I really wanted to like The Red Star and had high hopes for the game. I just couldn't help but be bored with it and didn't pick it up after the first play.My buddy and I had just finished Neo Contra and loved it. This game looks a lot similar, plus it has the addition of melee fighting and what looks to be Gradius style, shoot em up levels. We didn't make it to those levels, maybe they are better. We made it three or four levels in and just decided to turn it off and play something else.We played on normal difficulty and we just blew through everything without any real challenge until we were bored. Maybe we should have set it to hard and it would have been more fun. We thought Neo Contra was just the right amount of challenge on normal. In fact, it took us a couple playthroughs to beat and we ended with only a couple lives to spare.Perhaps the difficulty ramps up later on, we didn't stick around to find out. In games like these, you usually start dying a lot or at least feel a bit of a challenge by the fourth level.I thought the melee would add a nice variety to the standard shooting fare, but the combat was too shallow and makes thing too easy when you can just do a lock-on dash combo to every enemy.The game just wasn't fun for me or my friend and we were definitely the right audience for it. My advice is to get Neo Contra instead and invite a buddy over.