IRONCLAD

A really good shooter with solid mechanics, excellent graphics, good music and controls. You can choose between 3 different fighter ships, built for speed, power or balance. Your Ironclad is the little robot guy that attaches to the front of your ship and the cover model of the game. There's not an extremely wide variety of power ups available, but you are able to power up your ship's main shot, power up the Ironclad to have one of three different lethal shot attacks that activate by launching it forward, and finally, one of three power ups to the Ironclad's standard shot when it's detached from your ship. Stages are manually selected from the map as you progress, which is nice, but the best part in my opinion are the multiple endings to the game. Each final stage has it's own boss and own ending. The stage design itself is decent, you get a moderate variety of land, air and seascapes. The city's probably have the most personality and overall I think the entire theme of the game's world is immersive and entertaining. Difficulty seems to ramp up considerably on certain stages and boss fights can be challenging as well, however I never felt the game was all that unfair. Even among the library of quality shooters it has to compete against within the Neo Geo space and elsewhere, Ironclad is unique and fun enough to hold its own. My only real complaint is lack of care that went into the port for options like screen filters. The game itself is fantastic and highly recommended.

Ironclad manages to put a few cool spins on 2D side-scrolling shooters. First up, there's the unique (for the time) steampunk aesthetic. Next up, we've got branching paths between missions. Thirdly, we've got a robotic 'gunpod' which seems to have a mind of its own at times. While these features are now found in multiple shmups, they were fairly unique for them time. On top of all that, we've got the modern touches: Win/Mac/Linux support and modest hardware requirements. For two controller co-op: Have 2P press COIN (R Bumper) then START. Enjoy.

RECOMMENDED. The difficulty is very reasonable and easy is easy, though you lose stuff with every hit, of which you can take many. The stages are the easier part in comparison to the bosses that get borderline unfair (the stage 3C drill guy with almost unavoidable attacks can suck it). This shmup has branching stage paths with different end bosses and actual characters to fight, for a change. The sound has a lot of strength to it and the graphics are a bit forgettable. In other words, it is almost a perfect opposite of Pulstar on all levels. Ironclad ultimately defeats it by having some incentive to replay it. The original Neogeo and Ironclad roms are included with the release (much like with Pulstar) and it has the same menus, save states and even keymapping errors as P did (Z as A button instead of X as shown in the menus). That's a good thing as the P release was technically adequate. The gameplay is the usual horizontal shoot-'em-up deal, though there are no side pods (AKA 'options' in Gradius) and the front / shield module has a lot of different functionality. In comparison to Pulstar, the main ship weaponry is very standard stuff with basic homing missiles and strictly horizontal weaponry. The front module is the complex one as you can do a lot of stuff with it: charged special attack it, use it to boost the basic ship attacks, let it float away from the ship and shoot at enemies from a particular screen position, etc. Apparently Last Resort had something like this and a lot of people liked that one. All in all, you are not forced to doing things one way to not risk dying, so there is more of that free-and-fun stuff here. Unless you suck at boss fights, that is. Pulstar was all about finding the safe zones where bullets would not hit. This one is about maintaining constant movement and finding the gaps to avoid stuff. Not exactly a bullet hell, though.

Basically it's an emulator shipped with one ROM file, and no real way to do sensible things like set the controls up. Graphics can be set to "fullscreen" or "windowed" but how is it upscaling it? Who knows! You're betting off downloading the ROM and playing it on FinalBurn where you can change the controls. I'm sorry, but this is a trainwreck.