So what’s the story morning glory I hear you ask? Well glad you mentioned that because here is where the cool and worst part of the entire package collide all over your face. The instruction manual and box give a perfectly good enough version of events as does the initial intro sequence when you begin a new game. The scene is set that an Earth outpost is attacked and utterly destroyed by an alien invasion made up of creatures that are both mechanical and organic in nature, groovy eh? It’s another of those impossible odds situations that falls apart once you realise there’s nothing special about your ship at all, in fact in several sequences you see TONS of other identical ships so your left with that practical part of your brain tapping at your eyes saying stuff like….. ‘Makes no sense Mark’ or ‘What are all the other ships doing eh?’

Once you get past the fact that this is just a game and should not be taken as a work of Orson-wells like literature you just relax into it and let the story take you on the journey however this is not all smooth sailing at all even after you switch off the common sense or lack of logic issues but more on this later.

The game itself begins very much as a nod to the original with a lovely launch sequence after you have selected your weapons loadout, yup this is the first major difference apart from graphics that let’s you know Treasure was behind this. In the original game you collected power ups in the game to change weapons however this time you choose which weapons you will have to try and beat the level with from the off, it’s better if you ask me because it adds elements of luck and strategy to the mix rather than just learning enemy patterns.

Initially you only get to choose from 2 different types of mass destruction options, a simple forward firing bullet and a bullet that fires to the side on a kind of diagonal slant, each wing allows for one weapon so to start with you can have a maximum of 3 playing styles, shoot forwards on both, diagonal on both or a mixture of the two. As you complete levels you unlock the newer weapons from an ever increasing level of destruction, lasers come first then bombs then the crazy fun stuff. Remember once the action starts you cannot change until you reach the half-way point in each level where you can re-assess your weapons options once more for the second part of that area, another nice, clever and tactical addition to the title I feel. Your shields also get recharged at this midway point as well....Phew.

Back to the game itself and at it’s core it’s simply a top down shooter with moving backgrounds that gives the impression of real freedom and much like it’s predecessor it works just fine and dandy, the speed moves up and down to keep you on your toes and the action at times is relentless which again is the hallmark of a Treasure game. It is important however at this point in the review to mention that a western developer involved in the conversion to these markets did a bit of extra work as the original JAP version had some serious slowdown that sometimes made it nearly unplayable, thankfully almost all traces of this have been removed for the  PAL version so for once we get the best possible edition, how awesome is this eh?