fucking amazing!

the music is perfect fer this game i love it!

good and a tiny bit bad

the game is very addictive and i liked the range of colors on the enemy's the difficulty was balanced sometimes it was just right but at other times it was very difficult. theres only two bad points 1 the background was to repetitive 2 it got very hard at times but overall its a good game

Good Concept, But Balance...

I really liked the genre-blending concept, but I found the game design wasn't all I'd hoped for.

The Good:
1. The music's great.
2. The graphics, if cliched, were nicely differentiated and helped identify characters.
3. The enemy characters had great variation of their behaviors.
4. Each level had a fairly distinct feel.

Things that could be better:
1. It appears item drops are random, which is problematical, because of 2.
2. There are only 3 item drop levels, but you can get the same thing multiple times.
3. The standard shots are too weak to be useful most of the time. It's only when it's at 4X that it's finally useful vs. the rockets, because of damage differential vs. screen area covered. I'd double their damage at least.
4. Enemy character health ramping is such that either you have the right weapons on drops, or you can't get a gold score. This makes it feel potluck, and nobody likes having a game of skill go sour merely due to a RNG.
5. There's no progression; it's really irritating to spend so much time having to collect all this stuff, then have to do it all over again on the next level, and so on. It starts to feel like a grind after awhile.

Basically, the game is "old skool", but I feel it didn't really work as intended. Old skool game art is fine, if cliched at this point in time; old skool game design reminiscent of quarter-stealing arcade games is much less welcome- there's a reason why games use upgrade mechanics and persistence these days, and it's not because gamers are lazy or don't want to be challenged, it's because people like persistence and progress, and don't care for pointless grinding. In the end, when I got past South America and didn't feel like playing any more, I felt like I was playing a MAME ROM with unlimited quarters.

That this was intended doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea in the first place. At the very least, re-examine the drop system and the relative balance of the weapons- when one of the two guns in a shooter is basically worthless until it's upgraded significantly... something might be fundamentally wrong with the balance.

Decent but could be better

I really enjoy these kinds of games, and you did a great job with this.

However, I think this game is difficult for the wrong reason. My problem (e.g., in Area 52 stage) is that the weapons are so weak that its nearly impossible to kill the mobs. The difficulty then comes from an inability to hurt enemies rather than a skill difficulty. In the end, I gave up due to the boredom of trying to kill the mobs with the peashooter that was available. Stages also took far too long because of this issue.

It's not often i find a game i can't win

I play a lot of games. And most of them on hard mode to boot. I decided to try this out since people were whining about how hard it is, only to find they're not joking. The concept is ok, I really liked the music, as even though it never changed it didn't feel repetitive at all. The upgrades are so rare (up till the point i gave up trying) and the enemies keep piling up whether you defeat the last set or not. By the time i got to Paris i was at that point where i wasn't feeling a sense of accomplishment, just a sense of too much effort for too little payout. The difficulty curve is too steep for my taste. I felt like it was easy in the first few missions then suddenly i was struggling just to shoot down one enemy. The Difficulty isn't the issue as much as the reward for survival. For that steep an incline i'd suggest adding a few things to assist, like NPC turrets, or even random bullets from the people on the ground or the healthy buildings. Perhaps making upgrades a little bit more useful, as i saw several levels where i got several upgrades after the weapons i used most that level were maxed, or not enough upgrades dropped leaving enemies nearly impossible to defeat, even with shields. Some people might enjoy retrying a level 20 times working out a strategy to beat it, but to me that get's boring after about the tenth time.