A modern refresh of the 1989 Taito hit, in expected M2 spirit and quality. A must-have if you enjoyed the original game, Space Harrier and similar shooters. 9.5/10

Great game but, lacking in the polish you expect from modern arcade releases, especially M2.
Everything this game is doing well is significantly held back by some of the most frustrating visibility issues I've ever seen in an arcade game. The only rail shooter I've played that's as difficult to visually parse is Taito's Galactic Storm. And it's a real shame M2 did not provide visibility/accessibility settings to try and curb this.

The visual issues do not involve the density of hazards or even the speed of the game. It's the special effects. A scaling sprite rail shooter is already going to have some degree of ambiguity with sprites that increase in size and come towards you in a 3D space while overlapping each other. With how much glowing from enemy shots, glowing from background elements, massive vision obscuring clouds of smoke from defeated enemies, large pieces of debris and other good looking but excessive visual flair coming towards the camera, it is very hard to see dangers coming at you consistently.
It's even harder when you transform and YOUR sprite doubles in size taking up more of the screen. You could call this a gameplay mechanic that incentivizes you to be sparing and precise about using your Gear change. But there's already a strict resource for this.
What this causes is this very weird "side step" dodging where you you're killing enemies and then reflexively trying to get out of the way of the rapid debris to avoid the off chance a bullet jump scares you from the haze. There's a sorely lacking suite of options kind of like Salamander III back in August and I don't terribly understand considering how many settings and modes they provide in their compilations. It's a real shame and I hate to be that negative about an M2 product. This especially sucks for me as someone severely colorblind where similar hues tend to be difficult to discern.

I spent a lot of time talking about visibility but I feel it really is the most glaring issue with something that otherwise plays expertly. The only other issue I have is that runs are only 4 stages. There's a good number of stages to branch to, but runs feel a bit *too* short to me. I think one more stage, even if it was just a 1 single choice in the halfway point, would have nailed a sweet spot. You get a lot of health in this game so a bit more of an endurance would make that stretch a bit more.

It's a very smooth game with a ton of engrossing novelty despite being so simple. You move, you shoot, you transform for a bump in firepower. That's it. But the game gets a ton of longevity out of that because of how enemies are handled and of course Night Striker's road bonus to score encouraging you to land as often as is safe and lucrative to do so. The captain system is excellent and gives nice high priority targets that aren't necessarily the easiest to hit usually. It also alleviates the visibility issue at times because you kill everything at once in a formation when you destroy a captain.
Unlike the original, bosses have far more elaborate patterns and set pieces despite still going down about as fast if you can manage to stay on them with sustained fire. The Desert 1 boss is a highlight. I think this game is low key a new standard for railshooter boss design. The only others I can point to where they exist and are this good is StarFox 64 and the Sin & Punishment games. Perfect pacing, good spectacle, and fun patterns.

The game is pretty good. It just has large, unfortunate caveats and I really wish they'd release just one big settings update to address it. It's more than playable, but I always feel like I'm handicapped.

Beyond that is just personal gripes. Not a fan of the music especially when there's Night Striker 1's insane OST to compare and I would prefer actual pixel art over prerendered sprites for a game like this. But those are nitpicks.

It's sad it wasn't quite where I wanted it to be because I was wildly looking forward to this one all year.

(Side note: I appreciate that the sky levels are reminiscent of Taito's canceled 1993 racer, Vertexer. A nice touch!)

I need to buy a flight stick. This is beautiful work