In 2021 I was playing a lot of demos and this was the most impressive one. Great pixel art, moody setting, tight combat, levels with verticality, and lots of secrets to find. All those things are true, but the thing is the demo area was an alternate version from the full game to showcase several things you find later on. The full game is paced slower, and unfortunately I think the exploration suffers a lot because of that. Everywhere I go in this game is a dead end. Either a one-way wall disabled from the other side, or a pit, or a giant invincible enemy. You get the location of 5 key areas, but I'm finding exploring them to be quite frustrating because it really is linear. I'm only now close to the end of the first of five, about 4 hours of play-time, yet I've explored 30% of the map just trying different directions and failing. I'm not feeling the sense of freedom and discovery I felt in the demo. So traversing the map is more of a chore. You constantly have to hit switches to move platforms around. I wish it were more combat-oriented, because the mechanics are very tight with no jank (good parry, running and jumping feels great, impactful melee). At times I find myself wishing the levels were more like Crosscode, which is insane (the verticality is much better implemented here), but in this game it is actually more tedious to simply travel from one room to another. Last thing, there's a bunch of features in this game (digging, fishing) which you might like but I find over-designed and distracting. You have a dog/fox companion- yay! Except you need to stop and feed it every five minutes, nap every 15 minutes, and if you don't, it makes realistic yapping and whining noises. Yay... As far as the time constraints where NPCs eventually die, I don't have much to say because you can turn it off, plus I don't care because the NPC design is a weird art style that is rather grotesque. The emotional tone in the home village is like, corny, but also gross.
Not sure who this is for. The art and sound design is obviously good. There's plenty of effective horror, and the game has an ironical cutesy tone that is amusing on some level. I just don't see the point. It's not for kids, but the adults won't have much fun with the simple puzzles. The game even gives hints which I can't find a way to turn off.
This isn't as good as Streets of Rage 4 or Fight 'N Rage, but those games are some of the best in the genre, not just among indies. Final Vendetta is still better than the other indie beat 'em ups, especially the licensed ones. It has solid fundamental mechanics as well as more advanced combos and juggles, and great depth and balance in its gameplay design. Decent amount of features too, like a training mode. My issue with this game is that it has no identity of its own. Visually it plays things extremely safe, as an homage to genre classics. The stages are dynamic, the punks have some cool outfits with bright colours, But...where's the flair, where's the edge? Imagine if the main character of this game, the girl, was a hot babe like Blaze Fielding. Do you think the game would have gotten more attention, and been more fun to play?? Hmm, I wonder. Not sure why an indie dev is pandering to corporate interests. Anyway, it's still a shame they have to slash the price down to 75% off because I think it's worth more than that, but I wasn't going to pay full price either.
As much as I'd like to recommend this solely for Henk Nieborg's artwork and the beautiful huge sprites, everything else about this is barebones. The basic mechanical design of the characters and enemies is decent, but the bosses are underwhelming and the level design is non-existent. The upgrades you can get between levels are as basic as can be (improve HP or damage). While it does have that arcade difficulty that a skilled player would enjoy trying to beat without dying, the depth isn't there to make it fun. How did they go from Xeno Crisis to this? Xeno is a god tier game with amazing music, enemy design, difficulty, that can be replayed over and over for mastery. Battle Axe feels like it has 10% of the effort Bitmap put into Xeno. Hard to recommend even on sale, unless you LOVE how it looks and plan to play it co-op for some mindless arcade fun. (Game is hard though, you might find yourself switching to easy mode very fast.)
Not sure there's an indie game as faithful to the original RE style with as much quality. It has tank controls (modern as well), fixed camera angles, and a lot of retro design choices that make the game more difficult. I enjoyed the difficulty a lot, the puzzles are way more clever than most games and there's a decent amount of them. Resources feel scarce especially at the beginning, especially with save items. Took me about as long as a playthrough of RE2 did, which was less than RE1 I think. The mansion in this game has fewer rooms than RE1 but they are much more detailed and beautiful. The environment is gorgeous! You can tell from the character models that it's an indie game, but the textures and especially the lighting are amazing. The light and shadows are so creepy and create an incredible atmosphere along with the music/sound. There's some really interesting ideas in this game's story as well. If you want something horrific and disturbing you won't be disappointed.
