Shock Troopers 1997
First arcade shoot'em'up I've played. The story is your usual stuff: some power tripping evil guy - leader of the gang called "Bloody Scorpions" kidnaps scientist and his granddaughter to use her as a leverage against old man and force him to create a drug that will make super soldiers out of the terrorists, so they can rule over the world and, of course, you have to stop him. There are 8 playable characters and an impressive amount of stages - 16 (I've read that if you decide to change routes you also have to beat additional level, so that adds 3 missions for 19 levels in total, I've never changed routes on my playthroughs) that are devided in three routes (jungle, mountains, valley), although there are no bonus rounds at all, coop supports 2 players.
The differences between characters are not substantial enough for me to write a detailed description of them, so I'll give you a quick rundown. The four defining parameters for characters are: standart weapon, movement speed, special weapon and terrain specialization. The first three are pretty simple: there are two standart weapons in the game - M16 and double barreled M16; movement speed is self explanatory; special weapons seems to have mostly visual differences, but some deal more damage and some characters carry more special ammunition. Terrain specialization works like this - the more skilled the character is for work in certain terrain, the more health you will recover between missions (indicated by the amount of medals on the stage select screen), this varies heavily between everyone and you can get either no health restoration at all or some pretty big boosts. I will go into details as we move on, but for now I want to say that character select screen does really poor job at providing information, because the only two things it shows to you are: character portrait and their special weapon picture.
The asskickers
You are also given a choice to either go alone or form a squad of three men, you can say it's like a selection of difficulty, lone wolf being the harder one, obviously. If you choose lone wolf mode your character would have a bit more of special ammunition, but still way less than a team of three, you will also heal way less between missions (terrain specialization), health doesn't restore by itself in this game and items that heal you aren't common here. So avoid lone wolf mode, unless you want to challenge yourself. As for team battle mode, 3 characters share the same life bar and ammo for any non standart weapon that you pick up and you can switch between characters at any time.
I would devide roster like this:
1) Loki and Jackal - average speed, standart M16. Jackal is the protagonist of the game and boyfriend of kidnapped girl, if he's not on the team you will miss a couple of romantic cutsceenes, he seems to have the overall best skills at terrain navigation and will heal your team regularly, he also carries the biggest amount of special ammunition - 15.
2) Milky and Marie Bee - fastest speed, standart M16. Any of these two with shotgun is about the most devastating thing you can unleash upon enemies, they allow not only for easier maneuvers but also for easier melee, I will explain later why you might want that. Marie Bee seems to be pretty bad at healing the party.
3) Maru, Big Mama, Southern Cross - slow speed, double barreled M16. Make sure you take one of these with you, the game isn't very generous with weapon pick ups and characters with standart M16 can ger overwhelmed easily by bulkier enemies, not to mention that bosses are huge bullet sponges, so you will really thankful to have somebody with stronger standart weapon. Maru's special weapon seems to be the deadliest in the game, but he's overall the worst character to heal your party. Big Mama carries the least ammount of special ammunition - 8.
4) Rio - garbage, slow and carries a standart M16, his special weapon isn't outstanding either.
The strategy seems pretty simple to me - make sure your team overall matches the terrain, pick somebody with double barreled M16, pick one of the faster girls (optional), last character can be anybody that will heal your team the most in chosen scenario.
Big Mama is bringing the heat
As far as gameplay goes it's a top down shooter, you can move and shoot in any of 8 directions, if you hold fire (autofire button is not needed here) you can strafe and shoot; you can also dodge, which makes you completely invulnerable for a short time. If you get close to enemies you can melee them, killing them that way gives you various bonuses, most of the time you will get a crystal that raises your score, but sometimes you can get health, weapons, red crystal that clears the entire screen or yellow crystal that makes you invulnerable for a short time. My problem is that game seems to imply that you will melee your enemies, because it's kind of stingy with items, but who would want to fight up close in a shooting game ? Also melee attack is not a 1 hit kill and stronger enemies can take several of them, not to mention killing stronger enemies in melee doesn't lend you bigger rewards, it is still rng heavily skewed towards score raising crystals. It's really unfortunate that game doesn't allow you to go crazy with stronger weapons, because shooting is really satisfying here, there a good amount of gore too (which is disable by default, so make sure to visit settings first) and you can shoot off chunks of enemies bodies, set them on fire or even explode them, though it seems random and sadly doesn't really work with explosives. The weapon loadout is faily standart and should be well familiar to you, there are: machineguns, miniguns, flamethrowers, rocketlaunchers, shotguns, fire railgun and fire rocket launcher; nothing crazy, but as I've said it feels good to shoot them.
