its got all the foundations of a good compile shmup with high speed, hella weapons to mix and match with, and tons of stuff onscreen, but the overall balance is godawful. The upgraded powerups are so broken that levels 1-6 are practically braindead to go through even for someone who is ass at this games like me, with level 7 being a slight challenge, 8 actually being a really solidly fun challenge and 9 being an absolute rocket punch in the dick. I'm talking "lose all 20 lives you've been piling up from the easy-ass first two thirds of the game in minutes" levels of brutal at the end.

I feel like part of the appeal of shmups (and difficult retro games as a whole, really) is watching that slow skill progression through restarting the game at the end of every bad run, with game familiarity allowin ya to not only get to the part you last died at more quickly, but also usually with more lives/continues/just generally better odds at winning. This games pacing really doesn't allow me to experience something like that, as the piss easy nature of the first 2/3rds of the game makes it so that my punishment for getting pot shotted on level 9 and losing all my powerups is having to replay the stupid boring ass first 30-45 minutes that I already mastered on my first run all over again.

For a 1989 game it def is impressive on a technical and game feel level but I guess compile still hadn't gotten proper pacing down by this point. Honestly if they cut out the first 3 levels and put a few more powerups in level 9 to make death at least somewhat recoverable, this'd be a banger.