Classic arcade style game in the comfort of your home. A nice break away from pay to win micro transactions. All upgrades and cosmetics depend on you, the player. Very fun and addicting gameplay loop with surprisingly good graphics, sound effects, and challenging action.

It's fine. The presentation is mostly nice. Ran great on steam deck, no slowdown or stuttering. The ship speed is good, though it has a rather large hitbox and I found myself taking damage a lot by grazing over slow tiny bullets that I thought had passed off the screen already. This game has no bullet cancels or grazing mechanics that I noticed. There is a score bonus for letting no enemy leave the screen which is.. fine (I'd prefer a star bonus to reduce some of the grind). Enemy variety is quite nice, I especially liked when they feel part of the environments you're flying over, like tank squadrons mounted on hills and vantage points, but I thought the game could have gone much further in this regard. The bullet patterns are okay. A million little things to collect and bars to fill but all the pretty effects can clutter the screen and there's no toggles for things like screen shake or bullet colors (and only AA and resolution in terms of graphics), and the constant spoken feedback of you picking up upgrades (not even sure why this mechanic was included, other than the genre demands it. It adds very little) and rescuing humans will have you wanting to mute the game entirely. Some of the designs clash and I'm not sure what exactly it's going for. The character portraits (who even are these people?) look plucked from another game entirely. The basic mook looks like some WW1 plane? But the tanks are shooting lasers? And for a game that purports big epic bosses the first two are giant helicopters and the third is a giant tank (though I do like the tank and it does have a fun phase 2). They likely get more involved later on but I haven't progressed all that far yet, but this game absolutely does not come out the gate swinging. It prefers to lure you in by trickling tiny stat boosts that you buy between missions.

My biggest gripe is that the upgrades do an absolutely poor job of keeping pace with the levels. By level 3 I was already having to go back and grind so I could actually clear the mooks, who are now tanking 3 shots. Avoid this game if you are looking for a short arcade experience, as this one will demand your time to fully unlock the fun. On the other side of that coin there is a lot of incentive to replay the levels thanks to multiple objectives and difficulty scales and score multipliers, so it isn't all bad but it does feel very artificial.

Final petty note: I wish the main gun upgrades like the cannon and missiles had some sort of control over when they shoot, or a small meter that alerts you to when they will fire off next. Just the smallest little bar at the bottom corner..