Earthion

+ Generally looks fantastic. Really striking visual design, awesome little cutscenes, immaculate pixel art, great transitions, nice UI etc. + Sounds awesome - not just the soundtrack, but the sound design generally. Love the digitized vocal snippets here and there. + Generally fairly forgiving for a shmup in that on-contact shots replenish your shield, which for me personally is a plus. - Level design really starts to go downhill from level 3 onwards. I'm of the opinion that environmental hazards should be used sparingly in shmups (ZeroRanger is a great example of this) if at all, but I can still respect a game like Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun where the levels are carefully constructed around interesting and novel environmental hazards. This is more like a really bad take on R-Type. - Visual design on the alien level is so bad it's jarring after everything that came before it - literally looks like a second-rate R-Type. - One of my pet peeves in these types of games is when you have one powerup that is clearly far more useful than any of the others - in this case, the default diagonal shot, which is as weak as your regular shot but you're kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ without it. This game spams powerups at you constantly, and if you lose the diagonal shot you're going to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up by environmental hazards and boss fights will sometimes become far more tedious. - Been years - maybe over a decade - since I played either of them, but if you want a Megadrive shmup, I remember Thunder Force IV and Zero Wing being way better. Epitome of style over substance.