Personally, I prefer this style to R-Type. It doesn't require memorizing the entire stage, and instead encourages quick reflexes and familiarity with the nastier boss patterns. (But hey, there's no accounting for tastes.) Fast Striker also offers quite a bit more variety in the form of game modes that change the feel of the game. At the main menu you can select from "Novice", "Original", "Maniac", and "Omake". While those might sound like difficulty levels, they're actually a lot more than that. Each mode adds new gameplay mechanics as well as overall difficulty, allowing shmup fans of all skill levels to find a gameplay experience that's right for them. Novice is your basic nuts and bolts for beginners - you can shoot default guns and collect stars for points. Original forces you to chain score items (gold nuggets) to maintain your multiplier, adds a one-time-use shield system, and the ability to hold the fire button down for more focused fire. Maniac retains all the features of Original and adds a 'grind' mechanic where focused fire at close proximity prevents gives big points. Omake is a more difficult version of Maniac.
Maniac is my favorite by far. Omake is just too tough for this average shmupper, and the other modes seem dull and empty without the grind mechanic. Seriously - chaining your score and getting in close to heavy enemies to activate your grinder beam is challenging and makes beating your high score a real treat. It encourages risk/reward tradeoff and forces you to think about how you kill enemies in order to keep your chain going. Usually in shmups I focus on how far I can get with one credit instead of trying to score big, but for some reason Fast Striker is one of the few that can coerce me to try for the big chains. (Mars Matrix is another.) There isn't much to unlock or strive for beyond score, but serious players can upload their scores to NG:DEV.TEAM's online leaderboards.
Fast Striker has endured a lot of complaints for the repetitive backgrounds. If you look up a gameplay video you can see that they're all CG-rendered sprites that tile after a single screen. The animation is quite smooth and provides a sense of depth, but I can definitely understand the complaint. If you really appreciate little details and lost of hand-drawn luxury in stage backgrounds, Fast Striker is going to look like a budget title to you. The ship designs are also a little generic - bulbous, and with a high-contrast, plastic vibe. But the bullets are easily visible against the backgrounds this time, and the art has a cohesion from start to finish. Sound isn't anything to comment on in a good or bad way. It's perfunctory. The music, however, is catchy European rave and isn't a bad listen at all.
The Neo-Geo version is notable because of how much it pushes the hardware. NG:DEV.TEAM came up with some special techniques to get so many bullets to display at once. Layered backgrounds and sprite illusions, from what I hear. For the Dreamcast - home of several shmups with much higher bullet counts - it's not nearly as impressive. Then again, that's a problem with most of these releases. The Neo-Geo is impressive hardware to this day, but the Dreamcast has it beat when it comes to processing capability (not storage access speed, as can be seen in some of the SNK ports for the DC). I'm still looking forward to Duranik's Sturmwind as an example of what can homebrew can really get out of the Dreamcast.
As of Valentine's Day, 2013, Fast Striker is out of stock at NG:DEV.TEAM's online shop and eBay listings are completing at around $45 dollars. If you think Fast Striker is for you, I'd recommend waiting a while to see if NG:DEV.TEAM puts out another "Newcomer Bundle" package deal like they did for the Dreamcast release of GunLord. It would be a much better value than dropping $45 for Fast Striker alone. As with Last Hope, it's difficult to recommend Fast Striker to anyone who's still missing out on the Takumi Dreamcast shmups or other important genre staples. But if you've played everything else and you're hungry for a solid indie Dreamcast shmup, Fast Striker will show you a good time.
