So allow me to talk about the elephant in the room. The game does crash at complete random, but it isn't GOGs fault or necessarily the developer's. It's an old stitched together engine, that wasn't fully future proofed. GOG tried their best and it's commendable, with the patches even more so it's more stable than the Origin/EA Play and Steam versions. Either crashing at boot up, at the start or after playing for 8 hours straight and the game's application just kills itself on the task manager AKA crash to desktop. So let that be a fair warning that on surface level crashing of some type is to be expecting, but in my case to a rare degree since the team on site tried their best, but will fluctuate to everyone's PC for what the problem is (Thank god fan patches if you need them). (Bonus of not needing to login in to third party software, bless DRM-Free cause that helps a lot).
I want to start off by saying that I own a physical copy & the Steam version. I know that the fan patches can only do so much for this old game, for both copies. Yes I experienced crashes, non-proper wide screen support, frame rate chugs and at one point the game world being completely empty. That's older game engines for ya, that hard to future proof. However the GOG copy, fixes a majority of these issues. I say majority because the only thing that I've had to do between all versions when compared to this site's copy, is cap the frame rate a 60FPS and the last of the problems disappears from what I tested. Proper widescreen support, no crashes and less far less bugs. This doesn't mean that it's perfect cause older engine = newer problems depending on hardware and software, but it runs perfectly on Windows 10 without tweaking and according to a bud, Windows 11 as well. So if you want a copy of this game, I'd recommend getting it here
The trailer itself shows a mixture of Contra and Metal Slug, since I had a craving for side scrolling shooters. It is that, with free aiming mouse control, health bars and a type of eating mechanic for builds on the selectable character. The game play loop is decent. Jump, shoot, collect weapons, level up by killing enemies for more health and damage. Then there's the eating mechanic which just basically effects what kind of build you're going for, Carnivore is more damage and easily able to get the various upgrade currencies from the shops and Vegan for fruits and vegetables to obtain power-ups that last longer, or an in-between skills branch that allows you to eat whatever and still get decent effects and passives. Extra damage, extra defense, extra duration for powerups, the works. The level structure is 3 act worlds, reminiscent of a structure like Sonic Heroes if I had to give an example. The third act is always a boss fight, however in this game you fight your way there in a standard-length level like the last two before it. Reach the end, fight a boss that has three stages, simple enough. The bosses have readable attack patterns, that change slightly/just enough to keep you on your toes with their patterns. However, that's where the details for how the game is in terms of its structure works & now, we're on to the parts that sadly have major flaws: The bugs are abundant from enemy projectiles not appearing, difficulty spikes cause enemies in the level are randomly alerted, rewards not being given, all the way to the second boss in the game is unkillable, which made me cheat and change my save file to show world 2 was beaten. There is a major bug that surprisingly effects multiple copies of the game years later and that's the 2nd boss CANNOT BE DAMAGED. The reason behind this I come to find out, is that the trigger for the cutscene is incomplete within the game code. There is no second trigger to turn off the cutscene, hence why it ends up invincible.
