Finally got a chance to play this, I've been looking forward to it for a while.

Unfortunately, the game crashed about 15 minutes in and wasn't able to relaunch, but it was still enough time for me to have some thoughts about it.

The rail shooter gameplay overall is well done. Aiming felt consistent and easy (which is something I've struggled with in my own rail shooters, so congrats on getting it right here). Enemy variety is great, even if the enemies are mostly simple geometric shapes. The landscapes are awesome, I love how imposing some of the background features can look when they're just coming into view. There's only a handful of things that could be improved, there were times where it felt like I had to fight the controls a little to get the jet where I wanted it, and it was occasionally unclear where a track was taking me.

I'm less of a fan of the open areas, the aiming isn't nearly as consistent and some of the enemies are absolutely lethal. It's still impressive you got those done though, and even if they're not as good as the rail sections they add a lot to the game.

I liked the geometric visuals, they're a pretty good foundation. I think the game could use a bit more juice and better use of particles though. More sound variety would also be nice, but that's a fairly minor nitpick.

I would still be playing this now if the game hadn't crashed. Hopefully I just got unlucky and it's not a common issue. Great work on making this.

(still can't believe the coincidence of two rail shooters being made for a metroidvania focused jam)

Really wanted to play this game because of the obvious inspiration, and I was not let down!

Theme is well implemented. Visuals and audio were fine. My actual gripes with the game are the info dump on the titlescreen, which makes it pretty messy, the inverted y-axis that makes movement a bit unintuitive, and the lack of consistent aiming, like the Starfox games do with the charges. Apart from that, playing a rail shooter in this jam was a treat and I enjoyed my stay!

I was looking forward to this entry because StarFox 64 is a big part of my childhood. Sadly I couldn't get far because the Y-axis felt to me like it was inverted and there's no option to change it, so I really struggled to aim at enemies and couldn't clear the first open area (didn't StarFox have a charge shot that you could lock on? I was really missing a similar thing here, though it may be a later powerup). I also found the Immelmann turn to be very slow: I got swarmed and shot down a  few times while doing it.

The particles are also too much, both when you boost forward and when you hit enemies. There were multiple times when I just couldn't see what was on screen. But other than that, the game looks and sounds great and hits all the right notes. Good job, but just like poor Hawk, I fear I must sit this one out...!

Very competent rail shooting systems! Though at one point in the third (?) level it did drive me below the floor, thankfully that wasn't an instant death.

Some points that stood out to me

• The particle effect for a shot landing is either deliberately a bunch of large squares or is that way due to a missing texture, and either way the particle is way too big and has way too long of a lifespan. Every time I'd hit an enemy that took two hits to kill I'd basically be fully blinded for a second or two which made it *very* hard to get my bearings.
• There is no cooldown on shooting and so I used two fingers to mash on the fire key - I found myself wishing there was a "hold to auto fire at some fixed rate" button or at least a cooldown on shooting so I wouldn't be incentivized to mash as quickly as possible.
• I do really like the concept of linear levels that open up into open levels which require items from different areas to traverse, metroidvania style, but I struggled a bit with the concept in its current form. I think the first instance of this should have been made a lot more straightforward - between all terrains on all levels looking pretty similar and being sorta instantly dumped into the free fly area with "go get the special boost somewhere else" (also that specifically felt a bit confusing since player already starts with a boost - maybe making the player start without one and unlocking the boost at all would feel cleaner?) kinda had me lost and aimless. I flew into an orange orb, beat a level, still didn't have the new boost (far as I could tell anyway), and just sorta tried shooting at the big tower with a bajillion switches while shockingly accurate lil guys chipped away at my health from off screen, died, and that's around where I called it quits.

I've done my best to not factor my skill issue into my rating - lots of great work here! 

Sound mixing was quite harsh. The game also lacked polish, but not enough to take away from the experience. That aside, I absolutely loved the way the theme was implemented here, and it looks absolutely gorgeous and plays like a charm. Not much else to say, I enjoyed this. That said, this really didn't feel like a metroidvania.