izigame.me

Well... normally I go through the list of negatives in a game first, and... uhm... in the final cutscene they have a "wa" instead of a "way" as a minor typo.
...Yep. That's the list. That's all of it. That's the whole list of cons.
Soooo yeah. This is basically just short of a perfect game. The writing is fairly above average for a space shooter, nothing too overly special but not bad by any means. Other than that, the rest of the game is pretty much incredible.
The level design is very well done, with interesting enemies and things going on, but the pathing is intuitive, new mechanics are shown as they're added in ways that don't need explained, and in the entire game I only got "stuck" one time which I figured out right after and I only got stuck because I wasn't paying attention to something the first time it passed me by it to show me I could shoot through something that looked like a wall, but I saw it the second time when I wasn't as distracted.
Everything is very, extremely carefully managed for how it's handled. For example, if enemies are going to teleport in, which happens very rarely, they'll play an animation of where they'll show up a second before they arrive so you have time to get out of the way.
The graphics have lasers and shots all over the place, but everything is colour-coded so that you actually never lose track of where your ship is and never get confused on what are enemy attacks or what are your own.
For the game features that are unique and pretty interesting, basically you have a sort of Ikaruga-style absorb ability which can suck up any energy attack, but not physical shots. You can only maintain the shield for so long, but it makes you invincible to 95% or so of the attacks in the game, and when you turn it off, you get a brief period of invincibility and release a bunch of homing shots based on how much energy you charged. What's also interesting here is the more energy you absorb, the more gets stored in energy tanks which can be used as currency to upgrade your ship, purchase new weapon systems for different situations, and so on.
The other major interesting part here is you can pause the game at any time and change out your ship's loadout, even mid-level. So if the level goes from an open-space area to a tight, cramped corridor, you can switch out from wide-turning homing missiles to wall-crawling mines to suit the situation as you see fit. Your ship is extremely customizable and you're actually encouraged to switch out systems depending on what you're fighting.
Your ship has several different power levels it can unlock by grabbing pickups that enemies drop (or using a super-bomb slot item that you can purchase which just gives you a free one on an ammo-based system which recharges as you absorb shots, so handy), and it unlocks weapon systems as you go up in power. Start taking damage and ship systems gradually start going offline one after another, though you can organize which order they go off in, and rearrange things if something important gets lost in the middle of a fight thanks to being able to pause the game and rearrange stuff.
In general, there's a lot of really interesting systems in place and it's incredibly well made and intuitive. Once you have the basics down, they introduce everything you need to know extremely well each time. From a game design and level design perspective, it's one of the best I've ever seen for intuitive design overall.
As stated, the writing is fairly good for a space shooter, though nothing too great. Music is well done, but not distracting and not overly catchy, it just sets the right mood for what's going on and does its job competently just not exceptionally. It's not Touhou-level music by any means, but it is pretty good and fitting.
The sound effects are basically fitting, they don't stand out but they do their job well, and work with the visuals as well. Like if a boss has an ability that it's going to have a section which you're sitting in sucking up energy from with your absorption shield and it's going to block that off, it'll play a clear and obvious sound effect and show a flashing light before it does so, that kind of thing. The sound effects are just enough to catch your attention and alert you to important information, but otherwise they just feel 'right' without being intrusive.
Boss fights all, even the first one, have at least 3+ phases to them with many interesting mechanics, but the mechanics are always done well and in an intuitive manner. It's always clear what you're supposed to do, it's just a matter of execution. You will never run into an attack pattern that you don't know what's expected of you.
In short... this is a god-tier game in its genre. This is the kind of game that other games look to in awe in order to learn how to do it right.
The only downside is it's only about 3 hours worth of gameplay for the story mode. It's more than good enough gameplay and replay value that you can definitely go through it many times with different builds and system setups for your ship though, so it's well worth grabbing even at full price. It literally just came out today, and is $17.49 Canadian, with a -10% discount price of $15.74, and I can't even say wait for it to go on sale. It's definitely one of the best of the genre, and builds upon others in interesting and very fun ways, doing stuff other games of the genre sort of touched on but never really took full advantage of.
If you like side-scrolling space shooters, this is now basically the #1 slot for them as far as I'm concerned. Of course, there hasn't been much competition lately, as everything has been a bullet hell for over a decade now, but even compared to the top dogs of the past, like the Darius series, DRAINUS is definitely a major improvement in the genre.
So yeah. Why are you still reading this? Buy it. DO SO NOW.