Omega Five is a great 2D shooter with old-school gameplay and new-school controls even if it is hard for casual players.
You start Omega Five with two characters, Ruby and Tempest, and both of them offer a different play style and experience to the game's four stages. Out of the two, Ruby is the character to use for beginners while Tempest is for advanced players once they use his special ability to your advantage. Speaking of special abilities, each character has a special ability they can use by pressing the R trigger to use such as Ruby's anchor and switching your firing style with Tempest. Tempest himself can deflect enemy bullets back to them and it is useful in tight situations. Once you beat the game with the two of them, two more characters are unlocked. R.A.D. is another version of Ruby, but is faster and her weapons are slower. Sensei is a swordsman and perhaps the easiest character to learn since he swings his sword with range towards enemies. Since this game is short, beating it with all the characters offer different unlockables giving it more replay value.
Even though Omega Five looks and plays like an old-school side scrolling shooter, it controls like a twin stick shooter as seen in games like Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD. This means that the left stick moves your character around and the right stick fires your weapon. The game would probably be not the same if you use the face buttons to fire, so twin stick controls work pretty well, Each character has three types of weapons to use when they are found in the stages and they can be upgraded two more times for more power. Other than their special abilities, they have a desperation bomb attack (which you have to collect pink triangles by killing enemies to increase your bomb meter and the maximum is three), which is the L trigger, they can use when they are in trouble as well as bosses. If your character runs out of health (there's a health bar), you lose your upgraded weapon and your high score, which maintains the old-school mentality the developers wanted to have in this game, but you can continue where you left off even if you have limited credits. Playing Omega Five more does increase your credits at certain hour marks to a point of having unlimited continues, which appeals to the casual crowd who may be scared of the game's difficulty.
The stages themselves offer diversity and challenge in Omega Five. Each of the four levels have their own theme and unique boss at the end. Enemies can at times surround the screen and even occupy most of the screen as well such as a robot in the first level and a snake-like beast in the second level. If played long enough, it all comes down to memorization of where enemies spawn and move so you can avoid losing health because there are not much spots for health recovery. The bosses can be a pain to defeat them if you do not have a fully upgraded weapon or bombs. Killing enemies also increases a multiplier for your high score, but it only lasts by killing more enemies and not getting hit otherwise the multiplier will restart. The multipliers do make this game more playable especially for leaderboard purposes comparing scores with other players. You play the stages again in a challenge mode also for leaderboards and if it is a good run, you can save a replay of it and watch others' replays of the levels. There is even a harder arcade mode when unlocked for experts where is truly old-school where one hit equals an instant death. Other than playing the game by yourself, there is local co-op, but no online co-op which is a bummer to some people.
The graphics for Omega Five are pretty good for a XBOX Live Arcade game and can be better than some of the worst 360 retail games out now. The action can be fast and frenetic, but also beautiful in certain spots. The framerate never dips down or any other distractions hamper down the graphics. You may not pay too much attention to the graphics since you will be heavily concentrating on surviving the whole game especially going for the game completion without dying achievements without dying. The sound for Omega Five is also decent. The music is good enough, but not annoying and you will mostly hear your weapon or explosions from killing enemies. The only bad thing about the sound is playing the game with Sensei as he grunts every time he swings his sword, which will get annoying right away.
Omega Five offers a good amount of challenge for fans of the genre as well as casual players. It is a great shooter even if it is short like most side scrolling shooters. Even if you get all 200 achievement points in the game, there is still something to do like beating the extra modes and having good replays of your runs. It does feel underappreicated because it is an original IP on Xbox Live Arcade, but an original shooter is rare these days so hopefully more of these will come sooner or later.