Sadly, the Joylancer is completely joyless.
It's a retro-inspired fast action game, where you plow through the waves of enemies usingSadly, the Joylancer is completely joyless.
It's a retro-inspired fast action game, where you plow through the waves of enemies using skillfully made combos with your jet-powered lance. Sounds good so far and the gameplay itself is not that bad, but it was left unfinished, unpolished and on top of that, everything else also holds it back.
The graphics, while being stylized to look like a GameBoy game (which is something I'm usually fond of,) In many scenarios have too much stuff cluttered on the screen, which combined with a constant shaking and other action effects, makes it hard to see what's going on. And even with the full-color mode, the colors were seemingly thrown around at random, making most of it look horrible, even if you're able to see better.
Controls are... Questionable. They are too loose for this type of game; for some reason, they didn't implement full controller support; and the menu navigation is atrocious and confusing. But at least you can rebind the keys.
The music though. It's only redeeming quality is that you can turn it off.
Never before in my life have I heard such an ear-grating mess that fails so miserably at trying to be a melody.
This is basically the reason why, despite trying several times, I've never managed to stomach playing this game for more than 5 minutes at a time. Because even without the lack of content, and all the other bad things this game presents you, the soundtrack makes me feel like I'm being assaulted.
There is an option to replace the ost with your own music (and to be honest, they should throw away all of their music files and make that the default option,) so you can fix that if you want, but there was already too much damage done for me to care anymore.
Not that it matters anyway since the game was already abandoned a couple of years ago, making it one of many games forever left in early access.… Expand
