Demon Protocol

Generic shooter where you have to beat similar enemy waves across four stages, with every fifth stage featuring a boss fight. Altogether, there are 25 stages. You have three lives to beat the whole game, but there's barely any invincibility after dying, meaning you can die immediately after respawning, which becomes a cheap way to end your run in the later stages. While it’s possible to earn an extra life fairly quickly on normal difficulty, the points threshold goes much higher on high difficulty. Also, you can only have three lives maximum, so everything else goes to waste. There are no mechanics beyond moving around and holding your finger on the fire button. However, a string of silly design choices becomes increasingly annoying, along with the mentioned quick deaths. First, the area you can move in is limited to about one quarter of the screen at the bottom. This ties into the second annoyance. Each boss launches homing bombs that can be destroyed after a few shots, but the tiny movement area doesn't let you dodge them effectively. It's best to lure them to one side, dodge, and then use their slow movement to deal damage to the boss. There can only be a limited number of homing bombs on the screen, so the boss won't keep spawning new ones unless you destroy the existing ones. Higher difficulty increases their number and makes the whole thing even more frustrating. The third issue is also the worst, and it involves your main weapon. Although your bullets fly straight at first, they split after passing the middle of the screen. This throws accuracy out the window because there is none. Accuracy doesn't matter much except for one achievement, but nothing improves it, not even power-ups. Power-ups drop regularly from defeated enemies, and bosses also drop them to help you defeat them faster. The available power-ups are rapid fire, triple split, normal fire that splits into two bullets, a laser that's the best weapon you can get, a shield, and a bomb that damages every enemy nearby. Except for the bomb and shield, all weapon upgrades are temporary. This means their timers keep running even when there's nothing to shoot at.