YMMV / Combat Instinct

• Anti-Climax Boss: Just blow off the head of 3's final boss without bothering to use your shield, then mash A to shoot him down in seconds before he can self-destruct.
• Awesome Music:
  • 2 uses "Outworld - The End" during a cutscene where the Gnork bombard the planet Dead Ball, as well as the stage after it. It's an upbeat song perfect for mopping the floor with them.
  • 3 even uses music from Serious Sam: The First Encounter!
• Good Bad Bug: According to the programmer, the hitbox for the Hrumian Flamethrower in 3 was supposed to blink 1 frame every second, but when the finished product was imported from Flash 5 to Flash MX, the hitbox for the flamethrower ends up being mistranslated into "rocket damage" 30 times a second. The end result is a ridiculously powerful weapon which can deliver a virtual One-Hit Kill onto everything on the screen. Bonus points for having infinite ammo.
• Growing the Beard: 2 is where the trilogy gets good.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • 1 has quite a few:
    • When you shoot enemy ships, their death explosions move with them.
    • Shoot a Gnork soldier in Stage 2 and move your cursor away from him to see that your machine guns keep firing even when pointed away from him.
    • Shooting an Ion Beast's ion cannon makes the same sound as if your destroyer's turret was shooting him.
    • Even when you're using the machine guns, shooting a sniper causes a single bullet to hit him.
  • It's obvious that 2's final boss has the same ion cannons from 1 since the crosshairs still appear on them.