Okay, guys, honesty is the best policy, so I'm gonna drop a hot take: A game isn't hard if it's BS. And this shmup has many bad design decisions that make it BS. This was Apogee's swansong, and unfortunately, it really doesn't feel tested at all. Any difficulty selections are quickly moot when you start playing. The scaling is so off the charts that any stage is soon a serious chore to deal with. After chapter 0 and two thirds of chapter 1, my patience had run out completely. I'm sorry, I tried! I honestly tried. But at the end of the day, this just isn't a good shmup, freeware or not. And I have seen and even played my fair share of decent, even GREAT freeware shmups. My heart goes out to the developers, though, as I hope they were able to learn from their mistakes and make better games in this genre even as the Apogee label effectively faded out.
