Bullet Hell. Curtain Fire. Barrage Ballet. That's a good way to describe a game like this where when the Vulcan defense systems come out there's no place for the player to go
Hah! No danger can surpass the wonders of Japanese technology!

Dodging projectiles in the early levels of Giga Wing is possible but in some spots is extremely difficult. At times most of this dodging is just luck. The bullets themselves have different styles and colors so it can at times be tricky. There are also other projectiles you can't dodge (lasers, nuclear blasts, etc) Everything moves at different speeds as well. Enemies are all unique and have different attack patterns.

Bullet ballet? More like... Bullet buffet!

Normally I do not like this style with SHMUPs and I try to avoid it with the exceptions being Boss Rush or caravan style shooters (I love those). Those lend themselves well to the manic shooter style. But oh what is this? Something that comes along to try and change my mind?

Giga Wing has a nice ingenious gimmick that fits well in bullet hell games: Reflect. In addition to your standard auto fire and bomb, you can press another button to raise a reflect shield that will reflect curtain barrages of bullets back the direction they came from. This isn't necessarily a 'better way' to attack, but it is satisfying, and it drops scoring tokens that have huge gains. You can also do heavy damage to vulcan type enemies that spew out a hundred shots a second. It's really the best way to kill something (like a boss which you have 120 seconds to defeat before it runs away.)

Giga Wing is a straight up score attack/high score shooter. You gain points by downing ships and collecting badges. There are small badges and big badges, and 'biggest badges'. Bigger ones are worth more and tend to drop from the bigger enemies. In this game every enemy drops a badge. So tons of badges drop and it's impossible to collect but a fraction of them. (This makes the game something of a 'retrieval' shooter, a mechanic which i don't particularly like but it's forgivable since you do not actually 'have to' collect everything.) The big badges are worth significantly more too. The reflect shot basically grants an automatic biggest badge value in a small sprite for every shot that you reflect which lands a hit. This means that a successful reflect shot against any vulcan type enemy (or boss) nets you huge score compared to anything else (if you can collect the streaming pile of badges that flows out)

So this shooter is something of your standard bullet hell type game with some careful ballet type attack plans. Its a fun game to practice and actually get better at. The fact you have unlimited continues (The Dreamcast port functions just like a coin-op) means you can keep playing it in the campaign, and don't have annoying start overs. You do however lose your score at the end of each credit however.

You can determine your lives, bombs, difficulty etc, all in the options in the same way you could set up an arcade machine.

Score attack lets you pick one of the six stages of the game. I enjoyed practicing the second stage of this game, a practice mode really is a nice addition to something like this, and the game naturally is something you play to get a better score each run (similar to a caravan shooter)

The last few levels of the game basically get impossibly hard and are designed to steal your quarters. The final boss would seem to not be meant to be beaten. But since you have unlimited continues you can. There is no way to really get a decent score here, however.

It is a good game and one I'd like to play again Co-Op or competitively at some point. It certainly has better design than so many shooters, even though some of these mechanics don't win me over completely, it works well with the way it has been made. I have played other shooters that will introduce some kind of mechanic or utility that feels wonky or out of place. This fits perfect into the genre. But in the end its still hard, its still bullet hell. And its still a game overall based around getting a better score.