Recent reviews by BertDutton

Tedious meta progression that is required for advancing through the game. Character skills and variety are locked behind essentially doing runs where you forego actually attempting to beat the game and instead try to earn as much currency as possible so that after some 30+ hours or so (estimating based on upgrades I can see) you can then attempt to beat the game. Way too much player power wrapped up in those progression systems. I enjoyed what I played of the first game and I generally like rogue like games but this ain't it.

A solid metroidvania. A lot of similarities to Hollow Knight if that is a game you enjoy this may scratch that itch while waiting for Silksong to never come out. Combat is fluid and challenging with some notable spikes at the beginning and end.

Reasons it may not be for you:
- Heavy on story. I prefer atmosphere to exposition and have come to expect it in games in this genre and I found myself annoyed at how often the game would stop you and talk at you. Not a deal breaker but I think much of it could have remained on the cutting room floor.
- A couple of annoying sections
Terrible tropey prison sequence, arbitrarily removes certain abilities and becomes a stealth survival game. I don't understand what purpose this serves.
A couple of times they remove the UI (including health bar) for aesthetic reasons making sure it is difficult to know when to heal. The only way to know your health is low is with the red thorny border around the window which notably does not react well if you have high internal damage.
- Specific gripes about a particular boss Last phase of the last boss may leave a bad taste in your mouth, first two phases are great, third phase was too much imo. Learning phase 3 quickly became tedious after quickly learning phases 1 and 2. From reading around it seems this may be a controversial take but you should know by now where you fall on the tedium to difficulty spectrum and prepare yourself for a potentially frustrating ending.