They get paid to go through this. f A visually attractive puzzle(-ish) platformer. However, physics simulation issues keep this from being playable. Truck pathing is semi-random, which itself isn't a problem. But your interactions with the trucks is also unpredictable. Sometimes you will jump where you want, sometimes you won't get any height, sometimes you'll shoot forward far faster than you expect, and sometimes you'll be tossed hundreds of meters into the air. ds And from the first person view, it's hard to tdfaell if you're actually making contact with things. You will touch the side of a truck, unexpectedly saving yourself from a failed run and then jump too late, hitting the ground anyway. Even if you do save yourself, you are unlikely to know where the jump will send you (or where the truck will go) so even those last minute saves end in failure. In the end, it's a platformer where you need to make peace with the fact the platforms can't be jumped on, and sometimes aren't even there.
Hyper Light Drifter presents a very attractive world, done in a style reminiscent of games like Fez or Sword & Sworcery. It then encourages you to explore the nooks and crannies of the game through both a visual storytelling style, and positively littering the world with collectibles. Actually exploring the world is an effort in frustration though. The game's first hour will do the best it can to convince you of its difficulty, but the curve is largely flat once you wrap your head around how the combat works. Once you've got your feet under you in a fight, you'll see most of your deaths coming from things you didn't see: new boss mechanics, unexpected world hazards, or trying to understand why you couldn't move. The developer has decided to break with several traditions common to games of this genre, and many of those simply make moving feel unresponsive: - Being hit does give the momentary invulnerability you'd expect to prevent insta-death, but then will usually stop your character long enough for the enemies to line up another hit. - The 'medkit' pickup not only requires you stand still, but the healing is done as regeneration instead of an instant pop to full health. Being hit during this process causes the healing to stop (you of course then take the damage from the hit as well). - The dodge can be 'chained' into a very quick method of escaping hits. However, the window of opportunity to do so is only a few frames: too late and you'll come to a complete stop as the character goes into a recovery animation, too early and the second dodge simply won't register. On top of that, touching anything in the environment during a successful chain stuns you in a 'hit your head' animation. In all, the game looks great, sounds ok, and most of the difficulty comes from unlearning the quality of life enhancements we're used to from a dodge-centered combat game.
A game boring enough I had forgotten I owned it. I have no idea how far I made it through the game. Half maybe? Has anybody actually managed to get through this? I made it to a point where they had given me the Strike Suit, and I made glorious missile-love to all my short lived enemies. And I did it over and over again because the ship I was escorting kept dying because I guess I was killing the wrong screenful of enemies? And then they took the Strike Suit away, because super missile explosions are too much fun, and I got a bomber instead. So I sat in my slow ship, and fired slow torpedoes at slow other ships for a long time. Because I had infinite torpedoes, and everything was pretty slow. Except the fighters trying to kill me; they were fast, but I wasn't supposed to fight them. Maybe the guy who was piloting my Strike Suit while I was in the bomber was supposed to fight them? I'm not sure, because I may have blacked out from boredom at that point. Either way, it's the last I remember from this game. Uninstaller totally recommended.
