Recent reviews by [K.eX] MaGuSware

It has been a few years since I have completed a game which had such a satisfying story ending. Right from the start I was gripped with the premise of fighting against the way things are, for a better future. There are hard points emotionally depending on how invested you get in the world and the characters.

I do however have a few criticisms.
1) the balancing of the game felt way off - the first major boss was the hardest in the game for me. whether it was because I was new, or what, that boss was overtuned for such an early fight.
2) The characters don't really interact with each other much, I would have loved to have seen the heroes banter and interact a lot more than they do.
3) Performance, there is no excuse for a game to perform this poorly - I was able to power through it thanks to my system, but I can't imagine other people are as fortunate, so I warn anyone who is thinking of buying this, you may have a rough time unless you have top tier hardware.

I want to continue my journey in this world. So much.

So much fun, to rip and tear through battlefields. The shield is so much fun to use to parry in a back and forth with multiple things that are bigger than you then letting rip. So cool.

I have 3 criticisms though

1) The secrets are telegraphed too much, exploration for secrets boils down to looking at the map and heading towards the ? icons for the most part.
2) Difficulty, too easy. Yes I know there are difficulty sliders, but I expect them to be more of a challange mode rather than needing to feel like tough fight. I've played every doom on UV, always have, always will, 2016 felt good, Eternal felt overtuned and TDA feels Undertuned.
3) Bugged achievement :( - I have all the upgrades but can't get the achievement. It is bugged, broken zapped, kaput. Apparently the milestone which is linked to the achievement is what is blocking the achievent from being obtained even on over save slots. Very sad.

I really enjoyed this game. Looking at some of the negative reviews it seems to me some people don't really know what metroidvanias are like.

Difficulty.
The main difference between this and some others is that dying in this game sends you back to when you last saved, losing progress, opposed to just warping you back to the last checkpoint like most modern ones do. However, I didn't find this much of a problem at all as there were plenty of save points scattered around, plenty of items you can use when you are low on health or ammo... which offset the struggles. If you die and go back and lose progress, it's not that much progress lost.
To cap this off, you can stock up on food and just chug a lot to brute force some bosses if you are struggling with certain aattack patterns, making it a little easy if you take this approach. I did in NG+ stocking up 9 medicines, 9 ammo, 9 bomb restocks and just fact tanking the last boss for the final couple of achievements.

Music
Yes. I love this style of retro music, it has that true old-school feel where bass doesn't quite sound like bass but it''s meant to be bass, if you know what I mean... it chugs in all the right ways.

Graphics
Beautiful pixel art. Amazing sprites. Love it. Has that exaggerated metal slug style on strange vehicles and it works so well.

Exploration.
The majority of fun in a Metroidvania, for me, is the exploration. Finding secrets, upgrades, weapons or even alternate routes. This game nails it here in this category.

Controls
In general the controls feel really good, but there are a few quirky which make it feel clunky. Some of the controls which feel like should take priority over other controls, don't, which often lead to getting hit. For example, holding down to shoot full auto locks you out from dodge rolling, you have to let go of shoot and press dodge roll to do it. Makes it feel a little clunky on the controls. Would have been better if dodge roll press had a higher priority than shooting so it interrupts. Another issue I had meant I had to turn off one of the abilities, the knee pads, because of a strange interaction with one way platforms and jumping down. When you shoot, if you immediately press down and jump on a platform you would normally jump down from you perform a slide instead. On one of the boss fights (in the tower) this got me killed a few times when trying to drop to avoid a super attack, instead only sliding into it.

Conclusion
If you alike metroidvanias and metal slug, this is a crossover of those games you should not miss. It's fun, gimicky, and offers a fair challenge (depending on playstyle) with plenty of secrets to find..

I ran into a friend, and saw another friend run around a corner in a distance. The first friend didn't trust me - probably because I ran towards him with a Shotgun. However, this was because I had a detonator. I showed him and he was like "Take the C4 out of play. Just detonate it"... So I did. I saw a shockwave radiate from the direction friend 2 ran.

10/10 will always push the red button.

I was good boy. I swear.

Aside from the performance issues - of which I did not get many, I am one of the lucky few - this is an incredibly solid Metroidvania and one of the best, if not the best, single player Star Wars games I've played.

Rip and Tear

Best FPS of the decade.

The most fun I've had on a star wars game since Dark Forces. And an awesome story. + It's canon.

First let's get the negatives out of the way. I have played more than what the steam stats say. This is because the OpenGL renderer used in the games engine kept freezing about 5-10 seconds at a time every now and again. It was really frustrating so I downloaded eDuke32 and played the game through that instead. This was the only negative.

The game itself was a lot of fun, rekindling the fires of what it means to be an FPS in today's market. Exploration is rewarded greatly as the level design allows alternate paths through many of the stages. As you progress through the game more and more different enemies are thrown at you. It's up to you to quickly learn which weapon is best for handling which enemy. For example, I realised that a specific enemy is quite dangerous up close and that 3 grenades take them out with ease, so I ended up saving a lot of my grenade launcher ammo for these things (as well as shooting around corners ofc). Another enemy which is usually quite tanky and fast (can also teleport and go invisible) is made trivial with a different weapon. The sense of exploration and experimentation is strong with this game. I missed this feeling.

If you have played an enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, or any games like that, I strongly recommend you check out Ion Fury. You definitely can't go wrong for £20.

I'll be honest, I bought this on a whim. I was bored, wanted to kill an hour or so and I saw an indie JRPG. So I thought, meh, why not.
I'll be honest, I'm really impressed by what I've seen so far. Sure it's a little rough around the edges, but it's early access by a small indie team. The combat system is a implementation of the tried and tested ATB made famous by the final fantasy series; but also includes tile based moment and interactive field elements such as siege weaponry which adds a nice layer of strategy.

I am looking forward to playing more.