Today I learned that if you're not dumping quarters into a Metal Slug game and just mashing Continue when you run out of lives, these are like an hour long, tops. Beating it was fun, though! Nostalgia trip back to the mall and various arcades and playing (and dying) on these old machines with my brother. If you've never played a Metal Slug, do it. They're great fun.
Devs said they didn't want to pigeonhole their creation as a metroidvania. Fair enough. They absolutely killed it, though. I bought this game a long time ago and never really played it because the combat is so tight and the KB+mouse combo was giving me grief. I recently picked up a controller and let me tell you: 100% better. I rarely die now. So the controls are super tight, even though I'm occasionally miffed by spike hitboxes, but I think this might be a defining characteristic for metroidvanias. Combat is very tight, to the point where if you're not paying attention you'll get roughed up by sword-fodder mobs. When you get the flow of combat a little ways into the game, it starts to feel awesome. The art is just gorgeous. Very cute, but very grim and solemn at the same time. Exploration for these games is also a big deal. I normally avoid big open platformers because the backtracking is so fkn tedious. But Team Cherry nailed this perfect balance of impenetrable and vague lore, sprinkled areas you're going to need to return to, intelligent fast travel, and slow but rewarding discovery and progression. I kept THINKING I was up against a wall and dead-ended and stymied and so bored but actually another route to another place I hadn't been was just right near me, or I had just unlocked a skill that let me take another path, or I realized I had a traversal technique I used to suck at but now could pull off so reaching that ledge was plausible now. Part of this is a brilliant map that was hand-drawn and how the Knight adds to it as you go. You can also drop little markers on it to remind yourself where to come back to, and it's HUGE. The exploration and slow reveal of the world and lore is 10/10. It absolutely blows other games like this out of the water. You're never not able to explore, and you never know when you're going to fall down a chasm and walk into an altar to ancient gods only to have them trap you in a dream. Or find a new skill. Or meet a friend. Amazing.
Really cool game. Saw ending coming at the opening cut scene, but was still cool to follow through. Thing about this game is that it's charming as hell. Your little moth and her carrots, the graphics, the bosses, the over-dramatic NPCs. Even how you handle falling off an island and how you fix it is cool. And kicking dudes into the abyss is dope. It's immersive in its weapons customization, ship building, even refueling and repair and stuffing supplies in the hold, all of it is done in-engine or shows up in-game. You repair by fixing smoking bullet holes in your ship by holding E (meaning combat repairs are possible), you refuel by grabbing a tank of fuel and pouring it into your little outboard gas tank. Sound design is also immersive. Flying your airship, hearing it creak. Gunfire. Nice. Gunplay and ship2ship combat super smooth, rewarding, requires a bit of strategy (most times: sometimes you just get an NPC caught where their AI fails them and just wail away on 'em till they pop). Bosses are nasty difficulty spikes. A lot of the systems feel a little shallow: gun mods essentially increase damage, full stop, and a Level 2 scope contributes less to damage than the Level 3 scope you just found. Neat thing is the gun graphics change and the handling does change a bit, but could've been better. You'll see what I mean when you play. Very little grinding, which was refreshing: I didn't have to mine nine tons of sheet metal to make a "HARDENED TRIGGAR" that makes the "SUPERIOAR ACTION" fire "hEXPLOSIVE SHELLS," i.e. the game isn't Far Cry or Fallout 4. Ship upgrades and different ships are cool. They're all functionally different, and there's no small fast armored shooty ship that makes all your earlier ships redundant. So it's actually quite fun. And not so long it wears out its welcome, but you can still turn around and 100% it by murdering every sky pirate on (off?) Earth when you hit the end.
