Gameplay is incredible repetitive where it is the standard travel from point A to point B, along the way loot stuff from corpses, lockers, shoot some aliens, use a computer, watch some more annoying explosions, then repeat for every single level. It does not help that the camera is jacked, mouse rotation is more harmful than helpful since it messes up your aiming, this is where cheap tricks come in where the game spawns in enemies exactly behind you where you have to either fire your weapons exactly vertically downwards with limited visibility since camera is pitched 45 degrees leaving huge blind spots or you rotate 45 degrees at a time with Q or E key, by the time you finished rotating the alien has already eaten your ass along with a quarter of your health, like I said cheap tricks.
The core of the game is decent but there various aspects of it that make this a hard sell. The bulk of the plot is communicated to you though overly pretentious dialog, most likely a fatal mistake trying to become like the equally pretentious game SuperBrothers EP. Most players will not bother to read and people with a software engineering background sadly will not understand it either. Combat is actually interesting but as the game drags on it becomes boring and tedious with weird game design where healing is underpowered, jumping does not feel right and i-frames for the dodge is questionable. Visually this is another pixel game where they the developers went waaaaaay overboard with the post-processing making this game an absolute eye strain.
Suprisingly decent cyberpunk game with half baked combat and hacking mechanics. If you wanted to play pacifist, this game is not for you, combat is either impossible or an absolute snoozefest depending on how many skill points you put into combat. The best I can describe it, is like a Cyberpunk Streets of Rage. Hacking is... bad. However, it gets super easy... only if you invest points into it. The good news is that if you've been leveling up like you should be doing you get enough skill points to max out the important stuff. OK, so the combat is jank and the hacking is bad, but at least the effort is made to create a very well done cyberpunk world with fully voiced characters that draw you into the story. Soundtrack is meh, good enough to suit the game, not good enough to be memorable. It's no Deus Ex or Shadowrun but it's decent for the sale price.
The controls for this game is mental, they are counter intuitive and cannot be remapped, it is a struggle to do anything in this sorry excuse for an ms-paint game when you do perform the controls exactly only to realize that the game does not honor your key inputs or the character reaction is so delayed that you end up dead.
The only thing that saves this game is story progression where it does a good job of letting you explore the city of Venice. If you can look past badly aged game design like and annoying portions of the game like. - Recycled NPC models - Bugged animations when using poison - Underwhelming spells and weapon skills - Only 5 hotkeys - Lack of different armor thoughout the game - Lack of direction forcing player to look up a guide - Using a consumable in inventory forces the inventory screen to close - Perma-stun if you don't roll or block - The treasure maps never work, digging is a waste of time Combat is clunky and just ends up with you performing your combo, if they block then you just circle around them and wait until they drop their guard, repeat this for the entire game. The only thing that will keep you going is wanting to learn how the story will unfold, making the gameplay more of an afterthought.
This game is literally Marxist Propaganda, not only that the game play is absolutely terrible since they probably never paid their workers since they love the ideology so much. The funny thing, is that they are charging money for this abortion of a game, you hate capitalism but you still seek to profit off it, smh.
Decent metroidvania that combines innovative combat via movement through multiple shapeshifting forms. Different forms gives you unique ways to move and interact with the environment. The story had a lot of potential to be great but there is no climax at the end with no additional information beyond the reveal of who Mabel really is. That being said the overarching story would actually make for a good Manga or Anime that would be nice to delve deeper into the lore. Music is great because it fits the characteristics of the game very well, there was a segment in the forest where it reminded me of the musical score in Chrono Trigger. There are a lot of glitches in this game, however none of them should be game-breaking since if you get stuck in wall you can use the mole-form to dig your way out (most of the time). I wouldn't bother with the pacifist route, the idea seems good of paper but bad in practice as you'll be even more frustrated without additional forms. The dumbest idea in the game is making Mabel lose her diamonds after taking a hit, just like Sonic loses his rings. It disincentivizes people from even bothering collecting them since you'll lose them just as easy. Speaking of diamonds you'll never see the shop keeper again unless you backtrack for useless potions. Additional effort into the pacing of the story, more explanations, revelations, bug fixes, quick travel way points and maybe a graphics update would go a long way to making this game even better.
While the witty dialog somewhat saves this game, overall the game is giant headache. Not because I wasn't able to solve the puzzles but a mixture of 8bit music that is repetitive and also because some events that should happen in the game do not happen causing the player to be stuck without continuing on any further.
