Positives: The gameplay mechanics are fluid and satisfying, the music is amazingly composed, the general aesthetic wonderfully captures the retro feel of the megaman X series while injecting its own personal flair, the abilities and power-ups are creative and varied, the the quasi-random level generation provides good replay value.
Negatives: This game does a pretty poor job ofPositives: The gameplay mechanics are fluid and satisfying, the music is amazingly composed, the general aesthetic wonderfully captures the retro feel of the megaman X series while injecting its own personal flair, the abilities and power-ups are creative and varied, the the quasi-random level generation provides good replay value.
Negatives: This game does a pretty poor job of explaining itself and how it works. The power-ups, for instance, oftentimes have descriptions that do not explain how they work or what they do effectively at all, opting instead to provide some tongue-in-cheek one-liner, leaving you to piece together what the power does. This would be somewhat fine, except the game makes you choose most of the time to take one power up instead of another, and much of the time, you have to pay for it with pickups, so at worst, the game is asking you to guess what the power is and hope it’s useful.
The game also, as alluded to, has an obsession with juvenile quirkiness in everything from the menu prompts to the dialogue, and it’s, in a word, obnoxious. I rolled my eyes quite often playing this game; it actually wrecked my immersion quite often. One of the worst offenders here was during the tutorial when the main villain ponders whether or not she should, and I quote, “Do a MuRdEr”. This villain is supposed to be a brilliant and sophisticated scientist by the way. And before anyone claims that the story/characterization isn’t supposed to be taken seriously, my knowledge of the lore, which I looked up out of confusion more than anything, implies just the opposite. The story clearly takes itself quite seriously and clues to it are sprinkled esoterically throughout the game, so I argue that critiquing the awkward presentation is fair play.
Then there’s the gameplay, which is buttery smooth in its construction, but fumbles in two key aspects; difficulty and platforming. The game has two main modes, standard and megamode. Standard is a roguelite experience where you traverse 10 randomly-generated levels that appear in a random order (except the last two) and get harder as you go, and you have to start over if you die. You can also collect persistent currencies to buy permanent upgrades between runs. Megamode, on the other hand, let’s you pick which order you do the levels, which are set for the entire run, and dying allows you to retry the level. Instead of getting harder as you beat levels, the game selects which levels will be harder and which easier, basically strongly encouraging you to go in a certain order. I did megamode on my first playthrough and my first impression was quite bad. The reason is that I selected a level that was in the harder tier first not knowing that the game prescaled the difficulty because nothing conveyed to me that that’s how it worked. How you know which is which is that each level name will have a subtitle that says normal, bold, or defiant (there’s that obnoxious quirkiness again). I didn’t pick this up though since I just chose a level without perusing enough of them to notice the subtitles. The result was a massive headache because of how the game increases difficulty, which is just by giving enemies way too much health, throwing a ton of them at you, making the game a bullet hell, and forcing you to platform through it all, sometimes with sections that require precise timing and jumps that feel too tight, like the devs took the exact distance/height you can possibly jump and tuned the platforming so you’d have basically no margin. Most of the platforming isn’t like that, but enough is to cause problems (the second to last level cones to mind).
Now to be fair, you can turn down the enemy health and damage you take in the options menu (not that the game explains this either, you just have to find it). It’s not worth doing that in the early levels, but I would say that it is for the later ones, because the enemies have, in my opinion, way too much health, to the point where it makes more sense to bypass as much as you can because engaging takes so long that it leaves you open to the bevy of other enemies currently firing on you that take just as long to kill.
And then there’s the bosses, which I actually really like from a design standpoint. They’re all imaginative and satisfying to fight, but again, only at the lower and mid nominal difficulties, because at the highest one, they become bullet-sponge, bullet-hell chores. If you’re not decked out on power ups by the time you reach them, fighting them is a crapshoot, and if you are, it’s become tedious and boring by the time their health bar is halfway depleted, as chipping away at them is agonizingly slow. I have had sweet-spot fights where my heart was racing because it felt like the outcome could go either way before pulling out a satisfying victory. Much of the time though, I’m either sitting pretty or tired/bored.… Expand
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