Valfaris: Mecha Therion

There is a good pacing to it which is great if you don't want to commit many hours to finish your playthrough The checkpoints are liberal so even if you die often it isn't that demoralizing.

The shooting and movement is intuitive, melee is satisfying, the hitboxes are well-defined, and it just feels good to play.

The game is now a shoot ‘em up and comes with some good gameplay, level design, visuals, music, and some really solid weapon variety.

Usually games in this genre don’t have this amount of “presentation” to them, and combining comically over the top dark action hero, plus a metal soundtrack that goes HARD, plus the framing as a story of revenge where you hunt down the big baddie while whizzing past planets in a giant mech is always cool.

The difficulty and pacing are perfect until a late-game boss which is an Souls-like brick wall until you figure it out, you can decide if that's a good thing or not.

A really solid "narrative shmup" - no focus on scoring exactly, though making sure you kill waves gives you upgrade points.