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Short version: Giga Wing is the fucking bomb, play it.
Long version: Giga Wing is a shmup published by Capcom in 1999 and developed by Takumi Corporation. Takumi is one of the offshoots that followed Toaplan's bankruptcy (along with Cave, for example) so you can immediately tell there was chaotic, brilliant expertise in shmup design in there. And lo and behold, Giga Wing is an exhilarating vertical shmup with a unique central mechanic, specifically designed to pump pure serotonin in your brain in apparently never-ending supply.
In Giga Wing, you're involved in a war revolving around a powerful mystic stone that can cause untold devastation on the world and must therefore be destroyed. You can choose between four characters with a different shot each (and a visually different but mechanically identical screen-clearing bomb), the unique mechanic being that, if you hold the fire button for one second, you can discharge a two-seconds force field that makes you invincible and reflects bullets back at your foes. This being a bullet hell, there are many bullets to reflect, and the force field isn't a finite resource, but can be used repeatedly after a five-seconds long cooldown. This creates a unique game rhythm: you're encouraged to dive straight into as many bullets as possible with your shield and quickly reposition to survive for the next five seconds, then do it all again. This is incredibly fun, but the secret spice is the scoring: almost every enemy drops golden medals worth points, and each and every bullet reflected with the force field turns into more medals as well. You're constantly flooded with sparkling collectibles that get more and more valuable the more you collect, resulting in an infinite dopamine cycle that sees you earning literal trillions of points and more. I'm not exaggerating! Even if you don't really care about scoring efficiently, it really adds to the fun.
The addicting, chemicals-releasing gameplay is supported by a great visual style. Giga Wing starts off pretty safe, with unsurprising militaristic design that sees you storming into bases and fighting planes and ships. It still grabs your attention through setpieces like flying through an exploding base or witnessing an aircraft nuke a city of innocent people. You see the stone (that looks Mesoamerican in design) powering different machines, and the game gradually leans more into that, with more fantastical later levels inspired by Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky and by Aztec, Mayan and Asian cultures. One of the highlights is stage 5's boss, a sort of Aztec golden-plated glider that takes off from atop a pyramid. It's just fun, it's not the most creative shmup there is but it has enough personality and is engaging throughout. The music, unfortunately, is quiet and quality-wise it goes from generic to just bad. That's a shame as it could have elevated the whole package.
Overall, Giga Wing is a fantastic time: fun, addicting and replayable with a neat twist on the bullet hell formula. Not to be missed.