9 Best Genesis Shoot 'Em Ups

A mining colony has been attacked by an unknown alien race, and you are humanity's last hope in a prototype attack craft. It plays like a very advanced version of the classic computer game Thrust: you rotate the ship and press B to thrust forward. You also have to manage your fuel, and missions are not always about blowing things up. Often you are rescuing hostages, and one mission has you towing mirrors around so you can bounce a laser blast right back at the thing that fired it.

Magazines at the time criticized it for its punishing difficulty, and they were mostly right. The terrain looks fantastic by Genesis standards, even though Zyrinx did not have an official Sega development kit. The best part is the Jesper Kyd soundtrack, where pretty much every song runs over five minutes. This is the shooter where the hard part is the flying.

Thunder Force II debuted on the Sharp X68000 home computer, and it was one of the launch titles for the North American Genesis in 1989. It alternates between top-down and side-scrolling stages. In the overhead parts you hunt for bases scattered around the map and destroy their cores, then the screen turns sideways for the boss. It also introduces the weapon system that every Thunder Force from here on uses.

Those overhead stages are why it is not as revered as its sequel. People tend to dislike them, and they are a bit cumbersome. The game really shines in the side-scrolling stages, and it starts off fairly easy before things get rough in the later ones. The better tracks, like "Knights of Legend" in the first stage, still make it an enjoyable listen. Play it to see where the series came from.

Fire Shark is the sequel to Toaplan's Sky Shark, and in Japan it goes by Same! Same! Same! Toaplan made the Genesis port themselves shortly after it came out in arcades. One way to imagine it is Truxton with a WWI theme. Your plane can only take one hit, so the planes and battleships coming at you deserve respect.

What you get in return is a ridiculous amount of power. Fully upgraded, the blue spread covers half the screen in your bullets, and the red flame-thrower makes short work of bosses. It is somewhat unbalanced, honestly: once you have that flame-thrower, the only challenge left is dodging enemy bullets. It often comes recommended as one of Toaplan's friendlier games, as long as you are not playing the Japanese one-player-only version. The port adds a harder difficulty too, and it stays very true to the arcade.

Technosoft made Elemental Master between the third and fourth Thunder Force, and it swaps the spaceship for a wizard named Laden. It is a fantasy shooter with an overhead view, and Laden can fire any selected weapon up or down to clear the way. The levels look like different landscapes, with hazards like the flames from the cracks of the volcano stage. You never lose a weapon once you have it.

It is never overwhelmingly hard on Normal, and a Practice mode lets you play a single stage with a full weapon loadout. Laden's constant jogging in place looks a bit silly. Who cares, though, when the music is this good? The soundtrack is by Toshiharu Yamanishi of Thunder Force III and IV, and the level songs are some of the most shredding rock music ever pumped from the Genesis.

Forgotten Worlds was the first game Capcom released for its CP System arcade hardware, and it came to the Genesis in 1989. In the 29th century, an evil god called Bios has turned most of the Earth into a wasteland known as the Dust World. You play a flying, muscle-bound soldier with unlimited ammo, and the A and C buttons rotate him so you can aim while the B button shoots. Collect Zenny and spend it in shops for upgrades like the Homing Laser.

The Genesis version has only seven of the arcade's nine stages, but it keeps full two-player support, which the TurboGrafx-16 version does not. It is a visual feast, and the bosses are the most fascinating part of the game. It came to the Wii Virtual Console in 2008. Grab a friend for this one.

Raiden Trad is a modified version of the first Raiden arcade game, released for the SNES and the Genesis. The Genesis version was developed by Micronet, who also worked on the Mega Drive shooter Curse, and it came out in Japan in July 1991. Raiden is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up with eight stages of increasing difficulty, and bombs cancel out enemy fire while dealing damage over a wide area. Beat the last stage and you start again from the first with the difficulty increased.

The port took some hits in the graphics and music, and a large portion of the screen is taken up by a status bar. Despite that, the game actually plays well. The stages move along at a slow to medium pace, which makes it a calm, steady shooter you can learn bit by bit. It is the vertical shooter for people who would rather memorize than panic.

Thunder Force III dropped the free-directional overhead stages of the first two games and went fully horizontal, and that became the standard for the series. You choose your starting planet, from the forest planet Hydra to the ice planet Ellis, then fight the battleship Cerberus on the way into ORN's base. When your ship is destroyed you only lose the weapon you were using. The wavy fire background on the volcanic world Gorgon turned a lot of heads back then.

Its one major shortcoming is that it is relatively easy, since extra lives are given out like candy. That also makes it the friendliest way into the series. The Japanese version is slightly harder, and because the ROM is identical across regions, a converter lets you pick. Technosoft even turned it into an arcade game, Thunder Force AC, which reached the SNES as Thunder Spirits.

A young team at Compile made M.U.S.H.A. in less than a year. It started as Aleste 2, until designer Kazuyuki Nakashima threw out most of the style of the old Aleste games and went with a Japanese look instead, right down to a midboss with a Noh mask. The first boss is a gigantic mobile pagoda on tank treads, and the second stage takes place inside it, among the clockwork that keeps it running. Getting hit costs you a weapon level, and you are only destroyed at the lowest one.

Composer Toshiaki Sakoda wrote what Nakashima called "Edo Metal", and the entire soundtrack is heavy metal inspired. Critics at the time felt it got lost among all the Genesis shooters. Retrospective reviews cite its challenging gameplay, strong soundtrack and graphics that were ahead of their time. It was re-released on the Nintendo Classics service in 2021.

Thunder Force IV was made by the Technosoft team that had ported the pinball game Devil's Crush to the Mega Drive. Only the sound department came over from the earlier Thunder Force games. The story picks up two years after Thunder Force III, against the Orn Empire again, and you can play the first four stages in any order. Many stages are taller than a single TV screen, which gives you room to move and a real sense of scale. In the US it came out as Lightening Force, spelling and all.

It is much harder than Thunder Force III, and the bosses can take quite a beating before they go down. There is some slowdown when the effects pile up. The soundtrack is one of the best on the system, next to Streets of Rage 2 and M.U.S.H.A. It came back on the Saturn in 1996 and the Switch in 2018. Players recommend it more than any other Genesis shoot 'em up.