Okay so first things first: I genuinely really love this game. It's a fantastic remake/sequel/spinoff of Yar's Revenge, one of my absolute favourite 2600 games, and it's great fun. The changes made are really cool and keeps things fresh and enjoyable for the most part. HHHHOWEVER, there are a multitude of small annoying issues that keep irking me the same way a semi-loose tooth would. If an update can be pushed out to fix any of these problems, it'd be absolutely amazing.

First: About the bullets that come from off screen... It's a bit overkill is it not? They're pretty badly telegraphed for one thing and then when you factor in the pretty loose control over your ship, it just becomes a mess. And in the later missions, having the extra bullets come in is just completely unneeded and artificially increases the difficulty for no real good reason. It's bad enough having to fight 3-5 cores at once, each controlling several gun and laser turrets, all whilst only being able to take 3 hits before having to start again from the top.

I also strongly feel that the game has a strong visibility problem, with bullets often blending in with surroundings along with some minor lack of clarity over what will and wont hurt you. Despite not having it, I tried messing with the colour blindness settings to see if any of them helped out visibility wise and a couple of the modes did, but in very minor ways.

RE: telegraphing: the bullets that come from the sides are only telegraphed if you are close to said side and it happens so quickly that i don't even notice it half the time...in fact I swear one time they just appeared out of thin air suddenly. It's not exactly clear that the line connecting the core to a turret will harm the player, and i'm not exactly sure why it does either since it's not even a physical thing in the game. The special bullet type that beeps before exploding into a lot of regular bullets is a fun mechanic but it seems to be inconsistent timing wise for when it'll actually explode. Sometimes it goes on the count of 4, sometimes on the count of 5. I also noticed that sometimes it has a lower pitch than usual; no idea if that has anything to do with it but frankly i don't really see why that variant needed to exist either...

RE: other minor complaints... Chewing through the strongest kind of shield also takes far too long considering it's actively needed to complete certain missions at all. The lasers are mostly fine but I'm not sure why it can penetrate the cannon's shield, and the later missions end up putting you in too many situations where you basically can't do anything because you get trapped in by lasers.

And finally the difficulty curve of this game overall is utterly ridiculous. The missions will be easy for a few, then suddenly become super hard, then go back to being easy, then a bit tricky, then super hard again, before going back to easy. why? this is an incredibly frustrating way of ordering especially since you can only ever have three levels unlocked at any given time. Also the life system; neat to let me take 3 hits per level...but seriously, give us a g*ddamn gimme every so often and add in a "life up" powerup. Arcade mode needs at least one more life or a continue system (and don't prevent getting the "complete the arcade mode" achievement if the continue is used for goodness sake...) and mission mode just needs an opportunity to recover health so I don't have to waste yet another 3 minutes chipping slowly away at an absurd amount of defences whilst the enemy, floor, wall and ceiling fires fifty bajillion bullets at me in one go.