Hyper Light Drifter

It's really beutifull pixel-art, but some bosses are too hard, because, as I can see, developer ignores his own rules.

The good: This game offers responsive controls and feels sleek to play. The atmosphere is excellent, and reminiscent of Sword & Sworcery. I thought its difficulty was well done - definitely not an "easy" game, but the mix of more tactical bosses and hacking and slashing of minions felt good. The bad: The tradeoff for atmosphere is clarity of story, of setting, and of what you're supposed to be doing. A game should balance both to be immersive, but this game was almost all atmosphere. I didn't feel attached to the game; it felt like a beat-it-and-uninstall kind of game.

You know some of those games that when you play it it absolutely blows you away? Hyper Light Drifter is one of those games. You start of with little to no explanation. Just a quick overview of the controls. There is actually no text apart from this tutorial in the game. The story is told to images and level design and much like dark souls you have to imagine the story in your head and come up with theories yourself. Because of the lack of explanation you have a different sense of exploration than in most games. Many indie games use pixel optics because they are not able to draw proper graphics and because of time restrains. While this might be true of Hyper Light Drifter, I never felt like it. The pixel look actually added to the atmosphere with the beautiful hand drawn sprites and amazing animations. The electronic soundtrack is also just amazing and sets a big part of the games mood. The combat is very slick it just feels right, for the most part (later more to that), you have to avoid enemy attacks, strike at the right moment and boy, this game is hard! But it usually doesn't feel frustrating because, unlike dark souls, there isn't such a big penalty for death and you start at the beginning of the room. Only in some instances it starts to become annoying, for example when you only have one healthpack left to fight a lot of enemies. So why only 4 stars? While this game is amazing, there are of course some problems: While the controls are responsive and for the most part work very good, there are some engine limitations which make some fight, especially boss fights unfair. For example when you dash out of the way of a big attack and you clearly see you were out of the way but you still get hit. This makes some boss fights a bit of a gamble and you just have to try until you are lucky. Overall I had quite fun playing this game but at some points it really was frustrating. It is amazing but has it's flaws.

Great game and at times it can be punishing. The good - Loads of well hidden secrets to find - Tough, but rewarding - Excellent game mechanics - Unique story telling method - Solid game pad controls, 90% of the time - Atmospheric - Minus a few glitches, seems well polished The bad - Beat it in 10 hours, could probably do it in less without exploring - You get hit after you've been knocked down, usually results in death - Crashed 6-7 times in the 10 hours I played - Retry button in crash dialog doesn't ever work - Specific area in the south, that if you collect a piece and then die before getting another save, it'll transport you back to the piece, which would be fine but there is no way to get out of the area since the platforms disappear

This game is absolutely beautiful and original and deep, the visuals and atmosphere and music are all breathtaking and its super fun! I GIVE IT MAX AMAZING RATING!!!!!! spiritual sequels pleassse