Recent reviews by clippa

Excellent shmup sparkling with that zakichi magic. Chunky, colourful graphics and possibly the best shmup soundtrack of all time. It's nice and chill to play for survival, but experimenting with where best to use the hyper in each stage makes it very moreish for scoring.
Lots to like for veterans, but this would also make an excellent introduction to the genre for new players.

Sublime caravan-style score chaser with lots of modes and banging chiptunes. Short runs and fast gameplay. Highly addictive. It's a blast!

This is mind numbing. It feels like everything is a placeholder, just copy and pasted boring waves, no interesting mechanics.

I don't trust the hitboxes at all in this game, I was forever getting unfairly clipped during the bosses so I was just bombing through them on very hard difficulty.
I think the hitboxes on the enemy bullets need to be a lot smaller. I think that's the issue. Some of the patterns can be quite dense during the bossfights and going between bullets often results in an unfair death.
The bombs in this game are ludicrously overpowered though! One bomb takes off 90% of the TLBs health!
Bit of a pedestrian game, to be honest, but worth the 4 quid they're asking so it gets a thumbs up. Would be elevated by an extra scoring mechanic or a hyper button or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9Arnonz0SQ

It's been five months now and the game is still broken. The developer and the publisher both know about the issues and don't seem to care enough to fix them.

The game is very poorly balanced, takes a long time to get interesting, eventually you become so overpowered that bosses go down in seconds.
Eventually the stage generation algorithm goes to pot and starts to build caves with impassible walls that you have to just fly through, tanking the hits until you die.

So all runs go this way, you're overpowered and the game is far too easy up until around stage 30 where the game becomes impossible and you die flying into walls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJispLaebZc

I rate the dev, he's been getting better with each release, and you can tell there's a fun game hidden in there if it was balanced and tested properly, but I think it's safe to say that it's abandoned at this point.

Very bland and unchallenging. Terrible mechanic where your shot powers down as you shoot.
Update: I've removed the stuff about the leaderboards being broken since the devs say it's been patched.
Also, I discovered that you are awarded points for stars remaining at the end of the game, so if you're frugal, you can get a big end of game bonus.
The problem is that powerup drops throughout the stages seem to be random, so somebody who has a lucky run can keep their shot power up and get a few lucky bomb drops and not really have to spend anything in the shop.
edit: Aaaaah! There is a hidden mechanic. Once you get 100 stars, each star you pick up gives you an extra life, so don't spend anything in the shop, and then you can just tank your way through the final boss and get a huge bonus.
I spent a load of money on bombs before the final stage on my most recent run and I didn't have to!
I was wondering "hang on, where did all those extra lives come from?!"
Edit: yup that's the way to score big. Spend nothing in the shop, tank your way through the final boss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DugRvCvOSOg
edit:To be fair to the devs, they say they're gonna change the mechanics based on feedback, so hopefully the game becomes a lot more fun to play.

This is brilliant fun. As well as your main shot, you have a sword which you can use for extra damage and clearing bullets. It feels really satisfying to use. You recharge it by hitting enemies with your shot and collecting coins.
You do triple damage up close so the game really encourages you to play aggressively. You also get extra score for killing enemies before they've been on screen for too long.
There's a type c ship that dies after one hit for when you get really good at the game, you get an extra sword charge slot with this ship to make up for it's squishiness.
It's a blast. Highly recommended!

This is loads of fun. Shmup creator doesn't have very many exciting scoring mechanics (right now, they could be easily patched in), so I think this sort of oldschool style game with lots of set pieces and interesting stage design is definitely the way to go. You can tell how much effort has gone into this. It's great! The four different weapons reminds me a lot of dezatopia.
Green mode adds a nice little twist where you're trying to keep the omni weapon for as long as possible by killing enemies and collecting green crystals.

Too easy, slow and boring. Lots of dead air and unskippable dialogue.

You'll 1cc it in 40 minutes and you're done. No extra difficulties to unlock. Very basic scoring mechanic of chaining enemies, I have absolutely no urge to play this again.

Hitbox on your ship is pretty huge, try to go around clumps of bullets rather than dodging between them.

It looks nice and it's cheap but when you can buy something as good as eXceed 3rd for a fiver on steam, there's just no reason to get this.

Such a dissapointment. I don't think I've been this bored playing a shmup for a long time.
It's far too easy, completed the game in 2 hours, no hard mode unlocked, nothing, and no reason to play through again.

Lots of cutscenes and dialogue and stuff that you can thankfully skip through. You can rebind keyboard controls, but not pad/stick.
You get some patterns spawning together which are unavoidable, hence the health bar.

It feels like the base game was so poor that they threw all the unnecessary extras on top to make up for it. There are a load of weapons you can unlock (none of which are as good as your fully upgraded default gun, so why bother), loads of characters and hats and little arcade games and stuff. All of this would be welcome extras if the core game was good.

It's all garnish and no dinner. Such a shame as I was really looking forward to this.