Section Z is a lie! There is no Z section in it! Anyway, there were some controllers and some curse words flew around, but I beat the game. This is a pretty solid game, but there is a number of little things that are a bit annoying that come with the strange systems they use for health, weapons, damage dealt and received, etc.
The core exploration system, as I mentioned above, is pretty straight forward. Each section of the game is an horizontal auto-scroller. You control a flying robot (or dude/dudette in armor?) that shoots left with B and right with A. At the end of each section there are two warp beans that take you to a different section. Some of those beams are 'locked' and finding a section with a generator to kill unlocks it. Some levels only have a single exit. Some levels have bosses / mini-bosses in them. Voilà. There are 60 sections in the game that are structured like a chain of three sausages of 20 sections each (by that I mean you navigate within a set of 20 levels until you can reach the Boss that is a choke point that leads to the next set of 20 sections). This is a pretty neat design and the closest thing to a shoot'em-up metroidvania I can think of.
The health/life system is a little more suspect and in earnest I am not sure I understand it totally. The basic idea is that you have 20 hp (a max that gets upgraded through the game) and that just about every bullet in the game does 1 damage BUT getting hit by just about every enemy in the game immediately makes the character crash to the ground. You then have to restart the section with 5 less hp and without the active power-ups you had. Now when you reach 0 hp, you crash, lose your active power-ups, lose a life and restart the section with 20 hp (I think). When you run out of lives, you can continue (infinity of those), and that sends you at the first section of your sausage (so section 0, section 20 or section 40), with 20 hp and no stored or , obviously, active power-ups. To gain hp, you can get random drops from enemies (for 3hp) or find secret warps inside levels that bring you to health regeneration rooms (for 5, 10 or 15 hp). Note you can also consume hp to use special weapons (I never used those so... yeah). A nice thing is that unlocked warps stay unlocked forever (as well as special weapons obtained, but... still did not use them so yeah).
The problem with this system is that it has a tendency to bone you hard. Losing power-ups because an enemy bum-rushed you, because you were too close to the edge of the screen when something entered it, etc is annoying as heck. Also, late in the game there is an absurd discrepancy between the 3hp health drops and your 99hp pool! As a result of it, I had like a 20min prep' time, looping through 3 sections, to top my hp before going to fight the final boss.
The weapon system is more straight forward, but somewhat broken. You start with your basic gun that fires single bullets but, this is important, just about as fast as you can mash (technically I guess you can only have 4 or 5 bullets on screen at the same time, but considering how fast they travel, no matter how fast you mash you will never have 4 on screen if you fire at an enemy that is reasonably close). Power Up are not random, they are in specific places in specific sections. There are three different ones: a wave beam (more damage than the basic gun, goes through enemies, can be mashed), a 3-way gun (more damage than basic gun, shoots in front and like 40° up and down, cannot be mashed) and a frontal energy shield. When you pick a power-up, it goes into storage (you can only store one of each) and can chose at any time to activate it (which consumes the stored power-up). If you happen to pick a weapon power-up that is currently active, it goes in storage AND you get upgraded to the (supposedly) ultimate 3-way wave beam!
The main problem with this system is that the wave beam is god, the basic laser is ok and the 3-way and 3-way wave beam is highly situational. As you can't mash them, their dps is dramatically lower than even the basic gun. Trying to kill bosses with the 3-way is just excruciating. In fact I voluntarily downgraded to the basic gun to kill some bosses! The other issue is that the power-ups do not respawn every time you visit a section: they spawn once per life... So managing your power-ups is super annoying, as losing a precious wave beam by crashing is a tragedy (in my 20min prep' time for the final boss I kept the basic gun as to not risk losing the wave I wanted to use on it). Also... fuck mashing. Mashing is just physically painful. I almost went for my NES Advantage for the auto-fire, but hot plugging controllers on the NES is risky business.
Now, there is a bit of assholery in the third and final sausage (if you don't count getting crashed by the locked warp beams that are color coded red). One is by design and the other is a bug. The bug is that there is one mini boss that, in phase two, turns into a spinning circle of a dozen little spherical ships. The circle moves around, but if it goes near the edge of the screen, a portion of the circle wraps around to the other side of the screen... I let you imagine how happy I was when I crashed to the ground after being hit by a screen wrapping ship... The one by design is a SPOILER. While exploring you end up in a pocket of 4 interconnected sections with no escape. Obviously, that means somewhere within these 4 sections there is a hidden warp. To make a hidden warp visible you need to shoot the spot where it is... and of course it's pretty easy with level design and enemy patterns to have a hidden warp pretty well hidden. That's the spot I reached in my first go at the game and decided to call it quit. I confess that since the backlog is what it is, I checked in which one of the section the hidden warp was before my attempt of the day.
All in all, Section Z is not a very fun game. The enemies are not very original or interesting. The weapons are a bit meh. Mashing sucks. The game systems are a bit annoying. There is a bit of assholery in the end... but still there is something that works pretty well with the sense of going deeper and deeper into hostile territory and exploring this maze-like set of interconnected tunnels. So while not fun, and even frustrating at times, it is a pretty satisfying game to play and beat.