9 Years of Shadows

The game looks and sounds great with the aesthetically pleasing art and music that is pleasant to the ears. That's about where my priase for the game stops. The core gameplay is so heavily flawed and boring that near the end of the game I just wanted to stop because there was no more fun to be had. Having the dodge only go backward is an homage to Alucard's backstep in Symphony of the Night, but that idea is executed poorly here as the only movement upgrades the player gets is the double jump, whereas SoTN had plentiful upgrades. Enemy health is scaled way too high, and even for collectible containers that should only take a single swipe to open, the player needs to do nearly a full combo in order to obtain the object inside (which will always be a fullscreen notification, even if it's the 20th time you've gotten it.) These things can be forgiven, but what can't be forgiven is the lack of teleportation rooms that nearly every other game in this genre has done. I can't recommend this if you value gameplay. If you like the look and music, then watch a playthrough on YouTube. If Halberd Studios can rectify these gameplay issues, I would have no problem looking forward to their future titles, but as it stands right now it's an unfortunate disappointment.

Good. great art and an amazing design. only sight issues personally with things being a bit TOO smooth for a pixel graphic game. (water movement) but other than slight issues like that a good experience.

It has some great features of metroid/vania games. It's remniscent of some good times. HOWEVER, it's quite lacking in mechanical depth. It feels shallow to play. What's worse, there's a mechanic to "shoot aura" at things, but your aura is also your health. If you get hit, you lose your health, and you just have to piddle around until you can gain a fraction back in order to hope to shoot the boss again. But if you get hit again, go ahead and just play dodgeball for like 3 minutes while you wait for a chance to get it back. Overall, it's passively fun in some parts, and actively a nightmare in others. 6/10

Pretty linear and respects your time, still some secrets but no major backtracking. Gears of War reload mini-game makes the game maybe a bit easy. Boss before earth armor did not spawn first time, but did after reloading. Unfortunate crash towards the end of the game. If you enjoy metroidvanias and are looking for a shorter one, I would recommend this.

There's two problems that wore me down both related to boss fights: 1) It looks like about half the bosses have no checkpoints before their fights, for seemingly no reason. You have to run across multiple screens. And those screens can have annoying stuff in them. 2) Every time you come back to a boss fight, you have to sit through their introduction. Every. Single. Time.