Steel Assault

I am a sucker for beautiful pixels and found this game thanks to Mark MSX from the Electric Underground. I normally beat normal mode for these types of games and never think about the hardest modes or 1CCing stuff. For some reason it grabbed me and wouldn't let go, the awesome visuals, the banging OST and the tight and agressive gameplay kept me hooked. It took me a long ass time to get the arcade clear as I'm not super proficient at arcade style games and it is hard as hell, but practice makes perfect and grinding out the arcade clear was one of the most satisfying experiences in gaming I've had in the last few years. A real gem of a game.

Steel Assault is a fantastic throwback to stylish 90's action-platformers.
If you enjoy oldschool style games, there's a lot to love.
The Good.
+ Fast-paced action.
+ Beautiful pixel art.
+ Awesome soundtrack.
+ Very challenging.
The Bad.
+ Relatively short.
+ Not many levels.
+ Very challenging.

It's like Contra 4 with a little bit of Bionic Commando and Castlevania mixed in. A fast, fun, challenging and short experience (could had been a little bit longer, branching paths, etc). Music is pretty solid too.
Try the Arcade 1 CC mode if you want to have an aneurysm!

Beautiful pixel art and great soundtrack, but the levels and bosses needs more polish.
Levels and bosses are difficult due to not knowing their attack patterns and not getting enough time to learn levels or boss patterns before dying. On Normal difficulty you can only take 4 hits before you die and the invincibility after getting hit is pretty short, so it feels more cheap-shot + trial-and-error that it should.
Thankfully there are infinite continues because otherwise I might not have finished the game out of frustration (or at least finished it out of stubbornness rather than out of enjoyment).
I also ran into a bug 2 or 3 times on the final boss where after dodging their lunge attack, they would disappear and never reappear on the stage, so I would be forced to restart the fight.
Overall, get this game for the aesthetic, for a first game it's got a lot of charm, but the game design side needs work.

Pretty short, somewhat challenging.
The visuals can be very noisy.
Feel like it doesn't quite reach it's potential with power-ups and the zip-line.
Had fun though.

What can I say? This game is pure bad ass action and brings me back to arcade style playing. The graphics are exactly my type of graphics I love. The best part is they have 4:3 support. Would be nice iif more games had this feature.

Great fast-paced game! It takes about 1h to finish. It's a straight to the point kind of game, like good old 16-bit old games, such as Contra. Sometimes you just want to play something simple, beat up some bad guys and enjoy it without too much lore or anything.