Blazing Chrome

True 2D pixalted game (it runs on low resolution if you want). Pixel perfect. Tight controls. Really challenging but it also has an easy mode where you can finish the game comfortably with infinite continues. The game feels and play very much like Contra: Hard Corps but has a few features from other games. For example, sometimes you can get into a mech like in Metal Slug. There are also some hand-to-hand combat moves to do. It's very much 16bit and allows you to play with CRT filters if you want which look awesome. The music and the story is very much like Terminator. It feels really retro, it's 2 players coop, multiple unlockable characters with totally different skills, ... excellent game imho!

I have exactly one single gripe with the game, which is the over-reliance on the shoddily scripted melee attacks. Sometimes your character does or does not perform them while they are crucial in some bossfights, which is a serious issue for me, given you die in one hit. If you make bossfights rely on a mechanic, make sure it checks out, ffs. Often enough, my character will happily fire his gun instead of performing the actual melee attack, effectively killing me. In some bosses this costs me 1-2 lives per run, because it simply isn't clear, WHY all of a sudden it won't trigger the melee attack. Yes, that is 2 stars for me, because I want to ace this game as I did Contra back in the day, and it absolutely wouldn't be an issue for me, if the melee attack would trigger with a different button, but reliably so. Dying in these kind of games is a given until you know what's up, but dying because the controls are shitty, unintuitive or janky is a big no-no and ruins for me what could have been an absolutely perfect experience otherwise. At least give as an OPTION to have melee assigned to a button press. I mean, it's 2019, that shouldn't even be a thing! Look at Shovel Knight, where you can choose how to use your sub-weapon, why in the hell would you force me to use the same button for melee and range when it apparently doesn't trigger sometime? And the game is very unclear on why that is, sometimes it just doesn't trigger the melee atk. It's not on cooldown, it's not the distance between the enemy and me, it's just some enigmatic BS that I can't even test. I tried it over and over at a boss who has a lot of opportunities to use melee, and I can reliably prove, that sometimes it just doesn't trigger, but why that is, I couldn't find out. Shame to ruin a perfect game with some janky BS.

Reminds me a lot of the Contra, Metal Slug and Gunforce games. You can also see some vibes from titles like Gunstar Heroes, Shatterhand or Super Turrican II. The pixel art is fantastic, game is really challenging to complete, thankfully up to normal the Continues are unlimited.

In order to use this game for the first time I need to have an internet connection otherwise the game crashes tryed it in multiple pcs still does it. I give it one star because of that