The Messenger

I believe in you.

similar to shovel knight, it's just okay. but no where near as good as shovel knight

First off, this is NOT a bad game, but I didn't really enjoy it enough to finish. See, this is a metroidvania-ish game that takes it's cues from super-metroid. Upgrades to improve exploration more than gameplay most of the time. Basically, a precision jumping game. Ninja gaiden, on the other hand, was basically baseball: Enemies charge and see if can hit them. Which is mostly absent from this game. Also, if the story was removed entirely, I think the game would have been improved.

Im sure Messenger is a good Game and deserves to be bought, but the Ice Level was so bad designed, that i just had to end it. I dont like that it has to be 14 Hours long, if i knew that it would be over after this Part, i would have played it over and over again, until i reach the Boss. But because i like to play one Game after another and not every Game at the same time, i realised that this is not worth my Time, because i was only frustrated and not in a good way. The Three Stars are really subjective, i know a lot of people will bite in it and Play it 14 Hours because this is the right Genre for them. I think it was fun while it lasted and i dont feel the need to play it through.

It is very difficult to rate this game. If you compare The Messenger to Ninja Gaiden on the SEGA Master System, which it so clearly copies, it falls through with 1 star. The levels in the first part are boring, repetitive and does not giver a good challenge. If you look at The Messenger for what it is, a ninja 2D platformer released around 2018, it gets 5 stars simply because there is nothing to match this style now. So 3 stars it is. Very minor spoilers ahead. The game is split into two parts. The first part is easy and if the devs would take some time to strenghten the levels and add some more bosses, it could have passed as it's own game and it would have been a good game if not a very good game. It tries to copy what Ninja Gaiden did perfect on the SEGA Master System and to my knowledge no other game has done since. Perhaps the game could have been split into different parts, save games disabled and "lives" as you know it from the old games, i.e. Mario, with a Game Over feature would have been nice. The second part of the game is a mess. It is sort of a RPG platformer hybrid, that does not work very well, because it lacks effort. You are not guided and the level design is one big mess. You have the Unity go-fund-yourself platforming template map as you will find in every other Unity platformer and a cryptic messages about items you have to find. I did not finish the second part of the game, not because I did not want to, but simply because early on, I was told about an item (which I now realize must be some sort of end game item) which I went and fetched, used and ended up in with a game breaking save in which I could not complete the level and could not backtrack beyond the last save point. I did invest some time trying to figure this out and to my knowledge there was no way around it and I had to delete the save. If the devs had respected the genre some more and less of the ironic humor, The Messenger would have been a solid game.