Super Hydorah

The wall damage is extremely annoying. No good way to deal with enemies that shoot next to you or sometimes that fire along a narrow corridor with no room to dodge. In comparison, Gradius is generally fair if you do not do anything stupid. This one is straight up "memorize the level." One of the worst in its genre game-design-wise. WEAK. At least it ran well on a potato, though unfortunately it is not fun due to constant wall damage and enemy patterns you can do nothing about. Also most of the guns are useless and underpowered and the enemy health increases as the game goes on, meaning you effectively do not have the freedom to use the previous guns due to a severe lack of firepower. This was never an issue in Gradius (okay, Ripple always sucked though you did not have to use it).

It's good! The best part for me was routing the weapons to make the harder levels more manageable. Every stage is distinctive and the moment to moment level design is overall really good. The only critiques I have is that there's too much downtime with the story & some slow sections (like the boss rush checkpoint for example) and that it's trivially easy to savescum to obtain what should be the harder achievements.

Super Hydorah is not worth $20. However, if you can grab it during a Steam sale for $1.99, or pick up a key for around $1, it's worth your time. Super Hydorah is a tough-as-nails shoot 'em up with gorgeous retro pixel art. The controls are simple, but responsive, giving you everything you need without overcomplicating the game. Levels feature branching paths, and along the way you'll unlock new weapons and tools that can completely change your strategy from stage to stage. For the most part, the game feels challenging, but fair. That said, some stages (talking to you Galactic Inferno) are punishingly long. You only have a limited number of lives to clear each level, and if you run out before reaching the end, you're sent all the way back to the beginning. Most stages feature two bosses, but the longer levels can throw as many as four at you. You'll need to stay focused from start to finish, because it's easy to burn through your lives. As mentioned before, if you like arcade games or shoot em ups in general, and you can get Super Hydorah for a couple bucks, it's absolutely worth your time. Please do not spend $20 for this game.

It's a cool throwback to the old arcade times, but unfortunatelly not really fun to play. The graphics is nice, and the music is great. The problem is ship speed and firepower. You can't play this on react, because your ship is simply too slow. To make things worse levels are super tight and you will pretty often crash into the walls and loose precious shields. And since you only have 1 shield (or 3 on rookie) it gets old pretty fast. When you die you loose damage upgrades, so it gets harder on retries. YOU HAVE TO MEMORIZE ALL LEVELS AND ENEMY PLACEMENTS in order to perfectly plot your flight path. Otherwise you will die constantly due to that low ship manoeuvrability. I would recommend this game only to hardcore players, who like to suffer and are OK with memorizing everything. Playing this on react I managed to clear like 4 planets in 3 hours. After this one session I feel like after a whole day of work. So yea, it's not a relaxing game by any means. And you can't save when you want. You have to clear the level and then quit. Otherwise you will loose progress. It's not a bad game, but I fear it's way too annoying for most players. You simply can't play this for fun or to relax…

I was worried if I'd gotten too old and my reaction speed was in the dirt already, but I found out from the reviews that the game apparently runs too slow or too fast (just like my case) for many people. Plus there is no documented fix (I tried setting my monitor to 60hz - didn't seem to work, at least at first). They really shouldn't be selling this game in the current state. This is why this review is negative. Thankfully, after fiddling around with my graphics card settings, I was able to get it to run at the right speed eventually and play through it. It's a pretty good game - great graphics, solid controls, cool bosses and everything else I was expecting from the dev (I am a fan of Cursed Castilla). The CRT shader/filter is really high quality and I really enjoyed playing with it on. I played through on the Rookie difficulty and then tried the Pilot difficulty too, but decided I didn't want to grind the final few levels. So you'll like the game if you like what you see in the trailer/screenshots, just beware of the game speed issue.

I played the original version of this to death. This has better graphics and more fine tuning.