Came here from Rimworld hoping for a similar experience but with a WASDable character of my own (Rimworld has that mod now, btw). Didn't get that experience. The peasants are NPCs and nothing more, not like the Rim's cherished pawns. There is no story here, no drama, really. Peasants have no relationship to one another and just kind of wander from task to task like really introverted white-collar workers. You're the main character, but you're also the bald chick from Star Craft. It's actually quite something to be both. But four stars? Because the game is solid and consistent and actually pretty deep, deep enough to be confusing and vague, but also not so difficult you die like nine times trying to figure out how to plant corn or that steel is flammable. Plus, you can get your Thane/Chief/CEO up out of his chair and he can go slaughter bandits and invaders with the best of 'em, or fish. The goals and classes system is intricate, and the crafting is actually pretty cool: your peasants can workshop and mass produce stuff, but so can you. There's no morale spiral, because there's no morale. Raids are pretty tame, at least earlier on, and if you lack the military, your dude can handle a lot of it because you're not a dumb NPC. So if you're looking for a neat colony builder, this can definitely scratch the itch. If the devs do a second one, I'd play that, too: more characterization for the peasants, and the ability to travel longer distances? Maybe?
This game is FANTASTIC. I loved every minute of it and still go back and play here and there because you can drop in and out however you like and it's got a low footprint. Story is whatever. It's like a surrealist action movie. A lot of people relate it to Hotline Miami but you play it different: in HM the enemies are braindead and walk straight into bullets while having 0.0sec reaction time and almost perfect accuracy. In HM:2 it's the same thing except most enemies are off-screen so you crab-walk the entire time and trial/error your way into getting them to line up for a supersonic haircut. In Otxo (pronounced oh-cho, means wolf), enemies are varied, have AI, some small tactics, and you also don't die in one hit so battles get protracted. Enemy variation means suiciders, RPG dudes, guys that fire acid bombs, guys at HMG emplacements and shotguns, pistols, etc. There's even cloaking dudes. Add in focus dodge and it's awesome. You can play slow, and creep, but it kills your progress, which is all about momentum and kill streaks. Get comfy with the gameplay loop and eventually the soundtrack catches up with you, and you WANT to just blast into room after room, coldly sidestep hot lead death, dispense metabolic concision, and never ever touch your focus button. The environments get wrecked as you go through: lights, books, vases, explode in sprays of paper and glass. Occasionally, since it's all b/w and isometric, you'll get caught on something. Eh. Bosses are bizarre. Top review here takes the piss out of them, which is a fair take, but I actually found them interesting and the trick is NOT to hold down on the trigger but to learn their patterns and max your damage output while being able to fight back. For instance, reloading while the gardener is tossing autoturrets is a painful mistake. Boss patterns vary enough you have to be quick on your feet and accurate. Some are harder than others. Overall, has that John Woo feel and if you're even decent, it's a thrill.
The first game, Final Station, was pretty good. Not great, but had its moments. This one is cleaner and easier, but not more engaging, though the train maintenance got canned. However, it throws out environmental storytelling, since you're seeing things you already saw, and the payoff at the end is oblique and stupid and doesn't even match the narrative of the first game. So the main thing going for the first chapter is gone, so now you have a mildly entertaining platformer with survival elements and simple combat and irritating context.
The game is fairly bizarre. Not necessarily bad, just very much its own thing. Survival horror-esque, with some slight strategy to climb through the levels and some environmental puzzles. The gunplay is a little underwhelming. Main thing is the story, which is told through notes, dialogue, but, most impressively, through the environment and how it changes as you progress. A lot of it is implied, and a bit of it gets lost in the shuffle (see below). The train portions just flat out suck: your passengers talk to each other, and you have to bring them food and medicine as they starve or bleed to death or both. A lot of their observations are interesting. But you're busy running to grab food, medicine, and do train maintenance or whatever, so the floating, temporary, dialogue goes by and you can't ever recover it. However, overall, definitely can recommend for the interesting gameplay and exploration but mostly for the quirky, dark, sad story. It can also be a pretty and textured game.