When I played this game's demo I thought it was a cheap product, but revisiting it on release it's a good metroidvania - above average. Reviews will talk about the Castlevania and Bloodborne influences, but really this game is like if a team played Blasphemous and said, Hey- We can do that too! And they did a great job. Comparing it to Blasphemous then, my initial gripe with TLF was the controls and feeling. It doesn't have the same feeling of physics/weight to your movements, and generally, is not crafted with as much care and love as Blaphemous. Yet I'm impressed because they did some things better! It has pixel art cutscenes. It has voice acting. IMO, the content is of a more consistent quality- higher lows, and lower highs. The balance of powers and upgrades is better, in that fewer of them are essentially useless, but the progression is strange and rough-feeling. I guess designing a game like this presents a lot of complications with regard to when you get different movement upgrades and weapons/powers. So the beginning is more linear, and there are few spell and weapon choices, but the very end gives you a bunch of cool stuff that is almost pointless because there's barely anything left to do. This game is notable for having an ice-themed area which expands into actually three huge ice areas. And they are a pain in the a**. The status effects like burn, electrify, bleed, do not occur half as often as FREEZE will. This creates a balance issue, because resistances are tied to stats, and freeze resist is tied to strength. So, a strength build will probably afford a smoother playthrough than what I did. While the game lets you begin with a dexterity, gun, or spell based class, make no mistake, you will be relying on your weapon and basic attack. The secrets are inferior to Blasphemous, but no worse than Blasphemous 2 from what I can tell, so I think the devs deserves a fair amount of credit here. I didn't pay attention to the lore, but they put effort in.
This looks like a Diablo clone, but it plays very much like a Souls clone. At first the controls feel a little slow and unresponsive but when you get the hang of it, it's very fun to cut through a group of enemies without getting touched. While there's a good amount of enemy variety, it can still get repetitive as you'll be fighting a lot of the same human soldiers, skeletons, and cyclops. Still, I will replay this on the harder difficulty because after a rougher start where I died a few times and took things carefully, after exploring the entire first open world zone (there are two, and several smaller ones) I became very powerful. My equipment was upgraded and I had dozens of consumables, most of which I didn't even need to use like firebombs, throwing darts, resistance potions, and weapon buffs. I even dropped my shield for a two-handed sword and became "Achilles the Barbarian" just ripping through everything. There's quite a decent amount of play styles: You can use swords/axes or spears plus a shield, with some variation in moveset for different ones, elemental damage or DoT variations as well, or 2handers, dual-wielding, and if you want you can even specialize in throwing Achilles' shield. Some of the special weapon skills/spells you get are incredibly powerful as well, letting me 1shot large enemies or cut down groups almost like a 'press X to win' button. Overall a very solid product for the price, it looks gorgeous, audio not mind blowing but has some good voice acting and good sfx. Simple and fun action gameplay with variety, content, some replayability, and no technical issues.
The game picks up a lot with regards to sidequests and customization once you have all 6 party members. It takes a few hours to get there and is pretty linear until then. There's a lot of handholding, they want people who didn't play SNES etc. to enjoy this. All the gameplay mechanics are geared to make it more playable. Status effects don't persist after battles, no random battles, switching party members doesn't take a turn. The battles do pick up in difficulty, and there's a lot of bosses too, although with exploring all the side stuff it's still easy to be fully stocked on items but the bosses do get tense. However the dialogue sometimes doesn't move fast enough for me. There's a lot of talking, even though it's on the shorter side (less than 30 hours). It's a weakness, but also a strenght because they focused on making the story very emotional. The characterization of your party is highly personal and they aren't afraid to tug on your heart strings. The villain especially aims directly at your feels. Really nice graphics that are 8-bit in the overworld, but the battles I would say are more like SNES style (although still 8-bit technically, probably). Personally the 8-bit music annoyed me a little at first, turned the volume down and it's great. I'm about 9 hours into the game and it's picking up and making me want to play and play. Like I said above the battles aren't too difficult, it's not perfectly balanced (not getting tons of use from defensive skills), but I can tell they tried to put a ton of care into the balance and it's very fun. You have limit breaks, tag-team techs, one of the party can go super saiyan, everyone is unique and fun especially the robot. Stealing is stress free, like bosses don't have items so you don't have to worry about that. The world is basically conventional but well executed. There's lots of humour and very well placed throwback references. I'm glad I stuck through the slow-ish, story-heavy start.
