I noticed Hexadrive teasing a new STG a little while back and dismissed it as hype for a vansaba, but upon looking at the reveal it's actually... still a vansaba, essentially, but they are deliberately evoking classic STG to a greater degree than I would've predicted.
There's the superficial resemblance to Capcom's Forgotten Worlds, obviously, but the staff credits they're touting run a little deeper: actual Forgotten Worlds alum are working on the game (composer TAMAYO and dot artist Yukiyo Kuramoto) alongside a few other veteran ex-Capcom folk (dot artist Miki Kijima, composers Takayuki & Yuki Iwai). The art director, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, is best known for more modern games like the Tokyo RPG Factory stuff and Pokemon illustrations, but the main pixel artist, Masakazu Fukuda, has been working since ZOOM's X68000 days on the likes of Genocide and Phalanx and, later, Zero Divide. (As is often the case with projects like these, the game designers are not as known or tenured as any of those folk; they're younger Hexadrive folk who've worked on Hexadrive stuff, which is to say contract work for Square, Konami, Capcom, Platinum, etc.)
Of course, throwing these names around doesn't mean they have any intention of making a classic-style game (and the fact that they all but buried the info that it's a f2p smartphone game pretty much kills it for me) but their marketing copy talks up wanting to merge late-'80s/early-'90s sensibilities with modern design and production tricks and I do find that intriguing... or rather, it's curious to me that devs would even try to court traditional players or establish hardcore credentials, as if the vansaba market isn't a zillion times bigger than the crusty STG niche. I don't have high expectations for this game, or Raiden Nova, or any of the STG-goes-vansaba games that may or may not emerge in the future, but I do want to observe who's really trying to bend the format back towards classic sensibilities vs. who's trend-hopping, and even if these hail-mary games only manage to demonstrate one interesting idea between 'em, I'll be happy to steal it.