Guardian Force Gameplay

On a whim I decided to try out the last game in the Cotton Saturn Tribute collection, which weirdly wasn't even a Cotton game. To my surprise Guardian Force turned out to be my favourite of the bunch. It's a top down autoscroll shmup, where you control a tank. Your main weapon always fires forward, but you control the turret by rotating it left or right to get enemies coming at you at an angle. In a typical shmup fashion you have different weapons you can collect along with 2 types of attachments - straight or homing rockets. Each weapon has a different special move, which is a super attack with limited number of uses giving you some room to breath. Using those is essential since when you die you lose your stock anyway. Even though I'm not a big fan of shmups, I really enjoyed this one because of the level of control and mobility you have. Plus the enemies never get to a bullet hell territory where you have to count pixels to survive. This game really elevated the whole collection and even though I didn't manage to beat it, it left me wanting to play more, which is a rarity these days.