Posted on: August 10, 2018

IgnitionX

Games: 3 Reviews: 3

Little disappointing

Well, the game is great and it totally worth your time. But it could be better. The good things first: visually the game is amazing. Artist did such a good job. Mountains with stone temples and snow, dark forest with crystals growing on the soil, waterfals... Sometimes it looks so epic you're just standing still a minute and staring. And then you're going deep down to seek secrets buried underground. Such a contrast. Technologies and nature fused together. Gameplay is fast and satisfying. You have a bunch of sword techniques and various guns plus granades. Use them as you please. Firstly it would be challenging to see anything in this flashy nightmare, but you'll get used to it eventually. It's impossible to wipe out everything just with agressive tapping, so fast thinking may be crucial to actually clear the game. Fast gameplay is also the biggest problem of HLD. If you are not skilled enough, you'll be dead in a seconds. If you know what you're doing, it won't take long to kill every single enemy and keep going. So you can die, like, ten times in one minute. There are many secret paths here and there, much more than you can imagine, and it may be really hard to find them. Who wanted some challenging platforming? We have it. In my personal opinion another big problem is story and characters. If you'll try to dig little bit deeper, you'll find nothing. It's all empty. NPCs are just moving sprites. All the plot fits in a two cut-scenes. The game has its unique atmosphire, not a story. Kind of sad.

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Posted on: January 18, 2019

rousemm

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 15

Awesome game but...

That game is : Awesome. I mean, few games are that great. The game manage to tell a story and teach you how to play without ever displaying any text. This is master art at game design. I love it. For sure, localisation must have been cheap! The game revisit mechanics elaborated in several games of the 16bit era and add a lot of modernity to it. A clumsy comparison could be a mix between Zelda, Alien Soldier and Dark Soul : prepare to die. Alien Soldier seems odd here, but the gameplay is centered on the dash, just like that game. This is great because few games revisited this style, its hard to master and from a top view game it's very interresting. (AS was side scroller). Combat get stylish when you get used to it. On the controls side, it's sometime quite frustrating. The game doesn't alias anything and require you to have perfect timings. By example, I did felt that until the dash animation is done, I couldn't stack an attack in advance. In a modern game I would expect that kind of design. Given the battle are sometime quite hard to master, I would expected to concentrate on the tactic instead of focussing on timing my hit perfectly. It's not a fighting game. Also, my joystick isn't quite good, it would have helped a bit. The music has been done by Disasterpeace, an artist I'm listening to since his first albums. God, the ambiance in the game goes 50% to the music and 50% to the graphics. You feel so much alone, it's great and terrible at once. The problem is, I have hard time finishing this game, it freezes all the time and I'm not alone to experience this problem. The worse is, on Linux, it freezes at interval of 30 minutes... this is very frustrating and breaks the immersion big time. Usually after two crashes, I'm off doing something else. The developpers seem to have ambandonned fixing it... that's quite sad.

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Posted on: April 8, 2023

Adonisl27

Verified owner

Games: 290 Reviews: 2

Great Game... I will not be finishing

Spent countless hours trying to figure out the chain dash rhythm. So many hours that I have gotten to the point where the game become so unbearable frustrating from trying to even get the chained dash to be consistent, that I decided that I was no longer having any fun playing the game, and I have lost I any motivation to continue or finish it. By the time I got to the crystal spike area in the Western zone, and watching my character for the 100th time, with full health, miss the timing by a half a second, then get stabbed, skid, stabbed again, skid, and stabbed for a final death. I just quietly put down the controller, went to the main menu and uninstalled the game. Not worth by sanity, because the devs decided to implement a chain-dashing technique that is required to progress through the game that does not fit the rhythm of the game mechanics or the background music. I tried endlessly to get the rythyym down but the punishing demand of the timing makes this game not worth my time. I have watched videos and read articles on how to properly chain-dash, but after 42+ hours into the game, I can't get it to work. So I am disappointed in not being able to finish the game, but also can't take any more of the frustration of countless attempts to practice in open areas and not get anything close to what I am seeing in these "tutorial" vids. The only 7 chain-dash streak I was able to get didn't make any sense on how I did it. So I won't give the game a bad review or anything like that, just couldn't perform a mandatory technique for game progression so that is a bummer.

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Posted on: June 25, 2016

PizzaSHARK

Verified owner

Games: 154 Reviews: 6

Just shy of perfection

HLD is a fantastic game and is a great buy for $20. It's probably the clear contender for indie game of the year for 2016 and I'll be surprised if there are many other products that can even challenge it for that title. It's a beautiful game with smooth gameplay and superb sound design. But it isn't perfect. HLD has almost no text anywhere - this is allegedly a call back to the SNES era of games, where there was little to no spoke dialogue, but A Link to the Past is cited as a direct influence on the game's design yet had NPC dialogue and explanations of what's going on. So take their claims with a grain of salt. The game doesn't really have any sort of real narrative, and while this doesn't necessarily hurt the game, neither does it help it. For me, though, the biggest issue I found was the combat itself. Many attacks, especially from bosses, can knock the player down, but you aren't invulnerable while knocked down. So you can be knocked off your feet, unable to take any action, and then take MORE damage while still unable to do anything about it! With the player's very low health pool, this can very frequently result in "unavoidable" deaths. Instead of making a mistake and then taking a bit of damage for it, you make a mistake and then take a bit of damage for it, then a few bits more damage, and suddenly you're dead and have to spend 20 seconds waiting for the game to reload and let you try again. If they planned on making death so frequent and outright CHEAP, they could've at least gone the Hotline Miami route and made respawning almost literally instant. The game's final boss is the worst offender and was frustrating more than fun. I felt like the player and boss both desperately needed mercy invincibility... something that was a core mechanic in the 8-bit and 16-bit games Heart Machine cites as influences for HLD, yet is conspicuously absent here. Still, overall an excellent game.

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Posted on: September 16, 2018

atemporalDarkness

Verified owner

Games: 847 Reviews: 22

Lovely open world

In this game, you enjoy every moment just by observing the beautifully crafted worlds you walk by, which, together with its gameplay and the subtle way to tell you the story, make a very solid game with very good and clear design ideas.

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