theme and a desperate attempt to emulate R-Type down to a battleship stage, bosses with tricky weakspots, an organic final stage and a boss designed after some form of genitals.

Unfortunately it does that shit where starting after the midway point it dials the difficulty up from 6 to like 22, and as always that's when these games start falling apart pretty easily. Stage 5 with the battleship is by far the hardest shit in the game with it's insta-lasers across the screen and asking the player to move through a bottleneck as five turrets rain down suppress-fire, it's hard and also somehow just feels amateur-ish. The stage 5 boss I didn't even know you could blow it's arms off because there was no indication I was dealing damage, so I was constantly dying thinking the game was asking me to do some horrifically dodgey movement to hit the weakpoint on that son of a bitch. A special shoutout to the dick monster final boss with it's fucking arms flying all over the place at seemingly random leading to unavoidable deaths.

A shame, it started pretty good. Still think the ship is cute though, wouldn't mind hanging out with it.