Taking place in an alien galaxy, a group of planetary dictators are banished from their home planets for their megalomaniac crimes and rally together to plot their revenge. Using their combined forces and intelligence, the dictators construct Draconia, an artificial planet designed to grow and reproduce violent creatures and machines willing to follow their every command. Draconia, as well as its creators goals, are soon discovered and it becomes the player's responsibility to stop the dictator's plans: the mission is to destroy six of the planet's living defense mechanisms, thus destroying Draconia.
The player controls a powerful alien space fighter through six stages on Draconia. The player's ship has a energy meter, so the player ship can take more than one hit. The player empowers the ship's weapon strength and firing pattern by picking up power-up icons as well as obtaining Outriders (essentially Options) to increase firepower. However, the firepower upgrades are not permanent as their strength will degrade with use. The player has to continually fire at the power-ups in order for the item to change.
Source: Wikipedia, "Menace (video game)", available under the CC-BY-SA License.