Please stop saying it's bugged in your reviews, come on now people.

I can't blame 'em for not understanding what's going on, though. The 'Options' menu is poorly designed - why doesn't it tell you that you have 0 color palettes, or hide the choice altogether? It takes forever to start unlocking them too, like, level 9 or something.

The game is very feature incomplete. I love it a ton because I love shmups, but I can't deny how rough the game feels.

The only thing rough about the game, imo, is that the options aren't accessible right off the bat.

To the original point though, I just find it funny people's knee jerk reaction is to assume the color schemes are broken rather than go 'huh, I guess you have to unlock them'. I mean, not the first game to do that.

No, the entire UI is poorly designed. Nothing at all is explained. I can fire up Raiden and get a better sense of what's going on with the score system than this game. The game is still in alpha imo.

Then I'd say you have a pretty poor definition of alpha.

The game is not still in alpha nor do I think it feels that way. The UI is actually not bad, I will admit the pre-launch felt a little awkward at first, but then you realize the whole idea of walking between rooms in that Carrier Sub so it makes perfect sense. If you are thinking of the selection of parts then the explanations on the parts are all there.

I would like to hear what parts of the UI you thought were poorly designed in particular though. I may not have noticed it and maybe we can get some constructive criticism going.

In relation to biomatter: I do agree that the player should be told that palettes are unlocks. The level does not need to be that high. I just hit level 9 and have 5 palettes unlocked(original not included), at least 4 of which were previous to level 9. I think it may be related to certain objectives, possibly random ones, but I don't know for certain.

The one thing this game could use, which I didn't personally think of(Heard the criticism in TotalBiscuit's "WTF is... Luftrausers"), that I agree with, would be that I would prefer a health bar to be displayed. I mean it's a pretty old school game and I love it and I think they should have gone old school with that as well as usually back in the day you had a health bar unless it was a single hit death game like Life Force, Gradius, Contra etc.. The current system works so it's more of a personal preference.

I do however agree a little that the scoring system could possibly use a little explanation. I mean I get the general idea of it which is basically "kill stuff, combo to get increased score multipliers"(and I think that is mostly fine and self evident), but perhaps a list of "This enemy gives you this much score at 1x multiplier" might be convenient.

That being said it's a great game, but I do have a minor gripe or two.

Gripe 1: The Gog version, at this point in time, does not go into full screen on launch when the full screen option is set in the game(at least for me). The Steam version does not have that problem. This is however a very minor issue at most, as all you have to do is hit Alt+return or F11 and the game goes to full screen.

Gripe 2: I think there should be an option to reset controls to Default in the options menu.

If you are in any way familiar with other Vlambeer games (namely the awesome Super Crate Box), you know they strive to make games that are basically easy to get into, with light-to-no menus; I believe they wish to create games in which you jump right in on the action and start playing as soon as you start them. This is not their games being broken or "released in alpha", it's a design choice, and it works for a lot of people. It sure does work for me.