I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to any but the most desperate of Metroidvania fans.
The "humor" is constant and everywhere, which can be good if it aligns with your own sense of humor, or can be insipid and irritating if it does not. Do you like juvenile dick jokes? Juvenile drug jokes? An a-hole main character with little to no redeeming qualities besides making dickI cannot in good conscience recommend this game to any but the most desperate of Metroidvania fans.
The "humor" is constant and everywhere, which can be good if it aligns with your own sense of humor, or can be insipid and irritating if it does not. Do you like juvenile dick jokes? Juvenile drug jokes? An a-hole main character with little to no redeeming qualities besides making dick and/or drug jokes? A contrived "I must be tripping/dreaming" denial that goes on for way, way too long? If you answered no to any of the above, I implore you to stay away, because those are honestly the best qualities this game has to offer.
The (English) voice acting is generally passable, though there are a few times you can tell the voice actors weren't given proper direction because they'll pronounce the same word differently in the same conversation with each other, and there are a couple points where the production quality was lacking and it almost sounded like a fan dub. Overall it's not too bad, though.
The actual gameplay, however, is where the game seriously starts falling apart; the controls are a bit stiff and take some getting used to (jumps are not adjustable at all; you will always jump exactly the same height and distance, making platforming sections either painfully boring or painfully difficult dependent entirely on whether the developer decided to give you their standard half-body-length margin of error or cut it down to pixel-perfect); the combat is slow and boring, despite there being many weapon types (they all feel pretty much the same--attack speed, range, even animations--making the game way more about raw stat values than personal play style preferences, and making you wonder why the game forces you to choose a weapon group to spend points in to raise your proficiency when it all seems so arbitrary, especially when the game throws out the window any sort of sense it had been making before, when it starts giving you daggers that are stronger than axes of comparable level); enemies, while having many different appearances, tend to fall into very general categories (runs-at-you, shoots-at-you, doesn't-move-at-all, or ignores-you-and-patrols), making the already slow and boring combat now also tedious; boss encounters are incredibly boring, having very basic attack patterns you learn in just a couple seconds and essentially being damage sponges with unfair expectations of positioning using the stiff and monotonous jumps to avoid 30%+ attacks.
Now I know what you're thinking, if the story and combat aren't very good, then the exploration and level design must be, right? Because otherwise what's the point of a Metroidvania game? I'm sorry, but the exploration is equally dumb and boring; along with jumps that never change you get movement speed that never changes (regardless of whether you're wearing light, medium or heavy armor) and zero movement-based abilities (no sprints, no walking, no lunges, no ripostes, no dodges, no double-jumps, no floats to slow descent and give you a way to reach a far-off platform, nothing)... So, what stops you from just going to the end of the game right from the beginning? Locked doors, which you get the keys to by beating bosses. That's it. Sure, this is essentially the same thing as blocking off the next section of the castle by a double-jump-height platform, but those extra ways of navigating are what opens up level design possibilities, letting you hide powerups or items in early areas behind things you can't get by until later, letting you spice up later zones with different layouts than earlier ones because now you can move in all sorts of new and interesting ways, but this game doesn't have any of that. Once you unlock a door to a new section of castle, you can fully-explore that section right now, meaning the only reason to ever enter a previously-beaten section of castle is if there's another locked door in it to get to another boss that holds another key for another locked door somewhere else. Honestly, this game shouldn't even count as a Metroidvania in any way except for its window dressing with as linear as its level design is.
And I'm not even going to get into the absurdity of the leveling system this game has, where every level you're given a set number of points you can use to increase attributes, with the only respec option being incredibly costly and late-game, and things not even being shown as possible options until you unlock them. Meaning at level 8, after you've already invested seven levels of points into different stats and you have a plan for how to distribute your stuff for the rest of the game, you're given a whole new stat that you'll suddenly need to put points into. And that happens multiple times throughout the game.
I have really been nothing but disappointed with this game.… Expand
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