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.