The puzzling is quite fun, the setup and payoff are very good, the characters are fun, and the whole game does some very beautiful work with the pixel art where each character moves and acts individually: watch Barres when he's sitting, and look at all the little details done in big chunky pixels, chef's kiss. I'm not a pixel art fan, it feels lazy quite often, but here it's fine art. The music is also very good, changing when you swap universes and always fitting the theme. I particularly noticed this near the end of the game in the mansion-type level. A lot can be said for the platforming, too: not too hard, death doesn't hurt or frustrate or throw you off your flow and is explained in the context of the story, coyote-time properly implemented, and seeing what jumps the kid can and can't make is very clear after only a few minutes. The English localization needs a little bit of help. Puzzles are blocks, physics, acrobatics and universe swapping. Simple, but good. The duck button bugged me because you never actually need it, then I tried it on a bench---there's a lot of little details to be had in the game, lovingly crafted bits of lace that really bring the whole thing together. The game's humor is cute, I wasn't particularly blown away, but I did smile. I finished it in about five hours. The ending, I thought, was very well handled, with the showdown between the kid and the villain of the piece coming out of nowhere but the payoff being very maturely handled. I had some problems with frame rates on an older pc (that runs 3D open-worlds just fine) and there's a weird black bar over the bottom of the screen during cut scenes, but aside from that, all smooth. Overall, support these devs, buy their game. They definitely turned out a piece of art. Not too long, not too complex, not too hard, just right, and the story is pretty good.
A couple of QOL points and bugs turned me off of this. The gameplay is fairly fun but the aesthetics make it difficult to track with what's going on all the time. I appreciate being able to take multiple hits, but it slows the overall pace of the game down; where Hotline Miami was a whirlwind of bloodshed and near misses and repeated use of the R key, Detroit is a bit more of a creep. Somewhat like Intravenous but with all the imsim elements gone and goony AI that runs facefirst at gunfire and sometimes just sits on a couch until you mosey up and hit them with an axe. Hit a bug in a level where knock-downs and executions were encouraged where my legally distinct T-1000 would get stuck and force a reload of the level. This persisted. I stopped using melee. The cut scenes, which depict, accurately, the depravity of your bog standard tech bro and their callow little minions, play super slow, dialogue cannot be sped up, and you can only skip the entire scene. That alone would stick on another star if it were fixed. I actually was kind of into the story. It's dark as hell. A lot like Terminator: The First. Overall, neat homage, worth it on sale, but would be a lot better with a couple minor fixes.
Overall aesthetic is okay, I guess. Couldn't hack the game play and bugs. Something is also wrong with the resolution and I couldn't fix it in options. Text is tiny, game defaults in windowed mode, requiring me to lean in to read things and miss prompts. I started skipping dialogue and descriptions and ignoring on-screen prompts, which I never do and also never learned about an in-deptch crafting system because the particulars of ingredients were printed too small. This should be an easy QOL fix from the dev and I'd probably slap another star on. Ran into trouble with combat a couple of times, got ganked, all acceptable, RPG deaths happen, it's the give-take of more complex gaming systems. No autosave so literally rebuilt my character several times because that's on me. Then my dog, Jax, despawned. Could not get him to respawn. He didn't die. He showed up on my map. Nothing would bring Jax back. Ignoring the loss of Jax, picking up and doing BS starter-RPG-hero errands, wandering to do some alchemy in the starter village with some NPC, dig up some dirt, four larva spawn, get stunlocked, spam food items to heal, flee, spider shows up, webs, stunlocked again, devoured by spider. This is in screaming distance of my character's neighbors. That was it for me and Balrum. Game is janky, I encountered one major bug (Jax!), writing is okay to subpar, difficulty spikes are real, but spawning gangs of nasty mobs on a lvl 1 player out of a loot container is like that one DM who likes to put mimics in starter dungeons with newbie players. Quit and uninstalled. Maybe would come back to it with some fundamental changes and QOL.
