First off, this is NOT a bad game, but I didn't really enjoy it enough to finish.
See, this is a metroidvania-ish game that takes it's cues from super-metroid.
Upgrades to improve exploration more than gameplay most of the time.
Basically, a precision jumping game.
Ninja gaiden, on the other hand, was basically baseball:
Enemies charge and see if can hit them.
Which is mostly absent from this game.
Also, if the story was removed entirely, I think the game would have been improved.
Im sure Messenger is a good Game and deserves to be bought, but the Ice Level was so bad designed, that i just had to end it. I dont like that it has to be 14 Hours long, if i knew that it would be over after this Part, i would have played it over and over again, until i reach the Boss. But because i like to play one Game after another and not every Game at the same time, i realised that this is not worth my Time, because i was only frustrated and not in a good way. The Three Stars are really subjective, i know a lot of people will bite in it and Play it 14 Hours because this is the right Genre for them. I think it was fun while it lasted and i dont feel the need to play it through.
It is very difficult to rate this game. If you compare The Messenger to Ninja Gaiden on the SEGA Master System, which it so clearly copies, it falls through with 1 star. The levels in the first part are boring, repetitive and does not giver a good challenge. If you look at The Messenger for what it is, a ninja 2D platformer released around 2018, it gets 5 stars simply because there is nothing to match this style now. So 3 stars it is.
Very minor spoilers ahead.
The game is split into two parts. The first part is easy and if the devs would take some time to strenghten the levels and add some more bosses, it could have passed as it's own game and it would have been a good game if not a very good game. It tries to copy what Ninja Gaiden did perfect on the SEGA Master System and to my knowledge no other game has done since. Perhaps the game could have been split into different parts, save games disabled and "lives" as you know it from the old games, i.e. Mario, with a Game Over feature would have been nice.
The second part of the game is a mess. It is sort of a RPG platformer hybrid, that does not work very well, because it lacks effort. You are not guided and the level design is one big mess. You have the Unity go-fund-yourself platforming template map as you will find in every other Unity platformer and a cryptic messages about items you have to find. I did not finish the second part of the game, not because I did not want to, but simply because early on, I was told about an item (which I now realize must be some sort of end game item) which I went and fetched, used and ended up in with a game breaking save in which I could not complete the level and could not backtrack beyond the last save point. I did invest some time trying to figure this out and to my knowledge there was no way around it and I had to delete the save.
If the devs had respected the genre some more and less of the ironic humor, The Messenger would have been a solid game.
For the first hour or two of the game, you really feel like this dev understands what older gamers want from an NES throwback. I doubt most people who played the NES back in the day want games like this and Cyber Shadow to be hard and janky and stiff in ways that only make gaming worse and terrible. No one should WANT to be throwing their controller or pounding on the couch in rage.
After completing the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit in this game, I can say that the difficulty spike is disgusting just before the transition, and almost made me quit the game forever to avoid cortisol giving me a heart attack. I personally consider devs intentionally raising adrenaline and cortisol, which causes heart disease, murder.
So while this dev is slowly killing us all with completely unecessary difficulty that goes far beyond anything the NES could have thrown at you, I'm sure he's also fobbing off cirtics with "then don't play the game." Fine, and this review will be here to warn away anyone else that values their health and the genuine enjoyment of their free time. You have to love that psychotic egomaniac replies most devs give when they deliberately anger customers so much.
What is with people over-rating this game? Especially compared to Cyber Shadow? Most of the dialogue literally laughs at you for putting up with how overly frustrating everything is. Like the dev or devs are actually mentally torturing you for losing your money. Especially with that heinous mechanic of having the little blob follow you around counting the times you die. Seriously, what is wrong with these devs?
That transtion in graphical style should have been the end of the game. And it is for me. I'm done with it. And you human garbage didn't even include a difficulty setting. Off to a game that actually wants me to enjoy it.
