Recent reviews by DEATH

I really need to pay more attention to the games I buy... If it isn't obvious, this is mobile slop. It's dirt cheap, not even really worth refunding. But also not worth playing. The controls are terrible due to it being a sloppy port of a mobile game. The music, sounds and visual feedback are all terrible. The game looks better in screenshots than in reality. The resolution is incredibly tiny, backgrounds are flat, stages are single rooms with waves of simple enemies that spawn in. Stage hazards such as pitfalls and lava are more dangerous than the enemies, and the awkward player physics will get you killed more than anything else.

The music being especially terrible makes this a real chore to get through. You can turn it off at least. There is no knockback or much visual indication when you take damage so you can end up losing health without even realizing it. The jumping is terrible, you don't have any variable jump height, so you can only do full high jumps into the air, this makes killing flying enemies extremely tedious. You can't walk while using your shield so you have to come to a halt just to block something.

No idea how this got labeled souls-like. It's clearly an arcade survival game. Combat is brain dead simple as all you do is hold down the attack button to slash repeatedly. But you also cannot move while attacking so you aren't very swift. Makes it feel quite clunky. And enemies have ridiculous health on hard mode. Anyway, it's mediocre mobile trash, but it's playable and there's a decent amount of content in the game. If you have the tolerance for this sort of thing, maybe you won't mind sparing some change to play it. But don't expect a console/PC-level experience here. ~ 5/10

I'm gonna not recommend this one. I must have accidentally bought this not realizing it was a "roguelite". Not a fan of the genre to begin with but I guess I'll break down what doesn't work about this game.

Firstly, like most in the genre, it is incredibly repetitive. You will fight the same enemies in the same rooms over and over again. Get to the boss, die on the boss, repeat the same rooms again and again. It is mind numbingly boring. Killing the easy as hell mini-boss will give you a skill point you can use to unlock a permanent skill upgrade. So the progression here is kill the mini-boss, get the point, die on the major boss, unlock stuff, repeat until you are powerful enough to proceed to the next dungeon.

The major boss wasn't too difficult but it's damn near impossible until you unlock the deflection skill. Without that, you can't dodge the massive barrage of bullets coming at you. Locking crucial skills like this behind this stupid system only exists to pad the game's very limited content. I only got to the 2nd major boss within an hour of playing but based on how they have already laid out the content, it is paper thin distribution here.

I don't even see a reason for the dungeon layout as all you do in this game is fight the same few enemies in the same simple rooms. There isn't any real platforming or hazards to deal with, so it's just pure combat. The combat itself is okay but nothing deeply engaging. You can basically stun-lock every enemy in the game by chaining a heavy with a string of light attacks, rinse and repeat. Heavy attack bullets that get near you to deflect them back and that's about it. The 2nd dungeon does introduce enemies that fire lasers at you, this is much harder to deal with when you are juggling other enemies.

You really only take damage due to our limited cognitive ability to track dozens of enemies and bullets all at the same time. Enemy design may be simple and easy but in large numbers it's difficult to manage it all so you are gonna get hit and eventually die as healing is very rare in this game.

I will say, the game is polished, while perhaps undercooked design-wise. Controls are fast, responsive, character movement is fluid and easy to learn. So I can give credit there, it feels alright to play. it can be annoying dealing with enemies on ceilings though, a lot of the larger flying enemies like to hang out up there for some reason and it can be difficult to reach them in the taller rooms. There is also a weird mechanic where if you change direction while air-borne, you lose most of your speed, so watch out for that.

It is nice that you don't take contact damage, and you can attack in all directions. But I don't like the gravity pull that happens when you hit an enemy. This gets me hit more than I'd like as it reduces player control over where you are while you are attacking enemies in the air, which is important because the game is basically a bullet hell and PRECISION IS NEEDED. So it can feel pretty damn floaty at times.

Anyway, the graphics are okay. Nothing breathtaking. Very typical minimalistic indie design here. Main character looks weird as hell though but is so tiny you can barely really make out what it even is. Some kind of marshmallow man I guess.

The music I find to be abhorrent. It's a lazy rip off of the later Doom games' djenty/synthy metal riffs. I hate this style, it's all aesthetics over substance. Boring chuggy riffs with glitchy sludgy guitar noises. Basically no real composition or interesting melodies that'll stick with you. And the default dynamic behavior of it is absolutely awful. You clear out rooms so quickly that the music just starts and stops and starts and stops over and over again. It's like driving a car by smashing the gas and slamming the breaks over and over again. Sounds terrible.

