I really wanted to see this one through to the end, because I enjoyed the look and feel of it quite a lot. It's a solid shmup made by Germans who genuinely loved, and took major influence from, Japanese game design -- going so far as to make the narrative sections stylistically anime, and to give the game a Japanese name that appears prominently on the main title screen.

The gameplay is essentially Gradius--meaning, tight controls and a fun power-up system, and also an almost comical inability to power back up when you die, especially late in the game. So, it's basically about perfecting your strategies level-by-level so that you can skate through the entire thing without dying more than once, MAYBE twice. Not awesome.

The look and sound of the game, though, just about make up for its stingy Gradius-syndrome. The Amiga color palette is hyper-saturated and kiddy-feeling, and so when you get to the bonus level where you swim around inside a dead rat's carcass, it's all the more weirdly wonderful; and the music slaps.