Space Elite Force II

My soft spot for sub-five-dollar shooters is well documented on this team, so take this as a considered opinion rather than charity: Space Elite Force II is a genuinely competent love letter to the arcade shmup, built by a tiny studio that clearly spent its time on the parts that matter. You sit in a side-scrolling ship, you blast waves of alien Klyvu fighters, and between stages you spend energy cores dropped by enemies and bosses to upgrade your weapons and hull resilience. It is not reinventing anything. But it is doing the familiar stuff with care. The upgrade system is where the sequel earns its keep over the original. Rather than juggling a money economy, every enemy ship drops energy cores that stack up as a single clean upgrade currency, with bosses dropping noticeably larger hauls. That loop feeds directly into weapon customisation: you experiment with loadouts across a longer campaign, and because the game gives you room to try combinations, you actually do. The three game modes add replay texture beyond the story - Normal mode carries the Klyvu narrative, Arcade mode strips things back to fast score-attack bursts, and a Boss Rush option exists for players who want to skip straight to the sweaty parts. Online leaderboards for each mode give score-chasers something to chase. Honestly, the rough edges are where you expect them. Enemy variety is decent on first pass but the mid-game starts to show repetition, particularly in how enemies move and shoot. Auxiliary drones, which shoot autonomously, have a habit of cluttering your own field of vision to the point where you can mistake their fire for incoming attacks - a friction point worth knowing before you invest upgrade points in them. A small number of boss lasers are one-hit kills with limited telegraphing, which tips over from tense into cheap on occasion. The pixel art is colorful and clean without being remarkable, and the soundtrack sits comfortably in energetic retro territory without doing anything that will haunt you later. On PC and Linux the performance is smooth, which is worth noting given that Switch players reported frame-rate problems in specific stages. Where this game genuinely shines is as a two-player couch co-op session. Plug in a second controller, hand it to someone who has not played a shmup since the nineties, and the accessibility of the controls makes the entry point almost frictionless. The 68 achievements give completionists a reason to revisit, and the online ranking system is a quiet little motivator for anyone who cares about scores. For the tier it sits in, the handcrafted pixel work and the revised upgrade loop represent real craft, not placeholder assets. Rising Moon Games built something that knows exactly what it is and does not overstay its welcome. Kai, Scout Team