"Sine Mora seems to be a crashing bore no matter who's playing."


"...and then it ends up being another half-baked psuedo-Euroshmup with awkward mechanics and easily abuseable autofire/framerate."


"In a game in which survival depends so heavily on being powered up enough to destroy bosses in time, being underpowered through sheer bad luck or losing all of your weapons because you got hit at the edge of the screen seem like such basic design"


"One of the main advantages of a lifebar system is that it gives the player a degree of leeway to make mistakes, and then you took that dynamic and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ IT ALL UP. Other shmups have insta-kill hazards... then again, other shmups give you MORE THAN ONE LIFE and most of those even allow you to continue right back where you died. This one gives you neither advantage, and on top of that, it gives you limited credits."


"I figured the randomness was an attempt to dodge the memorizer label, but I feel there would have been better ways to do so without relegating a large part of the game's system to luck - a static drop order with a random starting point, or having enemies randomly drop items from a specific stock of items in a stage would have been a more balance way to shake things up. (though set item drops would be my preference) Randomizing item drops doesn't make the game more appealing to casual gamers - the story and production values did that just fine - if anything, it makes moving past the "these games are made to eat quarters" mentality even harder. A lucky run makes the rest all the more frustrating; the surprise factor you wanted can become the "♥♥♥♥ you" factor very quickly. It's like having a job where they randomly let other people use your desk for undetermined amounts of time but don't adjust your workload to compensate. At least something interesting happened to you today, right?

And it's not like the game doesn't require memorization anyway - if your shot strength is ♥♥♥♥ (it probably will be), knowing where enemies will spawn is very important to killing them in a timely fashion. I'm pretty sure some bosses can't be beaten if you focus on the wrong part first, and it's extremely unlikely that you'll dodge some attacks if you don't know they're coming. Not knowing what scenery will damage you will end your run very quickly."

"I think part of the problem may be that mainstream reviewers don't go play shmups with the same expectations we do. There are a lot of people who think the genre is unfair or unreasonably difficult by default and aren't able to reliably spot balance issues because of it. Or for whom score seems like nod to the genre's yesteryear influences, not a core part of gameplay.

I suspect most people who gush about Sine Mora or Ikaruga (or any of the others) do so without any intent or interest in mastering the game. When you play with survival or score progression in mind cracks in the game design become possible to see, but credit feeders never turn their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ detector on because the whole thing is assumed to be just one of those games that is designed to kill you as much as possible."


"Finally got around to playing this game. It is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible. You can wrap ♥♥♥♥ up in sparkles and rainbows, but it's still ♥♥♥♥. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ LOL at that [instant-kill] piano [pickup]."


"Didn't one of the devs actually talk to people here and acted as if he gave a ♥♥♥♥ about what people knowledgeable in the shmup genre have to say about his team's idiotic ideas, only to then ignore almost everything that was said to him?"


"You might be able to squeeze some enjoyment out of it, but with so many better shmups out there, why bother? Our standards can be and should be higher."


"Level design:
- Bad pacing at many parts (spelunking in caves and tunnels in a shmup, wow cool) & repetition of same boring popcorn enemy waves to stretch levels out.
- Boss fights with miniscule hitboxes (say, only the middle bullet of all your shots can hit the only remaining weakpoint of one boss and barely damage)
- Enemies spawning from behind you sometimes without warning, and boss lasers and some attacks being basically undodgeable unless you know exactly how it works (as in, cheap attacks) most stupid part like this I can think of is the wrecking ball boss sequence.
- Imbalance between levels in how many powerups are dropped, stages with few item drops are perhaps too much easier/harder depending on if you have lost powerups before them or not.
- Sloppy bullet patterns: I just get the impression the devs are trying to make bullet hell style patterns for the first time, which can understandably not be good.. but it's still not good. Some patterns are completely pointless and basically miss the player completely while others are very hard for the player to visualize. The bullet patterns are also very inconsistent throughout they game, they don't stick to a similar pace or some kind of rules in terms of speed or how a projectile sprite is expected to work etc.
- Hard to see projectiles: missiles and minimised size normal bullets(why even use these) are way too hard to see sometimes.

System:
- Too many powerup levels: you're generally either far too weak or too powerful because you usually lose all your power at once and it'll take ages to restock (some stages have basically no drops too) or you'll have a very easy time with maximum powerups which makes it look like the levels weren't designed with that damage output in mind.
- Some of the subweapons are really bad (cluster bomb, bomb), while others are extremely powerful in the right situations.. I'm assuming this is a balancing issue."


"Off the top of my head, firstly because of the turbo shot oversight which is an embarrassing oversight since shmup developers figured that problem out 15 years ago.

Secondly because enemies drop random powerups and random score items which makes the game and scoring more about luck than skill.

Thirdly because the game has a stage practice mode that is completely useless because it always starts you out at 0 power. The boss practice mode does actually let you pick your power level so I'm not sure what even went wrong there.

Bosses and enemies also chose random attacks and these vary from trivial to almost impossible making it extremely cheap and again more about luck. Patterns get repeated multiple times throughout the game, I've seen that laser attack that sweeps upwards used by at least three bosses.

The resolution of the game is also dumb because it seems like you need two monitors to actually properly see all of the tiny bullets.

Because you get a bonus for the amount of time you are in Rank A there is also a score oversight that encourages really boring boss milk where you destroy everything on a boss and then sit there doing nothing for like 60 seconds waiting for the timer to hit the last second before you kill it. The final boss even has a huge oversight since you can milk it for over 16 minutes and another problem with it is that it doesn't save your score so you have to suicide on him afterwards.

There are also no invincibility frames after getting hit and your lost powerups leave the screen immediately which makes it possible to lose all your power and instantly game over sometimes.

Continuing doesn't reset your score which makes continues pointless, the music consists of ambient noise which doesn't work in a shmup at all and there are also really dumb suicide bullets on the highest difficulty.

Stages sometimes also use only a single enemy type for the whole stage and patterns as a whole aren't really that fun to dodge. Ship speed is too fast to properly dodge the density of some patterns and there is chance a powerup will spawn that will give you an instant game over."

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Sources:
http://pastebin.com/hmvc4v4P
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=32754&start=420