I am a huge fan of Crypt of the Necrodancer, so this game was a must-buy for me and I am not disappointed. It is way faster than COTN but creating your own ballet of shooting, dashing and reloading to the beat of these "MY GOD ARE THEY AWESOME" music tracks is such a great feeling if you get the hang of it. I must say, I am not a fan of the chosen graphic style and at least some sort of tutorial or glossary would have prevented a lot of the "die-trying-to-figure-out-what-this-boss-does". But the grief of restarting is gone as soon as the riffs and the base drop again and you are back to bullet-ballet.
If you consider the game by itself, it is a super awesome se(pre-)quel to the Desperados franchise. Though there is some criticism from my side (later). If you have played the also awesome Shadow Tactics before, you might notice, that it is basically just a reskin. Of course that does not make the game worse, but it shows, that the devs did not really have the guts to develop further what they did before. The only really new mechanics has Isabelle, but there are no new enemies (except you count female enemies as "new") or e.g. cooperative abilities. Now to the constructive criticism: - Player characters do not make noises while running. I totally accept sneaking as a silent tool. But running past some guards without them noticing, while slowly carrying a body makes noise, feels wrong. - I personally do not like the completely binary view cone (at least distance-wise). It makes the game easier to read, but I would like to have some kind of transition area that interpolates the perception speed. - It might be a design choice, but the AI is a little bit too static. If I distract the same enemy five times in a row with a coin, he should at least go searching a bit or start ignoring it. Hectors whistle does this in a way, but it's the only one. - Three of the five characters have a heal skill, which is, in my opinion, not really useful. Either you play for stealth, avoiding being shot at (which is probably the most common way) rendering heals useless, or you play gun-heavy where you either draw faster than your opponents or die by two shots, making heals highly situational. I think giving Doc the only heal-skill (replacing the other two with useful ones) and distributing heals in crates around a map would be nicer. At this point I wondered, why Isabelles mind control uses 1 HP if she can heal it up infinitely anyway. Still AWESOME! Go buy it, of you havent already to support the devs and give us more of this.
The developers fixed everything that was bad about the first game, so now we have: - Free aiming - Dodge roll - Larger field of view - Slightly faster reload - Possibility to hit enemies outside of field of view - Awesome boss fights - More and diverse enemy mechanics -... The list could go on. It was a tremendously fun ride and earned no less than five stars.
This game could be fun and great if it wasn't for the severly limited moveset and aiming. The sequel does everything right, so I would like to have a remake of this game with the controls of the second game.
I think this is my favourite Zachtronics game, as it is not as abstract as the others I played (SpaceChem, Shenzhen I/O, TIS, Opus Magnum), but more about logistics like Factorio. Timing is a crucial point though.
The whole game is about putting the right cards in the right order. Not too difficult once you got the hang of it but very fun nontheless. There is also some minigame which is about programming microcontrollers, but who would ever look at this? Jokes aside: This is a typical Zach Barth...Easy start but pretty soon you are like "What?" with the usual statistics screen in the end displaying your inferior creativity and intellect.
This is one of the first games I played completely on my own and I loved every single minute of it. A milestone and the start of one of my favourite franchises in gaming (2205 did kind of suck though). It's relaxing but difficult at the same time, such a great experience.
