Vertical shoot-em-up. A shoots your regular guns, B fires a laser, and X uses your limited, screen-clearing bombs. The laser is kinda awkward since it starts off slowly moving away from your ship when the button is first held, but it instantly disappears entirely as soon as the button is let go, and on top of this, I didn’t notice much difference between it and the normal shots besides piercing (rarely useful) and slowing your ship’s movement, so I stuck with the regular guns for most of the game. I won’t call this a bullet hell because, besides one moment during the final boss on the hardest difficulty, there was always an obvious ship-wide opening to get through the bullet waves, so getting hit rarely felt unfair.

One thing I really like about this game is that, unlike a lot of other arcade-style shmups, this one actually saves your progress between stages, and getting game over only makes you redo the stage you’re currently on instead of having to start the whole game over.

One thing I didn’t like so much is the fact that the enemy waves thrown at you during the levels are randomized. Even before I realized this, I noticed the last couple levels started getting kinda repetitive and longer than they should have been, but it became obvious when I briefly started new games as the other playable ships to see how they played (their descriptions don’t really explain this) and the game kept throwing different enemies at me as the first wave. Plus, there are times where the randomizer doesn’t spawn any enemies and you’re just flying through an empty field for several seconds. Still, despite this, there is an actual difficulty curve here as well, with the enemies being spawned closer together and maybe shooting more frequently, too. I think the higher difficulties even affect this as well (and sometimes give bosses a new attack), but it’s hard to tell since there’s no description of what’s different between difficulties, and on top of this, I also feel like the higher difficulties increase the number of hits it takes to kill enemies and bosses as well, so between this and the aforementioned repetition, I’d only recommend beating the game once and not replaying it, not even on higher difficulties.

Lastly, although the game is mostly fair with its bullet patterns, there is one attack that’s a cheap hit: the last two or three bosses have laser attacks of their own that spawn instantly, and the only warning for where they’ll show up is an orange reticle against the red/orange background at the edge of the screen, so you won’t see or even know to look for it until after you’ve been hit by it a couple times.

Still, this is a pretty decent game overall, and I can easily recommend it for its base price of $2 (even moreso if you already have it from one of those itch.io bundles). You can buy it here: https://cosmiccrystal.itch.io/hellstar-squadron