After more than ten hours, whether I'm gonna hit with nail down on an enemy or be hit, or both is still random.
Unacceptable for a game where precision is of the utmost importance.
Not only that, but I had to restart my game being stuck at queen station after cheesing the game, all that to learn that there are quick travel point, thankfully no tutorial explained this.
If you can get past that, the game is enjoyable
and the "level design" is horrible. the nonsensical map didn't help.
I killed a few bosses and the game became a "where-the-fuck-do-I-go" kind of game. no challenge from enemies or bosses, so 90% of the time is moving around wondering where to go and backtracking. just boring...
For a Metroidvania game you don't get any interesting and fun abilities to unlock. After playing for about 10 hours I feel like I had gotten most of the abilities I should have started with in the first place. The combat consists of just hitting things with a standard melee weapon, and the typical fireball/magic ranged attack. There's nothing groundbreaking or inspired in that department
However all that can be overlooked if the game world itself is interesting and unfortunately that's where the game is the most lacking. Everything is drab and dull. Some of the areas have a distinct aesthetic, but all the rooms in those areas look so much alike that it's hard to tell where you are most of the time. It's made even worse by the bizzare and convoluted map system. Instead of uncovering the map as you go so you get a good idea of where you are and where you've been, you run around blind untill you find the guy who sells the maps. If that were all there was to it it could work, but no, it gets worse. The map you get only has a few rooms uncovered, you have to explore the rest of the zone on your own. If only it were that simple, the map still won't uncover the rooms you've been to until you stumble upon a save point. So first it's blindly wandering around until you find the map salesman, then it's blindly wandering around until you find a checkpoint, and then you can backtrack through the areas you were just in to hopefully stumble upon the correct way to go. Oh, I forgot to mention that it still doesn't show your location on the map unless you equip a compass.
As you'd expect the pace of the game is agonizingly slow, and mostly consists of blindly wandering around until you find an exciting new ability like a short dash, or wall jump.
