Steel Assault

This game is the end result of if Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel as Mega Man fanart

To get to the point where you can beat the game in "barely 20 minutes" on Expert (no checkpoints, 1.7% of players do this), leave alone Arcade (no saves), you probably are going to have to play 20x or 30x of that amount of time. Game is very well made and a great deal of care evidently went into it. Solid pick for just about everybody who isn't a pedantic prick.

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.

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.

Awesome Steel Assault video Review:
Words Review - 8 / 10
Steel Assault is a really fun and challenging sidescroller game where you are a cyborg with an electric whip and punch as your means of attack. You make your way through each level, of which each has multiple sections until you reach the level boss at the end.
The gameplay feels excellent when using a gamepad, everything is very responsive and tight. It's super fun to play and the action is top notch. Enemies can shoot at you and you can destroy their projectiles in mid-aid as long as they are not flashing, otherwise you need to dodge. You can also do a slide dodge for a short distance.
Most importantly, you also have a zipline just like out of Sky Commanders and this is necessary for certain parts of the game and to defeat certain enemies much easier. It's very fun using the zipline.
The levels all flow together perfectly and have incredible pixel art graphics that are great to look at as you play. This all feels like a brand new top tier SNES game or Sega CD game.
The only downside to this game is how short it is and how short the levels are. While each has multiple parts those parts don't take that much to get through. The entire game took me 1.5 hours on normal difficulty but the end boss was so hard I couldn't beat him, I lost over 40 times. Eventually I had to restart and run through the game on an easier difficulty, but after that I destroyed him and saw the end of the game.
Amazing game for sure, I would definitely say it's worth a play for sure. I hope they make a 2nd Steel Assault.
Awesome Game Reviews

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.

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!