I gave it a shot and it's acceptable, but not really what I was expecting. Foreground sprite graphics are decent, but background art uses about 256 colors and is hideously dithered; it does nothing to take advantage of the color capabilities of the GP2X. The large objects moving around in the background move choppily as if there were a slideshow going on behind you-- they look like paper cutouts moving around jerkily, not fluid at all. The graphics are rendered 3D but in the end, simply sprites-- they are not realtime generated 3D as was speculated. Explosion sprites are small, off-center, have nearly no animation, are choppy and vanish too quickly.
Framerate is pretty good most of the time, though it gets quite choppy at times. When it lags, it doesn't become slower and smooth like most programs, it just skips lots of frames which feels jerky and looks tacky. Controls are good, and makes you forget a lot about the GP2X's sketchy stick. Music is disinteresting and bland; they're really just short, boring and generic loops. It's easy to forget there IS music, and when it is playing, it's very quiet. Sound effects are fairly lackluster but serve their purpose. Sound samplerate is very low making the sound dull, washed-out and scratchy.
What bothers me most is that the game is essentially a Mars Matrix clone but lacks the cohesive and smooth feel of that game, as well as the art direction. Your ship looks like the Red one in Mars Matrix. In fact, both ships in the title screen look just like the Mosquitos 1/2 from Mars Matrix. Their color, shape, everything. The red ship's wide-sweeping shot is nearly the same. Its close-range attack is identical to Mars Matrix's 'Piercing Cannon' except that you need to charge it up. The bomb is similar to Mars Matrix except that you cannot charge it or absorb bullets with it. Enemies are, design-wise, identical to many in Mars Matrix, most notably the white and red enemy with the large wings and the rolling ball enemies which are from the first and fifth (might be fourth) levels in MMatrix. The background hexagon effect is more a throwback to Donpachi, but the Ship Select screen from the video footage is just like MMatrix's. All it's really missing is the scrolling text.
Gameplay-wise, the density of the bullet patterns and size of the player hitbox makes it mostly impossible to dodge through enemy bullet patterns, so you have to make wide sweeping movements around them, which is often not possible. This makes the difficulty curve very high, but it's a control and collision issue rather than any issue of player skill. Perhaps if the player hitbox were a quarter of its existing size and the player had a D-Pad they'd be able to play this effectively, but as it stands even a skilled shooter veteran will struggle with the first level.
In addition, there are pretty major bugs-- most noticably, it crashed twice I started a game after recieving a Game Over. I also got a Game Over the instant I started a game and could not get it to stop happening until I closed the game and re-launched it! The title screen also vanishes and reappears after a set period of time as if it was going to play a demo, but it never does. All of these bugs happened within my first 5 or 6 minutes of play and consecutive times between which I had to keep resetting my machine. It feels as if it wasn't really tested before release.
It's a good effort, but it feels more like an old late-90's PC game that was ported over than it does an original title for the GP2X.
