Still stands as the finest vertical shooter ever developed
Gameplay/Play-Mechanics: Very tight controls, if you are destroyed, it will always be your own fault. The game difficulty is well-balanced as it is challenging but far from impossible. Only a little persistence is necessary to achieve completion, and you won't need much incentive, since the game is such an unrelenting rush. Weapons are well balanced and each of the three primary options have their uses and can be used to decent effect. Pretty much flawless overall for a shooter.
Visuals/Artwork: Very intensive visuals for an early Genesis game, yet it does not come across as overwhelming or mindless as is the case with so many overpowered arcade shooters. A good variety of environments, all interesting to observe, and the enemies are drawn up and animate very well. Lots of colorful, screen-filling firepower, but nothing undodgeable, which only adds to the ultimate fullfillment of the game and its' considerable replay value. Some special effects-during the third level in particular with some basic scaling effects-were very rarely seen on the Genesis and furthermore the effects were intelligently implemented to complement the presentation and not just used as a shallow showpiece.
Music/Sound: As great as the rest of the game is, the music could be my favorite aspect here. The thundering melodic hard-rock music is the perfect complement to this style of game. Good up-tempo selections as well as a few mid-tempo crunchy pieces thrown in for good measure. Listen to the boss music for stage four, absolutely awesome bass composing on this. You can tell that the developers put real effort into writing the arrangements. Some of my favorite music in any game period. Because I like 80's hard-rock, I probably will like it more than some other gamers. The explosion effects have good depth about them and are convincing, as are the weapon related sound samples, no tinny sound effects here.
In closing, M.U.S.H.A. does everything right for a shooter, this is not a thinking mans' kind of shooter, just straight-forward, relentless, pounding, intensive action and lots of it. Sub-bosses are frequent and each boss at the end of every level is a cool battle. The shooter structure is set up as a non-checkpoint style where you continue on upon being destroyed and if all ships are exhausted then you start from the beginning of the level. I prefer this method to the loss-of-one-ship and back to the checkpoint style, it preserves the shooter intensity better. As I mentioned earlier, very little story, yet some dramatic in-game moments on occasion. To put it simply, M.U.S.H.A. has everything you want, and nothing that you don't.