The art style is nice and cohesive, really clean presentation. The sound effects pair perfectly with it. The heat for your weapon makes for different strategy than for instance in Gradius 3 where you just want to shoot everything on the screen all the time. Plus, really, the speed of your ship wont allow you to do that--you have to pick your battles. I didn't get very far in the game 'cause I wasn't very good at it, but one issue for me was that I couldn't tell if there were powerups or not. The first thing I tried to grab turned out to be a bomb so I stopped trying to grab things lmao.