The core turn based gameplay is fantastic, it's exactly what I want a turn based RPG to play like, deeply strategic where you can make informed decissions to escape (otherwise) certain doom. The Pixel art itself is extremely high quality and the combat animations are pretty goood Character design is... ok, a few good ones, but even those are a bit on the generic side. The music is fine So what's bad? The Millenial trademark insincere writing is eye-rolling at best, obnoxious at worst. The cynical writer can't stop himself from thinking he is a genious for being aware of basic tropes, and can't even let the ending of he story have any emotional impact, and immediatelly trivializes everything with a quip. IF that was all, I still would give this a 4/5. Sadly the writer must further break immersion by forcing modern-day earth politics into a scifi world, he literally said current day political slogans in the ending credits. Which means either the writer is simply incapable of imagining any other struggle in the distant future besides, or he is abusing this otherwise good project for his activism. I hope the team can find an actual writer in the future, and not let all their effort be sabotaged by rogue activist writers
While I wouldn't call it exactly a Contra-like, since the base mechanics are too different, aesthetically is probabbly what it tries to be, as masculine and andrenaline infused action game with tons of heavy metal. The first 2 levels felt a bit too slow, but the energy does pick up before long. My one nitpick is that with the exeption of the final boss, most bosses are far easier than the levels they reside, if a level makes me die 20 times, the boss will make me die 2-3 times at best, that said, it doesn't mean they are boring, they still require you to pay attention to they patterns. I haven't played the Heavy Metal mode, which is the harder new game+, so maybe that gets corrected there.
First and foremost, 2 stars are only because the pixel art is indeed as pretty as on the trailers, and the music is fine, everything else is just SO badly done. The game pretends to be strategy and adventure, the first is almost non-existent, and the seccond barely there. You can make each unit o equal numbers or just follow your gut, you most likely will succeed regardless. The actual gameplay is simplistic to a fault, you will only run from left to right on your mounted animal, picking up coins produced by your subjects, and spending them on literally whatever, specially if you make quite a bit of farmers you will cap your coing bag VERY fast and throw most of what you make to the river, because you can only spend it on so much. This simplicity affects the contros on having both throwing coins to the grounds and using for purchases on the same key, the down arrow. This is problematic because you are never told that the only way to differentiate the former with the later, by holding down the key for 1-2 secconds and releasing. There's absolutely no reason for these actions to overlap, the up key is perfectly free to be used for anything, like purchases. Having to run from left to right starts as just a normal task, and turns into a horrible chore, because you will spend most of your time running from one extreme to the other. And this is agrravated by your mounted animal interrupting you very often on a semi invisible stamina system, it recovers by letting it rest for 2-3 secconds so it eats grass (but won't recover without it), which innitially seems like a neat realistic detail, but becomes a horrible drag as you keep traveling the entire island again and again, from one extreme to the other. I can only imagine this game working as mobile clicker type of game, as those games are meant to alliveate the anxiety of multitaskers. But as PC/Console game where all your focus is on it, it's just plain boring and frustrating.