Fortunately you can turn the music to just the exploration tracks, which are a lot nicer. Not amazing but much more tolerable.

Let's rap this up. So basically the game is very thin content wise, each run is identical and has no variation whatsoever, and the progression of the game is built around repetition, you die, gain some points, use them to upgrade yourself than cheese the area, rinse and repeat. It's got none of the great qualities of a linear action game, and none of the qualities of a great roguelike. So what the hell is the point of this game? What's it even trying to do? Hell if I know. ~4/10

I guess I have to give this a recommendation because it's a free demo, so why not try it?

As for my impressions of what little content they show us in the demo. i wasn't too impressed. It's very slow paced and very easy. Level design is repetitive and basic. No interesting gimmicks or action set pieces at all. Enemy density is low and the enemy design is very weak. The heavy attack can one shot almost every enemy so you won't really be taking any damage from enemies except the occasional bird you might miss once or twice.

Bosses were also push overs. I didn't take a single death in the 30 mins the demo lasted. Barely even took any damage. So if the game is supposed to be reminiscent of brutal arcade classics, than I'm simply not seeing it here. The game is a literal walk in the park, as you move like a snail and kill everything in one hit. Now they did say the difficulty increases later into the game but unfortunately that doesn't show up in the demo.

I will say the graphics look pretty great and having 4 playable characters is nice. Though I dont have anyone to test co-op with so I can't comment on that. I don't see how they could possibly balance co-op though unless they just give enemies way more health, since the game is already ridiculously easy.

The music is a mixed bag. Some tracks were great, others were strangely minimalistic to the point of sounding unfinished. Looking at the credits, there appears to be a VERY large number of contributors to the game's assets. (Maybe many store bought assets, free assets and some commissions?) So this contributes to the mixed quality of the project.

But overall it's not a terrible game, though it does make a weak impression. I may consider trying the full game if it goes on a very steep discount. This demo is worth trying, likely more so if you have friends you'd like to try the co-op with. ~5/10

I'm gonna recommend this one for retro platformer / arcade fans, but with a BIG caveat. This game is JANK. Very much so. I'm not just talking about clunky controls or retro mechanics, I'm talking about basic things not working such as attack animations, hitboxes not disappearing when an enemy is defeated, or hitboxes spawning too early before an attack sprite has even appeared. Weird momentum changes occurring when you get hit while dashing, and the strangeness of how dashing even works.

There's a lot of oddness to this game. I haven't finished it because I spent an hour in one of the later stages looking for a key that doesn't exist so I couldn't progress, had to start the whole stage over again because if you use one of the 3 keys to open the secret door (which I didn't even know I was using the key since they just disappear from your inventory when you approach certain walls or obstacles) the secret room doesn't contain an extra key so you get SOFT LOCKED. The fact that the stage is so damn long with 2 awful horseback riding sections and a mini-boss only to throw this soft lock at you at the end of the stage is ridiculous.

Oh maybe I should elaborate on the janky dashing. It seems to work based on some kind of timer, it basically forces your velocity to stay at this increased rate during that time, so if you get hit you will be flung backwards at that same velocity. The speed is ludicrously high compared to your normal walking speed which is painfully slow. And you often have to dash jump to cross many gaps, the timing is very strict since you need to be near the edge when pressing dash in order for you to have enough time to clear it, so you gotta press jump exactly 1 or 2 frames after pressing dash. It's not like Mega Man X where you carry your momentum into the air when dash-jumping, no once that dash timer runs out you will lose all horizontal velocity and drop like a stone.

The game also features other common jank like no variable height jumping, and you cannot drop through semi-solid platforms. Fortunately the levels are decently design and almost always give you a way to kind of walk down to platforms underneath you, but it's still unnecessarily jank, and you can't get away with calling it retro as this mechanic has existed since the late 80s.

The game is fairly easy for the first half, the stages get a bit tougher in the later half. But the bosses are an absolute joke, you can basically just burst down every boss in the game. Most of them only have 1 attack and barely move. It's really weird to see these giant well drawn boss sprites just stand around or walk slowly while repeating one attack over and over again.

Enemies aren't much better but since they come in large numbers can be a little more threatening. You are gonna take damage since there's so much coming at you in the later stages. Almost all projectile-based enemies can be easily dealt with by simply ducking and slashing at them, they always throw over your head. Flying enemies are the only ones that really give you any trouble, and those annoying flower guys that fly at you at mach speed and have a habit of spawning right on top of you.

