I'm pretty on the fence as to whether I would recommend this. Let me tell you why.
So, it's a twin-stick shooter and in it's own way, has a charming aesthetic. Soundwise, it's fine and for the time I played it, I didn't mind the music either. Also importantly for this sort of game, what's going on on screen is graphically clear. You're never going to be confused about what killed you or why.
As for the all important "How does it play?" Well, the movement feels good, you move at a reasonable speed, you slow down while shooting so it's often a tactical question of when to run for space and when to fight. There's also a dash that has just a short enough cooldown that you always feel like it's there when you need it without it being spammable.
There's a variety of enemies that have different attack patterns, so that's cool.
Aiming at distant targets though, I found a little tricky, possibly because of the angled perspective the camera takes. There's no aim guide (apart from a couple of the powerups.) so fighting at a safe range feels a little like you're never sure you're going to hit what you're aiming at. Not ideal.
As for those powerups...This is where my main issue with the game appears. The fact of the matter is that most powerups are *much* better than your stock gun. That's fine. When you find a powerup crate, it gives you a random powerup out of a large selection. That's also fine. They don't have much ammo either, so you need to be accurate and tactical with them. That's great. So, what's the issue?
The issue is that's there's zero consistency with when powerups can drop. You'll run through a map, get half way, find no powerups at all and die. Then next attempt, you'll find ten and waltz through the level with complete ease. The game is very very challenging if you don't find powerups, so I found on some of the harder levels, I was just throwing bodies at it until I lucked out and found enough power ups to chain them.
A good example is the 3rd boss. I spent 4 minutes plinking away from max range, chipping away 25% of his hp, not finding a single powerup. Then a pack of adds finally dropped two and I finished him off in under 20 seconds.
There's also zero consistency of mini bosses spawning mid level. This became very clear to me on the very first level of the game. My first time through, 30 seconds in, a miniboss spawned in and murdered me. The next two times I tried the level, he didn't. The fourth time he did. The fifth time, 2 spawned. And so on and so on.
You have a bunch of minibosses spawn on a hard level where you're not finding any power ups? Oh well, better luck next time.
If you don't mind that sort of high variance, then sure, I'd recommend it. It's an otherwise fun game. I disliked that part of it enough to give up on the game though.
Oh and incidentally, there's a level up system that, as far as I can tell does nothing. The only mention of it at all in the game is an on screen message that pops up after a stage that says you've levelled up. Not sure what's going on there.
