Genre: Shooter
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

Axelay alternates between horizontal and vertical stages. While the former can't touch something such as the PC Engine's "Gate of Thunder" in terms of explosive visual splendor, the latter are "Mode 7" affairs, and crikey do they impress: enemies will submerge into the water below, mounted cannons scale and zoom past, and many of the boards even use bounding boxes, ala "Super Mario Kart" or "F-Zero", forcing the player to navigate through mazes of pipes or trees. The ship and baddie sprites have an impressive bitmapped look to them, and the bosses look like something straight out of a Saturn or PlayStation game!

Taro Kudo, perhaps better known for his work on "Super Castlevania IV", puts in a nice shift here: the game opens with a memorable, frightening, off-kilter intro, and Kudo's minor-key strewn chords strike exactly the right tone. The stage songs are more mixed: some are quite evocative and hit a balance between foreboding and heroic, while others simply lack enough bombastity to be more than background noise. As is a common problem with the Super NES, Axelay's sound effects are a little flat, and lack punch.

Unlike most "schmups", Axelay doesn't involve scooping powerups: instead, the player selects three weapons from a selection which grows as progression is earned. Holding "B" fires the main weapon, holding "A" fires that weapon's corresponding missile or bomb, while the shift buttons switch between the three weapons. In the vertical stages, the player slowly drifts towards the center of the screen, which can cause unnecessary deaths. The weapons feel kind of wimpy, so unlike many genre entries which focus on total decimation, this title is more about precision and dodging.

The best games are very often the ones which are tailor-made for a specific platform, and Axelay is a case-in-point, as it makes superb use of the Super Nintendo's "Mode 7" and color capabilities to produce a one-of-a-kind experience which wouldn't have been possible on any other computing system at the time. As for the nuts and bolts, the game's relatively weak weapons, navigation-centric boards and thoughtfully-designed bosses make this more of a "thinking man's" shooter-- and that's no bad thing.