There are some weird choices with the attacks too. Your basic sword attack is fast and getting powerups makes the range pretty good, it's actually pretty fun to use. Enemies get hit-stopped when you hit them so you can basically play it like a hack n slash, individual enemies are easy to deal with but groups of them require more careful play. There is a punch attack that thrust you forward, it's useless as you immediately take damage from whatever you punched. And a jump-kick which also is useless for combat 95% of the time, unless you are kicking a few of the flying enemies out of your way, it doesn't deal enough damage to be useful, but it does actually help some of the platforming sections feel a bit easier since it's more reliable than dash jumping.

With all those problems I just mentioned, why am I still recommending this game? Well, it's pretty entertaining. The graphics are fantastic, a truly authentic 16-bit looking game, very reminiscent of late 80's arcade classics. Large, colorful and details sprites and tilesets with parallax backgrounds. The music is also quite good, though it doesn't always fit the theme of the game, there's a lot of different inspirations in the music that are interesting to hear. The controls are consistent so despite the few movement issues, it still feels satisfying to slash everything in side and kick flying skulls in the face.

The stages take a non-linear approach where you often have to hunt for keys. Not my favorite style of level design but it's not poorly laid out here. It's kind of fun to explore the stages, killing enemies and jump kicking through the platforming. The sound effects are hilariously goofy, the player character makes really high pitch goofy sound screams all the time, odd choices for an action game but I think they were leaning into that late 80's / early 90s anime cheese here with the sounds and character designs. The dialogue is equally as cheesy as well.

So overall, it's surprisingly entertaining despite all it's flaws. And it's at a cheap price too so I'd say if you can overlook the jank, you might get a kick out of the gameplay, soundtrack and general goofy anime vibes. There's even one or two interesting ideas the game manages to have through out the journey. And looks like there's difficulty options, achievements and maybe unlockables with the hostages you can rescue so there's at least a few hours or more of content here. If you go in with low expectations you might have a cheesy good time. 6/10

I didn't really like this game much, but I'm giving it a recommendation to retro metroidvania fans as the game is competently made and has a decent amount of content. The music is mostly sub-par, with a few decent sounding tracks in there. The visuals are crisp and clean, very reminiscent of the Master System. The progression is linear as is the case with most action-adventure games, you mostly won't be getting lost as there is a fortune teller that will give you hints on what to do next.

The first 70% of the game is very easy. But after the 3rd major dungeon, difficulty does ramp up considerably. The ice area is particularly brutal, though it isn't very long. And the 4th dungeon is a little tricky to deal with at first. Some of these later areas like the sky zone are full to the brim with flying enemies that shoot projectiles, and you simply don't have the movement capabilities to dodge everything, and your short range attack doesn't handle these enemies well, so it can get a bit frustrating.

Your magic capabilities are very limited, with just a few shots and it deals little damage, so you will be relying on your very basic attacks the entire game. The lack of variable height jumping hurts the feel of the game and makes dodging even more difficult. The additional attacks you learn later on serve little purpose in combat, often getting you hurt if you try to use them. It really serves as nothing more than progression gating, and giving you a very small double jump of sorts.

That trial for getting the 3rd combat move is extremely difficult. In the later section of it with the birds you have to bounce on, I found to be WAY too challenging to complete with the game's default controls which is LEFT STICK ONLY for movement (use Steam Input to map to D-pad). The timing for these jumps and bounces and air slashes is extremely tight, one frame too late and you will get hit by a bird and drop all the way down this massive tower. It is insanely tedious, but at least it's optional.

You do get a dash ability later but you can't use your magic in that trial so good luck.

Anyway, the game is okay. It mostly felt a bit too bland and uninteresting to me, so I couldn't get deeply invested in it. The lackluster music is always a huge buzzkill for me. The graphics are serviceable but nothing impressive, slightly charming I'd say. The level design is adequate, but not exciting in anyway. Enemy design is basic, combat is very retro, so expect to get touched by large enemy hit boxes a lot that deals too much damage and knocks you back a mile.

Overall it's fine but unoriginal. If you really dig these types of games, get it on sale, it'll keep ya busy for a bit. But for everyone else, maybe skip this one. There's not really much to miss here. 5/10

Sorry pal, I can't recommend this. The biggest issue with the game is amateur game and level design. I don't mind the store-bought assets, I don't even mind the clunky controls too much. But the game is just bland, repetitive and often tedious. It's VERY bare bones. I get that it's a pretty direct clone of Castlevania 1. But man that's just not enough for a game in the 21st century, especially if you are trying to sell it.

