I was born in 1981 so I remember a fair bit of that particular decade. And that is why I can say, with full confidence, that I haven't received such a highly concentrated dose of the 80s in thirty or so years. Huntdown takes all the tropes, cliches and style of all action movies from the 80s (and some stuff from the 70s as well) and triple distills it into a gorgeous looking and awesome sounding 2D side scrolling action game, fairly reminiscent of games like Contra and Mega Man. The gameplay is somewhat lacking however. What is here is solid, but fairly simplistic. You mostly run to left, and kill whatever happens to come into your line of sight. You can choose from three bounty hunters that only differ in minor ways and pick up a multitude of weapons as you slaughter your way through the gangs that stand in your way. However you can't shoot in any direction other horizontally, no up, down or diagonal aiming. This limits the game a fair bit as you are stuck on essentially one level. Sure you can jump up and down from a lot of platforms but once you are on a platform you can't really effect anything on anything on a higher or lower level except for jumping and shooting. I also feel the bounty hunter aspect could have been explored a lot further with a shop and/or upgrade system. As it stands, the game is extremely linear and your characters doesn't gain any abilities or weapons from the bounties you collect. There are some extra objectives in all levels but the only thing collecting them all amounts to is really not worth the effort. It's not the longest game either though that's really to be expected from this type of game. My first playthough on normal difficulty took about 8 hours and almost 2 hours more to finish all bonus objectives. TL:DR? Best 80s nostalgia game that money can buy, but the it is a bit more style than content.
It's rare that I feel such disappointment and frustration with a game that I have been looking forward to. Despite what it might seem, this is not really a metroidvania, something that I had completely missed. Instead you traverse the titular island and locate dungeons which are procedurally generated and that's where the meat of the game lies. Eagle Island does several things right, the user has an unusally high degree of control over difficulty, gameplay features and personal settings. For instance, instead of having random dungeons all the time, you can set the seed to a preset one that the developers have come up with. Quite helpful if you are like me and is a bit tired of all the games that brag about procedural generation. It also certainly looks gorgeous with impressive pixel art and it sounds great as well. However the gameplay constantly feels stiff and frustrating to the point I just gave up close to the end. No matter what I do, I feel that my character is constantly rather lacking in his abilities. Both the attack range and speed is low, many attacks miss due to strange and small hitboxes, while the player hitbox is huge, cooldown between attacks, especially if you miss and hit a wall, is crippling. Many of these shortcomings can be remedied with abilities that you find in chests in the dungeons. However, due to random nature of the game you can't be sure that you will find these abilites. Secondly, all these abilites are timebased so even if you find a good one it will likely not last even one dungeon, and even if they do, they don't carry over between dungeons. Of course the vast majority of abilities are absolute garbage, and I spent most of my time ignoring them. In conclusion, there is the nucleus of a great game here but several things needs to be tweaked in order to provide a better experience.
