Having not played a shoot-‘em’-up properly for the best part of, ooh, about four years, I was fully prepared for the fact that jumping into Omega Five – developed by the bods a Harvest Moon developers Natsume – was probably going to be about as easy as attempting to suck ostrich eggs through a rather narrow hosepipe. Heck, it took me weeks – months, perhaps – to fully unravel what the heck I was doing in Ikaruga and fully enjoy it, so having to absorb, digest and tap up my thoughts on Xbox Live Arcade’s latest title in a few days seemed rather a daunting task at the time.

Omega Five is a side-scrolling shooter in which you play one of initially two characters taking on some sort of mechanical invasion. Seriously, if there were much more of a story than that I’d put it here for some flavour, but for whatever reason you’re chucked pretty much straight into the action without as much as an intro or any sort of back story, which is a little bit of a shame.

Still, a shooter lives and dies on gameplay rather than storytelling, and as soon as you’re plonked onto the first level it becomes rather apparent that you’re going to have to get pretty good rather quickly to even make it through the opening stage. It’s around the twenty-second mark when two swarms of robots pelt onto the screen and, should you not take them down immediately, spit bullets at you as if there were no tomorrow, all of which can be rather overwhelming to anyone out-of-practice or not terribly well versed in Japanese shooters. Learning each stage like the back of your hand and perfecting somewhat of a choreographed dance through it becomes the order of the day.

Navigating your way around the stages is pretty simple, with the controls being centred around the two analogue sticks, the left moving your character and the right directing their weapon. Throughout the level there are scattered power-ups for your character to upgrade their chosen gun, with each having a unique weapon set for you to try your hand at. As an addition to this, defeated enemies explode in a shower of pink shards that, when collected, give the player a circling shield that can be detonated for massive damage. Yes, massive damage indeed.

There are but four stages to navigate around. To the outside observer this sounds a little like you’re getting short-changed for your money and in some ways a couple of extra stages would have been nice, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll see the end of the fourth stage until a good few hours of practice have been logged. Likewise, having cleared a stage will open up the challenge mode for you to go back and have a one-life-wonder run, with your score at the end being uploaded to an online leaderboard. It’s not the completing that makes Omega Five; it’s the score maximising.

The levels themselves are pretty entertaining, lasting approximately five minutes or so each. One minor quibble is that the second level features an admittedly beautiful organic background which makes the on-screen action far too busy at times, but for the most part you’ll find yourself zooming through industrial settings taking out all manner of mechanical foes. Each level has somewhat of a mid-level boss that seems to follow you throughout, before sending you off for an epic big boss battle at the end that’ll test all your dodging and shooting skills rather heavily.

There’s a smattering of unlockables to maintain your interest, too, from extra credits to help your passage through the game to extra characters and modes to use and shoot through. Multiplayer options come in the form of – slightly disappointingly – a local-only run through the arcade mode, something that hopefully a future patch could address. In fact, the succinct nature of Omega Five panders toward future expansion, so hopefully something’s already in the pipeline.

You can’t really fault it graphically or sonically, either, with all sorts of metallic textures offset by some funky neon lasers and vivid explosions, all in eye-gouging high definition. The music’s all rather typically euphoric and pulsing, and added in for extra fun is a Japanese announcer who actually seems to purposefully mispronounce L’s as R’s and vice-versa.

It’s definitely worth a go, even with Ikaruga on the Live Arcade horizon. For a game containing only four five-minute levels it packs in surprising depth, and anyone with even a shred of a competitive edge will have a hard time putting it down. Immediately difficult and occasionally frustrating it might be, but get past the learning bump and you’ll find yourself getting more than your money’s worth.