Cryptark on GOG is a second-class citizen to the Steam version (no Easy Mode here). The gameplay is built around a fun core, namely flying around and unloading bullets into combat drones, but is surrounded by terrible additions. The ships you explore are poorly randomized by throwing together rooms of mismatched doors and challenges. Doors that lead into walls are common. The global challenges you encounter per ship, things like "don't kill X" or "use a loadout worth less than $45k", don't appear to account for the ship layouts at all. There is probably a SHUMP master who loves the insane challenge, but a humble gamer boy such as myself just wants to have fun and eventually beat the level. So, the scornful lectures for failing to meet stupid extra objectives or massive penalties for dying once are just not for me. The only way to actually progress in the game, that I've found, is to ignore extra objectives and go for the ship with the highest monetary value. This seems bass ackwards, but I've found the lower value ships just grind you up with enemies and I'm not sure why. There's also no way to go backwards, so you only get to explore 1 of 4 ships per area. May as well make the ship you explore the highest value. I've also found it's pointless to customize your loadout much: if you aren't a master at these kinds of games, just throw together something that works and tweak it as little as possible. To me, the result is an interesting but overall poor game.
Hellpoint is a visually interesting (if you're into blood and scifi more than fantasy) soulslike with bad combat. Enemies animate in strange and unpredictable ways, with some of the less human enemies conjuring sudden leaping attacks that have a small chance to get my character stuck in the floor. Not great for a soulslike. From the player hints that freeze my controls for no reason to the strange physics interactions sometimes from attacks, Hellpoint has alot of mess. You can get around some of it by simply out-leveling the basic enemies. Who cares about broken combat if you can dodge-roll forever, swing your weapon as much as you want, or shoot enemies from afar? Well, in my experience, out-leveling the basic enemies doesn't work as well for the bosses unless you really want to grind. I didn't mind so much for a boss named "Ozyormy Goija", as that guy is my favorite fight in the game. Additionally, he happens to live in my favorite zone to explore. However, outside personal favorites, zones suffer from tight corridors removing the possibility of clear landmarks. I've gotten stuck twice, and both times I've lost interest and had to restart. There are keys, hidden keys, doors, and hidden doors all over, and the process of figuring out even where you are after hunting for secrets can become tricky. You see, Hellpoint has fast-travel, but it's gated behind a special soul resource. I believe this limitation is a huge mistake, but I'm sure there's someone out there who loves it for story or gameplay reasons. The story seems silly, something about gods and wannabe Dark Souls, but a world torn in 2 presents opportunities to engage with twisted versions of levels and unearthly foes. Definitely one of my favorite aspects of the game, but it's because of this dual world system that we have to deal with the special fast-travel souls. Hellpoint is too ambitious for what it is. I respect it, but 3 stars is the highest I can go with combat such a janky mess.
The funky cyberpunk atmosphere of this game makes me want to finish it someday. However, there're so many little issues to contend with both in the design and controls that I cannot stand playing for extended sessions. Thank you geekgamer in the forms for pointing out you can re-bind the controls. Control is still awkward as heck due to the lack of a dedicated jump button. There's a strong isometric platforming element here, but the jumping is contextual, so plenty of things that should work just don't. Beyond the control bindings is damage modifying your rotation. This would be ok if you could kill everything in sight, but there are enemies you cannot kill that may be placed in your path. There is nothing so frustrating as spending minutes fighting character rotation to line up a run past an enemy, only to find the path blocked and a forced return to that same unkillable enemy. Who then kills you on return because of the inability to jump and the difficulty in manuevering past it. I wanna like this game, but I swear it doesn't want me to.
Spectacular Sparky is like a Saturday morning cartoon with more violence (outright gory at points) and somehow less meaning. I beat the game in a few hours, and on the right difficulty (there's several to pick from) I think anyone could have a good time. Spraky is a 4 star for me because I don't enjoy the boss design. Maybe it's down to my distaste for platformers leading to unusual expectations, but I found them to be largely spongy and long-winded fights. The boss fights did get better towards the latter forth of the game, but every single one up to that point just seemed generic or uninspired (with the exception of some repeated antagonist fights that I found to be kinda charming). There were also times when the lack of animation stuck out to me, like when a boss' face would remain completely frozen or how the protagonist doesn't really move when he's in his ship. These feel like cost cutting measures that took away a bit from the charm for me, but I won't knock the game for it. It's just something you may notice during play. Easily recommended, even if you dislike the majority of 2D platformers.
I can see a slower, more deliberately paced version of this game filled with abilities and more interesting tactical decisions. UFO Aftermath teases these things, and then devolves into a level of play so basic I became horribly bored after a few hours. There are little issues all over the place: You don't start with the ability to do much on the world map aside from occasionally send your 1 helicopter to missions or your 1 pack of interceptors out to catch UFOs, your soldiers take so long to switch weapons it becomes tactically difficult (and often inefficient) to switch to grenades, your units cannot attempt to peak around walls, I never got the running function to work which is a problem when one of your starting weapons is a shotgun, etc. The issues all together devolved my play into: fast-forward time on overworld until missions pop-up, select 1 to actually do and delegate all the rest while the horribly slow troop helicopter goes off to the selected mission, select all troops and blob-move in missions while slaughtering all foes, mash the space bar to constantly unpause time in response to annoying alerts, maybe use a medkit if a soldier seems low, rinse repeat. I hope the sequels are better.
The Immortal is one of the most interesting games I've encountered in terms of how it mixes adventure and action in a fantasy setting. The adventuring aspects come from managing inventory and combining and exploiting items you find in specific ways to solve puzzles. You'll reference pieces of maps to figure out the locations of traps, equip fireballs to throw at enemies, etc. If you run into an enemy, you get sucked into a separate action interface that is something between a JRPG encounter screen and a fighting game arena. Within the arena space, you must time dodges to avoid enemy attacks and throw enough attacks to damage the enemy without exhausting your stamina. It's not very challenging compared to avoiding dying to puzzles, but it's not boring either. There's alot of death in The Immortal. This would be fine if death didn't force you back to the start screen. You can choose to continue from the start screen, but each time you have to enter a password for any level you wish to travel to. And, every time you try to go to a level, you have to deal with the annoying copy protection. The copy protection involves referencing images in the manual, and then providing letters from a box placed next to any given image. If there were an updated version of this game, with saves or checkpoints or the like, I'd happily give that version a shot and probably end up recommending it. However, the current version of The Immortal is so old-school I can only recommend it with one big caveat: You should avoid this game if dying alot and keeping track of copy protections in addition to passwords every time you want to play sounds tedious.
