Okays,

XBox Live arcade game, that's been around for a little while now. It's an old school Contra style side scroller.

It sort of works... Sort of.

There's lot's to like about the game. Some nice boss battles, mid stage bosses, nicely drawn graphics and plenty of content. Something doesn't feel quite right though and I've been struggling to put my finger on it.

In a concession to the unlock generation they've included something called Uprising mode, which has a shop where you can unlock buffs and additional abilities for your character using points accumulated in the game. I've got about 50% of these unlocked now for one character and whilst a chunk of them are just there to make the game easier there's a whole raft of additional movement related buffs and powerups that make your character far more controllable. Abilities like shot reflection, vaulting, faster aerial dashing etc. are all up for grabs and for the most part these are available in the arcade mode out of the box, but dammit I want these to be default in uprising mode too. Even bloody autofire has to be unlocked and that's pretty essential!

Not a bad game by any stretch and I'm enjoying it. I just doesn't fill me with the adrenalin that a shooter of this type should.