While other shoot-‘em-up (shmup) developers were busy pushing the envelopes of gimmickry and bullet-hell survival, Backbone went back to the basics of kill or be killed. Instead of looking to the future for their heroes of the skies, Backbone turned to the war torn days of our forefathers for inspiration. They seem to have forgotten one thing when dredging through the vaults of The History Channel though – the reality of WWII was in color.

From the sepia-toned menus to the grey-washed battlefields below, nearly every image is drenched in the degradation of archival footage. I’m not saying that every shmup in the post-Geometry Wars timeline has to be a retinal-crushing peek into Learyland, but in this genre, colors do more than set the mood. Do you know why hunters wear those fashionable, blaze-orange jumpsuits? No hunter wants the nickname “Cheney.”

Likewise, nothing screams “Danger!” to the shmup player like a swath of day-glo pellets burning the air. There are a few pinks and purples in 1942, but as a general rule of thumb, you don’t put dull-orange bullets over dull-brown landscapes. This is one of a few reasons that I suspect that Capcom hired the folks of Backbone for their resumes, and not their dedication to the genre. Cases in point:

Cheap Shot #1: Dropped a suitably devastating bomb, sending me into an automated loop-de-loop, only to drop directly in the boss’s waiting flamethrower attack and die.

Cheap Shot #2: One of the bosses blasted me with an inescapable swarm before I was even allowed to move.

Cheap Shot #3: The enemy was dead ahead, the screen’s edge was at my back, and my wings didn’t fit between the encroaching streams of bullets.