Nightmare Reaper is pretty much everything I would want out of a modernized pixelated fps shooter; - Weapon usage feedback feels great in terms of audio, how enemies react to it, visuals, etc. - There is permanent progress in the form of a super mario 2 inspired 2d map where you can enter levels. Upon completion you unlock permanent upgrades like faster weapon swap time, faster run speed, reload time, dash unlock, more hp, etc. This is a great way to break up the shooting and you can do this whenever you'd like to. Furthermore, you can keep holding on to one weapon when you've completed a level. - Weapons have valuable stats and are categorized in rareness. - Randomized levels to a certain extend... yes, it genuinely works and does what it's intended for, it really shines when you have to rerun a level 2-3 times. - An -in my opinion interesting non intrusive story that you can skip all together if you're not interested. The things that needs work is are jumping puzzles, which often give you a good amount of air but positioning your character is rather clunky in air, it doesn't feel right yet. That's it, I'm really looking forward to more updates since I've completed all chapters so far. For what it's worth; a game really has to compel me to play to completion let alone let me hunger for more and give a "perfect" score, I don't throw these 5/5's around.
The shooting sections are fun, the dialogue is well written. Where I pass is finding a person in a large top down map with multiple floors with one floor standing on top of the given marker where he should be (but isn't there and the other floor you're unable to get to him either). I genuinely despise searching for 20+ minutes to come to no conclusion on how to solve or find something in a game.
For me the appeal was direct and clear: The artstyle. After years of eyeballing the game now and then I finally gave it a shot and I was not dissapointed. In fact, it takes a bit for a single player game to make me want to play it through to the finish and didn't expect this one to do so. However, the combat, visual artstyle, sound, music and overall difficulty made me keep coming back. These are all subjective matters but for the person on the verge to buy this game I can give one general point that may make or break your descision to buy this game and that is; you will sooner then later be confronted with PARRYING and if you master it you are at a massive advantage, if you don't consider yourself a fan of such a mechanic I wouldn't recommend Slain. However, everything is fair and well indicated, if you fail it's your fault, including the boss fights which are actually fun. Ofcourse, enemy movement patterns and traps have to unavoidably be learned as the game progresses. I only have two nitpicks with the game: - *Some* of the special effects can look rather cheap (like a flash game). - From what I understand collecting all the pieces for the talisman doesn't give any substantial reward other then an archievement. Dissclaimer: Played the game exclusivly with controller (5h played, finished).
