Takotan - 星のタコ

Neat little shoot 'em up that seems heavily inspired by Konami classics -- Parodius and Gradius in particular -- with some of the cuteness of the former and the tight-maneuvering side scrolling of the latter. There are 8 levels and in old school style there's no picking up where you left off, if you want to finish the game you have to do it in one run, but you do have a few continues at your disposal. Once you finish the game you unlock a harder difficulty called Panic Mode. There's also a leaderboard (just local? can't tell) and achievements.

The price is nice and low but the game unfortunately lacks some quality of life features like saving your sound and screen settings. It also opens in a 720p window which you need to Alt+Enter to make full, and there's no way to quit the game other than Alt+F4 or going to the taskbar.

If you're a shmup nerd like me you'd probably find some things to like here. 7.5/10

nice to play a good old school style shooter!
overall a fun time. if you like konami shooters, this one seems to borrow some inspiration
its a flawed game but a good first effort. its a shame the game seems to have sold so poorly.

pros: cool bosses and i do like the gimmick of being able to dodge into the background at the press of a button. your octopus has a large hitbox so this is meant to mitigate that. there's also multiple difficulty modes. if you are seasoned at 16-bit console shooters like the ones on the pc engine or megadrive, the normal difficulty isn't too difficult. i beat the game without dying once (you get a health bar with health items here and there). i would imagine panic mode is a big challenge.

cons: the scoring system involves a bunch of gems that bounce and change colors when you shoot at them, very similar to the bells in the twinbee series. however, the twinbee bells had powerups in each color. the gems in takotan cause far too much clutter, and for a regular playthrough, i could really care less about the score, since the extra lives are mainly from powerups.
the weapon system is also really subpar, its difficult to identify which weapon you're picking up, and some of them are outright harmful to use, and you can't upgrade weapons either. to play it safe, i stuck with the triple shot for the full game, which had a decent fire rate and okay coverage

I miss Konami's Parodius series so I had to buy this game, since it's the only one I found that pays direct homage to it. Though it's a strange hybrid between that and Gradius, being too serious for a wacky game like Parodius but also too cute for its parent series. Not nearly as good as either of these, but still nice and competently made. Though you feel under-powered somewhat with most weapons. The idea of changing plane to avoid bullets and obstacles is neat, but sometimes it's hard to gauge what is a danger and what is part of the background. Nice 16bit-inspired graphics and good soundtrack too.

cute shmup, had fun with it!!