I beat it on Easy, and nothing about it made me want to try the higher difficulties.
The game is a simple shooter where you cruise around on a series of moon surfaces, seeking out about a half dozen crystals to collect in order to be able to fight the moon's boss (guardian). After defeating all the guardians, you then go to the enemy's home planet and do the same thing.
I'd played Nova 9 in the '90s, and didn't realize this is part of the same series until I read through the manual prior to finally playing it. I've never played the first game in the series (Stellar 7), but had randomly also picked up Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge on 3DO, which I have yet to play. I really liked Nova 9, even though I couldn't ever get very far in it, and had high hopes for this once I realized the connection. Unfortunately, it came well short of that.
Each stage simply has you follow the prompt on your craft's radar that indicates the direction to the next crystal, shooting down an unending stream of enemies. There are about a half-dozen power-ups for your lasers and cannons, but none for your shields -- there is one that fully restores your shields, though. Thankfully, there are enemies that do drop the shield-restoring power-up. There are some power-up caches that are off of the prescribed paths. The 4th (Ta Eliab Vee) and final (Arctura) stages are the only ones where I found it necessary to find them. A major downside is that you can only shoot forward, which I'm guessing is due to the limitation of having the 3-button controller. You also cannot strafe, nor can you move in reverse. Because of these movement limitations, the boss fights became me staying stationary in front of the boss, as far away as possible while it was visible, and pummeling it while simply taking damage if the boss's attack was on target, and only moving when it would pull off a secondary attack. While each moon has a different surface type, with the ice moon causing you to slide around while trying to turn while moving, and enemies unique to each, this isn't enough to mask the sameness of going through each of them.
While it's not a bad game, I didn't find anything about it to recommend it. Thankfully, I didn't pay very much for it.
