"I LOVE IT!"
This is an especially solid shmup hybrid, not unlike Smash TV.
The control is excellent, and the enemies and their projectiles move slow enough that you really feel in control. All of the weapons are quick and responsive. This isn't one of those games where the sniper rifle takes so long to reload you can never use it, and there's no need to worry about splash dammage from your own rockets.
You will occasionally go after some money and get pinned down, forcing you to take a hit, but thankfully you have enough health to act as a buffer.
I thought that the shop between levels was kind of a letdown. Basically because there's no real choice. You always just buy the next thing on the list. There is never any reason to do otherwise. Also, I would have liked to see max HP powerups for sale in the shop, not just healing. A good shop lets the player restructure their abilities to suit their play-style. This shop just felt tacked-on. They could have just given you a new gun every 2 levels and the result would have been the same, so the shop is kinda a red herring.
I got as far as the second boss, and then I died instantly because there's no obvious charge-up before the beam attack comes out. I don't really feel motivated to try again, because I know there's nothing I could have done differently, shop-wise, to improve the odds. I just happened to be standing on the left when the stage before the boss ended, and immediately after the fight started, I got raped by the beam attack. Two hits was all it took to take me from full health to dead, and I certainly didn't have any chance to study the boss's attack patterns or learn from my mistakes. Lack of any continue feature means your first mistake will be your last. Or more accurately, the first enemy you encounter with an attack that can hit you quickly, cover a huge area, and do a lot of damage, represents a bottleneck where the difficulty spikes and the penalty for making a mistake suddenly goes from a little health to all your progress.
Up until that one boss with the instant-death beam attack, it's a perfectly solid game. For all I know, it might resume being a solid game afterwards. But I have no desire to do it all over again just to find out.
It would also be nice to see a variety of rooms, or even scrolling levels for the player to explore. maybe some health power-ups so it doesn't come down to a choice between buying health or buying a new weapon, both of which feel necessary after each wave.
I did like the mecha designs and the graphics. The strangely silent intro animation, while impressive, felt overwrought and kinda pretentious for such a simple little game. Overall, it's a great but simple game that could have been incredible if it were a little deeper and the difficulty didn't spike in the middle like that.