I spent so many hours on this game. The music was great. You don't have to know all the mechanics of the game to have fun.
Art Style: 5/5; Consistent, gloomy, every area easily recognizable. Music: 3/5; I couldn't really whistle any of the tunes afterward. I did like the Greenpath and City of Tears Themes. Combat: 4/5; (My favorite was the failed knight boss) A few of the bosses were very fun to fight. Most of the basic enemies were boring and it felt like I was grinding my way through them. Some exceptions were the Moss Chargers, Oomas, Shrumal Warriors, and the Mantis Warriors. The Flukemons get points for being terrifying. I think the Hunter's Journal should have included actual stats on the enemies (HP counts). Level Design: 4/5; The largest Metroidvania I've played yet. It seemed like some of the important parts of the game were a little too well hidden. It was also frustrating when the wall to get to the pale lurker became breakable only after playing round 1 of the colosseum of fools. This inconsistency begs the question, "are there other secret areas like this?" I shouldn't have to go online to find out. Mechanics: 5/5; Editable controls, check. Things felt smooth. Dying was punishing, but not too bad. It was frustrating getting to certain places on the map because there weren't any close Stag stops. It was interesting trying to come up with the best charms combos for different bosses. Story: 3/5; The story is slowly pieced together in a nonlinear fashion and I ended up just watching a youtube video to get it all put together. Really the story wasn't interesting enough for me to care about putting it all together myself. By the end of the game, I got a little fed up the missions that sente me back into areas that I'd already explored. When that Grimm lady wanted tens of thousands of geo for the breakable charms, I just said, "screw it, I'm not farming that."
Do yourself a favor and get the "Nuclear Throne Together" mod by YellowAfterLife. The music is great. Each character is well-balanced and encourages different strategy. There are numerous community-made mods such "hardmode." This game is HARD, but after a couple hundred hours, I improved a lot. It would be nice to be able to play the game at 60 fps, but that's not really a problem.
Great music, beautiful art style, pacing was good, controls were solid. I'd recommend this game to anyone.
I felt like it took too long for each run to get fun. The music was so so. I'd have given it 4/5 if it had online multiplayer. The boss battles were challenging and fun, I especially liked the Gorgun, but I've only played against the first 9.
I played this with my little nieces & nephews and we loved it. I'd give this 5 stars except I got soft-locked once in Queen Vanessa's manor and I didn't like how there were parts where I could not control the camera despite explicitly setting the camera control to manual in the settings (it's fine for boss levels and levels where the camera has to be fully automatic, but there were parts in levels where camera control would be taken from me without warning). It would also be nice to be able to fine tune little controls like the mouse-wheel zoom (I wished I could flip it.) It would be cool if I could play this natively on Linux, but the game seemed to run fine in Wine with only minor additional glitches (mostly the sound). The music, art, level-design, and the writing were great. I was so glad to finally have a game like this I could play on my computer.
