Neat! I'm a big fan of Shmups and Bullet Hells and this certainly is one! I'm also personally a massive fan of ThunderBirds, so this hit me right in the nostalgia!
"Insert Coin" is a cute way of saying new game, this was very sweet.
The gameplay itself is OK. It's novel, but it's one of those cases of "an rpg maker game doing something another engine could do better, easier". I really respect and appreciate the ingenuity on display, but the game suffers with the issues you'd expect it to. Movement feels quite sluggish and inexact (which as a fan of the genre was somewhat frustrating), and enemy patterns aren't super interesting - there's not a ton in the way of challenge or finesse here, and while the ability to switch bullet types by switching ships is cool they lack the feedback to feel meaningfully different (except for firing pattern).
Hit detection both on friendlies and enemies seemed to be quite buggy - which I'm sure is an artefact of this being an RM project. It didn't lessen my enjoyment, nor did it lead to the game being any less endearing, but it was notable. Health also bugged out for me a couple of times, leading me to not take damage where I really ought to, and the lack of a limit to credits meant that any semblance of challenge was immediately offset by basically being infinitely shepherded through the experience.
Structurally, the game is exactly as you'd expect. Do stage. Do boss. Repeat. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it innovate particularly - the novelty here is in seeing our favourite characters doing stuff outside the norm. The stages progressed quite nicely - I especially liked Stage 2, whose ground-based enemies reminded me a bit of side scrolling Shmups like R-Type.
This brings us to story: It's not particularly story-intense. Cutscenes play out as expected. Super competently made, and I enjoyed the Tracey Island sequence (although I felt it was a missed opportunity not to use show picture to animate the default title screen island to show where the machines were hidden). I really enjoyed the ending - going from ThunderBirds to Voltron with some wicked sick hero theme happening was a great way to capture "Heroic Return", so big kudos!
(Also, Spark Cannon made me smile, well done)
Not gonna lie, I very much did not expect the CG to show up postgame - but I do think that this CG made me realise that I wished we'd gotten a Voltron/Megazord combination set of CGs/animations, so in its greatness it kind of made the rest of the game's art feel underwhelming.
Music was fine to good. Don't think anything really stood out there. Sound was fine. All felt fairly stock. Same with the art, and for that I feel like I can't really give more than a couple stars in each area. I really love that CG, but overall I feel like the rest of the project could have benefited from some of the author's incredible artistic talent!
In general, a fun time - 3 short stages and a High Score tracker to encourage you to play again. Classic stuff, but with enough niggles that it holds it back from true greatness.
3/5 - absolutely would recommend to anyone with 15 minutes to spare!