This game certainly offers a very unique form of a turn-based strategy gameplay. In essence, you know your enemy's actions beforehand and try to prevent them or turn them to your advantage. Mostly that means avoiding damage to buildings and your units, as well as some side objectives. You have quite a significant potential array of options, based on your units, terrain, enemies and specific level quirks, but at any given time they are quite limited. This means that any given turn in this game can be perceived as a sort of puzzle where the primary goal is to avoid damage to any structures while the secondary one is to have as much of a benefit on your future turns (by destroying enemies, blocking their spawning, healing your mechs, setting up the battlefield). In a way this can be seen as a set of threats that you have to manage as efficiently as possible to then use spare actions on additional benefits (e. g. killing enemies that aren't directly harmful right now). This can be a fun and enjoyable intellectual experience that is certainly helped by the fact that game is pretty challenging and gives you opportunities to make it even more challenging (by completing additional islands, achievements, or just increasing difficulty). I highly recommend playing it for this. There is, however, a reason I only give 4 stars and that's the amount of randomness. It's not about the results of your actions - you can be sure about those. But the actions of your opponents can make a certain situation with the same set of enemies and objects vary highly in difficulty. An enemy targeting your unit can be solved as easily as moving it away which doesn't even take an action. An enemy targeting a building, however, means that you have to find a way to kill, move or disable that enemy which most of the time means one of your 3 units has to make an action specifically to do it. This doesn't destroy the game for me, but it often harms the experience.
The core idea of switching gameplay is fine, it could totally work. Problem is, none of the modes the game goes through is ever good. It always keeps being annoying, just barely crossing that line between parody and an actual bad game. Zelda-like mode is super generic zelda-like, platforming mode is super generic platfromer. The movement in the overworld is just slow enough to annoy me, dialogues go slow even if you mash buttons, cutscenes can't be skipped, hitboxes in combat are inaccurate and controls in general are bad. The roleplay system that kind of permeates through all modes is so generic and bland that I could easily forget that it even exists. I can't help but think that it was done on purpose, because you can't create something this generic unless you are absolutely unable to be creative. But the developers of the game came up with the whole premise that sounds so exciting, can it really when their creativity ran out? I personally love parodies, I love games that recreate others' experience, I even love games that overdose with references - all of which this game does. But it can't do anything if the gameplay itself is so annoying, generic and just uninteresting.
...and that's a good thing. This game emulates the old games well, but uses the years of game design development that past since to its advantage. Color scheme is vibrant, controls are responsive and animations are smooth. There are also features that mostly didn't exist back then like a very developed system of character upgrades (that varies heavily depending on character, with Plague knight being able, for instance, to tweak their bombs in a variety of aspects at once), challenges, lots of anti-frustration features (like the fact that you only lose a bit of gold when you die, and you can optionally retreive it afterwards). If there's a single one thing that amazes me about this game, it's how well thought-out the levels are. It almost feels like a puzzle game sometimes in a way that moving a block a step right or left would break the level. You start to appreciate it more when trying different characters, since each other of them has a different movement set, and you can see how the levels (often literally the same screens of the levels) were adjusted to accout for that, and how sometimes different move set offers a radically different solution to the same (or similar) screen. The story is, as far as I can see, pretty interesting to read, even if game doesn't take it that seriously. I ended up actually caring for characters in a game that is mostly about platforming. I won't give it 5/5 for one reason: it often becomes annoying. Every area has its own gimmic but it often gets overused in the same way (especially darkness in lich yard) until it's no longer fresh and really frustrating.
It would be wrong to deny that it's the game of the same kind as Dusk - a retro-inspired first person shooter with straightforward and fun gameplay. Thing is, Dusk wasn't just good because it was a retro-inspired shooter. Dusk was so much more due to its intricacies - really creative secrets, level design aware of rockedjump and strafejumping being possible and encouraging you to use them, highly interactive enviroinment, story that was genuinely mysterious and creepy. The game is no way near bad. Its combat is really satisfying and levels are a sight to behold. But if you aim to copy great games of the past, you need to be as good as Dusk, since you already stand on the shoulders of giants.
A true artifact of its age. Nowadays it'd probably cause an outrage among more sensitive audience.
