Crisis Force. I picked this up seeing it was a Konami-developed scrolling shooter (don't think I've played one of those before). I saw it was generally favored in reviews, so figured it would be worth a shot.
The game has a thematic style that is a bit of a 'mythology shooter,' similar to say Phelios or Gondomania. The story is more or less Atlantis rises again and with it rise the monsters that sank it (the bosses you fight), so most of the levels have some pseudo-Egyptian feel to it with Pyramids and such, some enemies look like rosetta stone tablets.

7 stages and bosses. some have minibosses. the last level has a lot of minibosses. The bosses I thought were pretty good. They have lots of moving parts and look cool.

The game looks colorful and bright. Enemies and bullets are usually easy to see. The game is also very fast moving, with lots of beautiful NES video effects that play on perspective. The end result is a shooter that looks and feels interesting as you engage enemies at different angles, sides, ceilings, etc. The game even manages to move slightly left to right at times, so it's hard to only give this game 3 stars when it tends to look and sound great on the NES (some really cool sound effects in here, one enemy makes a weird droney/echo noise when it attacks) and delivers better featured game design than many shooters. You can even transform your craft into different forms, aero-mecha style (though admittedly I didn't know or discover that you could do that when playing).

The game does have flaws though. The biggest one is the fact that there is no way the NES can run so many sprites on screen at once (the way it's programmed), this game gets massive (but welcome to make these parts easier) slowdown. It's one of the worst games on the NES to suffer from sprite slowdown.

I also don't really love the weapons in this game. The weapon upgrade system is also kind of boring and meh. Your super form, however, makes up for it.

Average to some maybe, but it shines to me as one of the better vertical shmups on NES. I'd rank it up there with other shooters on the NES that used cool video effects.

Do check it out.