I caught a lot of bullets in my time playing the new Sega Genesis game - yes, the new Sega Genesis game - ZPF . But! The amount of time in-between each bullet gradually increased as I caught up with the shoot 'em up's blistering pace, learned to take advantage of upgrades between and during missions, and achieved a flow state undisturbed by the sheer amount of stuff happening at once. ZPF, from the undisputed king of the modern retro game, Mega Cat Studios, is precisely what you'd expect from a game that builds on pretty much every classic shoot 'em up of the 16-bit era – from Forgotten Worlds to Shadow of the Beast and everything in-between.
It's frenetic, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but there's an order to the chaos as you slowly learn to navigate just enough to survive a little longer than you did your last run. The scoring system, which grants points based on enemies killed and the varying worth of items you collect, makes stepping away even harder. Watching your three-digit handle climb the scoreboard as you wipe beads of sweat from your brow will never not be satisfying.
But before you get that satisfaction here, you'll need to learn to maneuver through a lot of enemy fire of varying shapes and sizes while making time to collect power-ups and line up your shots to ensure you aren't just wasting metal. In the demo I played, I whirled across the screen as three different characters: a knight that fires off a thick blast of blades straight in front of him, a ship called.