Oh man, I love this game. I played it for the first time last year as part of the “play a new game for every year you’ve been alive” thread. Here’s what I had to say last year (spoilered out of an abundance of caution):
This game’s great! The mandatory one hour is a good idea, because I almost stopped this one at the first level. It’s a difficult first level! However, once you get past that, and start building up your character and getting subweapons, it’s really fun. I think it’s super cool that you’re digging down into this dying planet, getting deeper and deeper from the ocean to the weird guts at the core, so you can kill the demonic aliens and destroy the planet. It feels like a big, weird journey.
One other thing I really like, and this will sound simple but trust me, is that the some of the shooting stages scroll fast. Like “this is out of control” fast. It’s a really exciting way to make a shooting stage feel tense.
The game’s password system is pretty unforgiving, so I just save stated my way through the whole thing and had a great time. I feel like I still got a pretty satisfying challenge.
I love that you get a carefully animated transformation sequence every time she turns into the space plane.
I will happily play this again. I’ll do my best to get to it before the month runs out.