ExtraGalactica

ExtraGalactica is a blast from the past with exciting new twist, clever mechanics, and a stylized look that will blow your mind. With game play that's tough from the get-go, you really feel yourself progressing as you learn and master what the game contains. This creates a sense of addiction. Getting to that next wave, beating that boss that poops on your runs, seeing that high score climb. ExtraGalactica takes a genre you thought you'd seen all of and breaths new life into it, bringing arcade action right to your PC that you'd think is only possible from a cabinet in a dimly lit pizza joint.

Infinite/survival mode in a score attack game is very important, imo. Leaderboards are just as important and the devs have nailed both. Such a fun game!
Controls work well (been using an Xbox controller). Looks amazing on a widescreen monitor.
Definitely read the tutorial just to make sure you are familiar with the mechanics. Barrel Wave (a sideways attack) and Retro Dash (slow motion) are your friends. Retro Dash is ESPECIALLY important.
If you enjoy SHMUPS, score attack and fighting over position on the leaderboards, then you will enjoy this game.
Very impressed with what they are offering at the moment and cannot wait to see what they do going forward! I could live off of infinite/survival modes in shmups so to me, this is already awesome, haha.
Highly recommend!

Pure, arcade-y fun. Tough as nails, as only arcade style bullet-hells can be, but very fun.
The music rules, too.

I have been attempting to defend against the enemy since i was a boy in 1943 at The Battle of Midway. I spent my teens on the front line with team thunder force in shiny M.U.S.H armour. Several years later, I helped one of the most powerful men in the small island nation of Horai, Tenro Horai, to discovered an incredible magical power deep within the ground that gave him god-like strength, More recently I have helped smaller army's defend against Vortex attacks and Beat Hazzards. I was always told things would get harder with age it seems they were correct. This is a fantastic little shooter with a promising future as long as we can form a devoted army to help defend against the wave of enemies.
**I received the game via a twitter giveaway but views are my own

Introduction
ExtraGalactica is an arcade shooter or non-scrolling shoot'em up in Early access. For now it only has a procedurally generated Infinite Mode where you have to protect a nearby planet named Celestro by surviving wave after wave of enemies including bosses and mini-bosses while not letting enemies escape. I was given a Steam key after the developer showed his game at a shmup discord channel but it would have gone on my wishlist for a future purchase otherwise because this is the type of game I enjoy.
Gameplay
In Infinite Mode all you have to do is survive and not let any enemies escape. Enemies that escape will hurt Celestro, the spinning planet in the background, and when its health is depleted you lose. Your standard weapon has auto-fire, it starts out weak but gets better. Your secondairy weapon is a Barrel Wave Attack, it's a sideways attack. You only get three of them but the hull bar at the bottom center recharges quickly. The right bar shows when the Retro Dash is online which allows you to slow down time. During slow down your autofire rate is slowed down as well so you'll have to button mash to inflict a bit of extra damage.
At the beginning of a new run or after getting hit you're handed a standard ship at level 1. Every x amount of consecutive kills your ship levels up and your gun improves. At a certain level you get (homing) Missiles you can launch. When you reach the final level you will be invincible for six seconds which you can spend barrel waving (death spiral), because at this level the three attack limit is gone. This level only lasts so long, as soon as you reach this final level a countdown timer starts. Before the level ends you can activate the Special to clear the screen. Once the Special has been activated or when the time has run out your ship goes back to square 1 and you'll have to level up again.
Control
You can play with a controller, with keyboard + mouse (buttons only) or with just the keyboard. An analog or dual stick controller is recommended because of the x-movement sensitivity. If your auto-fire stops while moving you have your controller set up wrong and the game sees multiple inputs but only allowing one at a time.
Auto Deflect
The game offers two ways of playing which you could see as an easy and hard difficulty mode. Starting out the game is in Auto Deflect on mode. When an enemy or bullet is close to you at the side the ship performs an automatic Barrel Wave Attack if one is available. During a Barrel Wave Attack you'll be invincible for a moment. This allows you to escape attacks with no regards for enemies or bullets in the way of your escape route, it will also save you from bosses who often attack from the sides with little warning.
The disadvantage of Auto Deflect is that it will use your Barrel Wave Attacks when it's not needed as well. Especially further in the game you really need them without them getting wasted on bullets that would not have hit you. To challenge the top scores you'll need to play with Auto Deflect turned off, this mode has a steep learning curve.
Conclusion
The game has some refreshing game mechanics, nice selection of enemies and the Infinite Mode is a good challenging score attack mode. The menu and UI take some getting used to. Once you know where everything is on the UI it's all good though. The upcoming campaign and versus modes look promising.
Video
Here's a recording of some early gameplay using Auto Deflect, this run put me in 3rd (on the old leaderboard).

My YouTube first impressions video of the Early Access version as of August, 2021:
I've played a lot of shmups in my day and I can honestly say there's nothing like ExtraGalactica. The roots of this project are fascinating, originally developed as a private project to run on an arcade cabinet one of the authors built. However, it ended up being so cool that they decided to turn it into a full product and I'm very glad they did.
In the Early Access version at time of writing, the game is an endless score attack with online leaderboards. I don't just want to pimp my own video but there are so many different mechanics and systems in this that it's hard to explain in a short Steam review. There is a lot of RNG involved in this game but with practice and acquiring upgrades for your powers, you'll learn how to better master the numerous systems at play in order to maximize your score and learn the numerous different bosses. I've never before seen a shmup that has so many different mechanics that all somehow manage to gel together.
Some will find the seeming randomness of runs to be frustrating as this isn't a shmup that you can learn to minmax by memorizing patterns like you can in many others. However, I equate it to pinball, another genre I love, despite not being greate at it. In pinball, you'll have one or several bad games in a row where it feels like nothing's going right, you're scoring badly and losing balls quick. But you stick at it going "just one more game" and then you suddenly have an incredible run where everything seems to click, you smash your previous best score and it feels like you're invincible. ExtraGalactica replicates that same feeling and experience and it's very clear that's what the developers were going for. That's the part I love about it the most.
If you really prefer traditional, pattern-based shmups, this probably won't be for you. But if you are like me and want to see the genre innovated on and taken in cool new directions as well, this is something you absolutely need to play. This game deserves way more attention than it's gotten and I hope it gets some soon. I'll be continuing to cover it as things like the Campaign mode are added.

A lovely looking retro shmup, reminding me of classics from the 80s...that I was really awful at! I got my ass handed to me quite a few times in this game too, but it is fun to play.