The game's marketing says it's a retro-inspired shooter, but it's filled with very modern mechanics. Relaoding, checkpoints, linear levels, and progression systems. It's a game that feels extremely conflicted in it's design. The enemies barely move, and half of their attacks seem to miss on purpose. But they deal a significant amount of damage when they do hit (at least on Very Hard). So the game has a very unusual reverse tension.. Where you can fairly easily clear several encounters without taking any damage, and then take a bunch of hits at once and die. The game is also extremely stingy with health pickups, so if you don't die you're whittled down over time because each time you do get hit you're losing around 20 to 30 HP, but pickups only give back 10. The game also lacks quick saves, and instead has an extremely generous checkpointing system that respawns you with full health but does not reset the enemies. So you can just die without consequence and win via attrition... Or restart the entire level when you die. Both of which aren't necessarily great options. You can also lower the difficulty, but then the game becomes too easy so it devolves into nothing but shooting lackluster enemies and mild platforming. The levels are also rather linear and straight forward, and don't feel like they're inspired by the more open level design of retro shooters. The game also has a progression system that requires you to get currency to unlock weapons, and items to unlock levels. It's so out of place for a seemingly retro inspired shooter. It's just weird, I don't recommend it.
Perhaps not as good as Duke, but still fun! Quite a bit more difficult than I expected. Doesn't take itself very seriously, and is just silly fun.