The flaming tornado of justice
There are 16 levels for you to complete, but you only need to finish 6 to beat the game. At the beginning you are given a choice of which route you want to take - mountains, jungle or valley, each of them features 5 unique levels and the final stage is similar for all, additionaly you can switch routes after beating stage 3 (or 4, sorry I forgot which one exactly), but there's no real reason to do that, because your party is likely to be better suited for terrain that you started with. Jungle route seems to be the intended one, as it is the most graphicaly impressive (more explosions and more variety between stages) and there are more unique encounters than on other routes, it's also the easiest route to take; mountains are the hardest to beat, because there is stuff that restricts your movement and it features the biggest amount of flying enemies (I will explain this later), it's also the only route where you can find power up that boosts your speed (there is one in valley route and jungle doesn't have any); valley is about water, you are going to be swimming on boats, moving through cannals and sewers, I say it's the most balanced route difficulty wise.
Fighting regular enemies isn't that hard, their projectiles are slow and they don't shoot a lot of them, so you wouldn't have too much problem avoiding them with your dodge, the realy difficulty here is that your mistakes accumulate in the long run, as I've said earlier health only restores between stages and only if your characters match the terrain, health items are pretty scarce here, you can take about 8-10 hits before dying and you blink after taking a hit (invulnerability window). That whole terrain stuff seems a bit random to me, on some stages characters will provide healing on others they won't, even if they seem to be specialized in the area that you chose. There are not many non-standart enemies for you to fight, the most notable battle is probably a pair of ninjas at a bar that only appears on jungle route, but most of the time you are just shooting regular terrorists, it's a shame because enemy variety isn't small, it's just that most of them are barely used, though you are unlikely to be bothered with that, because game is short and everything explodes. The most annoying ones are flying terrorists, they move fast and can shoot you from point blank not giving you chance to react to their attack.
The bosses are hard and this is where game difficulty jumps significantly. Developers had a simple idea, restrict player's movement (not on all bosses though), make bosses shoot more projectiles than a gang of elite enemies and give them a fuckload of hp, seriously the bosses are damage sponges, they don't die that fast even if you throw a good amount of special weapons at them, it really is too much for the amount of shit they shoot at you; some of them have several lives too, like first you blow a gigantic tank that blocks 60% of screen and relentlessly spams you with chaingun, rockets, energy weapons and flamethrowers and then you have to beat it's driver, who isn't as dangerous but still can take a while to go down. So, save special weapons for bosses, there's no real reason to use them on regular enemies, because characters with double barreled M16 will plow through everything anyways and don't forget to use those double barreled M16 on bosses, otherwise you're going to have a really bad time.
Flamethrower is best used on a boat
The plot is explained to you between missions, after completing one you get to watch a cutscene, there is also a cutscene that is shown as demo before starting screen, but you can safely skip it. There's lots of broken english in this game, seems like devs were translating the game on their own, if you took time to look at the game's poster you could've noticed the example of it. There are a couple of lines between missions that vary depending on which character you have selected, there are also endings for each character that are shown as pictures.
We haven't talked about presentation, haven't we ? It's fine, the graphics are nothing mindblowing and even plain at times, but they do the job well, the animations are fine and I've never felt like they were badly done, unfortunately most bosses are reused and are just palette swaps of each other; characters are generously animated, but for some reason most of the weapons show as standart M16 in their hands, only rocket launcher and railgun change the display, was it so much of a trouble to draw various weapons ? Especially when they drew so many variations of ending screen. Music is good, mostly consisting of loud rock tunes, but it's not something you will remember for long.
The game's biggest strength besides catchy action is variety, depending on the route you take you get to go through various obstacles, ride bikes, climb mountains, shoot different weapons and defeat some unique enemies, the big roster helps at spicing up gameplay too.
Overall, Shock Troopers while not being mindblowing is still a very solid and enjoyable game that provides a good variety of scenarios, it's short and intense, so you won't get bored.
There's another Shock Troopers game called "Shock Troopers 2nd squad", I initially planned for this review to cover both games, but it didn't happen. I heard that 2nd squad was a dissapointing follow up, but I still decided to give it a go... My thoughts ? It sucks. The graphics got worse, there are less characters with more variety (different weapons and stats), but there's less "character" in them, difficulty went from manageable to "fuck you, lol" enemies kill you in 2 hits and there's way more shit on the screen and shooting feels worse. I stomached it up to level 3, but after that I decided that I will not be playing it anymore.
See it here for yourself if'd like.
Additional stuff:
More screenshots, warning they are big
Gameplay videos