The game looks and feels very much like a "first project" type game and likely should be freeware on some obscure indie site. But these days everyone is trying to sell their rough practice projects for cash, which I get, I did the same. But customers aren't your friends, they're not gonna feel proud of you for finishing a project. They're gonna criticize a mediocre product they purchased.

But I don't wanna just krap on the game without pointing out some details, try to be constructive of course. So I'll point out a few things here:

- Blind jumps/drops are common and often punished hard with high damage spikes.
- Bad enemy/hazard RNG can create inescapable patterns that lead to forced damage.
- Forced backtracking for keys and doors in a linear stage-based action game is awfully repetitive and serves no purpose other than to needlessly pad out the stage.
- Most enemies aren't very threatening, almost all can be mindlessly button mashed to death due to destroying their projectiles immediately.
- Lack of (Down+Jump) to pass through semi-solids is a weird and clunky decision.
- Using the same enemies for the entire game makes the whole journey feel bland and repetitive, while a few do get introduced in later stages, the same skeletons, zombies, mages, bats and flaming skulls appearing in every single stage. Nothing really differentiates the stages thematically at all which results in a very forgettable experience.
- The slow attack recovery and slow movement results in bad player feel and a reduction in player agency, it forces a requirement to play very cautiously during boss fights as trying to go for a 2nd hit will lock you in place and guarantee you get hit by the boss's attack even before they have started their attack animation.
- Some boss attacks (especially the plant boss) has too much RNG which can result in patterns of forced damage. Some runs are super easy due to this while others will destroy you in 30 seconds.

Those are the biggest issues I had with the game. Well that and the TERRIBLE music. Seriously, who made the music? It's not only boring but sounds awful and bland. I had to mute it entirely. And that's a major sin against Castlevania if you ask me. If the game had a great soundtrack, it would've painted the gameplay in a much more positive light, but with bad music it's like the flaws were amplified.

Lastly, the game is quite short. Can be beaten in about 90 minutes. If you run out of lives you are kicked back to the start of a stage which is kind of annoying, but there's a handful of lives you seem to acquire somehow as you play through a stage so I didn't find myself running out of lives often. Also there's some kind of currency in the game but I have no idea what it does, never seem to be usable anywhere.

The difficulty isn't very high so it's not a particularly challenging game but it does tend to feel more frustrating than it probably should, due to the above issues I mentioned. I didn't have much trouble getting to the final boss, but I didn't finish the boss as the fight goes on quite a while with very limited player health, after losing my lives and having to start that long backtracky stage again, I called it quits.

It's not complete garbage but it's really not impressive or enjoyable in anyway. 4/10

Wallachia is a rare hidden gem if you ask me. It actually understands what made the classics so great and timeless. It's a true arcade-inspired action platformer. The game is fairly short and can be beaten in a single session but it's got some extra content and is designed for mastery which if you want to extend the play time a bit further is worth putting in the effort to 100% the game. I haven't finished Hard mode yet but I found Normal mode to be a fair challenge.

It's got an old school lives system here so it is a bit punishing when you game over and are sent back to the beginning of a stage, but the stages are fairly short so it didn't really bother me until Stage 7 which has it's checkpoints pushed towards the end of the stage, but I mastered that whole stage in about 15 minutes anyway. Beating it hitless lol. You also lose powerups if you get hit a single time, but keeping them makes you feel like a total bad @$$ and as you learn the stage layouts and enemy behaviors, you'll be completing stages almost hitless pretty quickly if you got moderate skill.

The graphics and artstyle is incredible, really reminiscent of early 90's arcade hits. Rare to see for indie games. The sprites are huge, which is great for detail but it does lead to one of the two major frustration points of this game: Large hit boxes and very low invincibility frames after getting hit. This makes dodging quite a bit harder, and recovery difficult as you can easily find yourself losing your entire health bar from one mistake. It's especially rough on some of the bosses, they have massive hit boxes and often give you very little room to avoid them, especially on Hard mode.

Those parts would've been nice to see smoothed out but if you are used to that era of arcade games and hardcore console games than these issues are easier to forgive. The game is a lot of fun most of the time though.

The soundtrack is pretty great. It's got that CD-quality to it and fits the stages well. A good handful of them are quite memorable and catchy too. It's fitting for a game clearly inspired by Castlevania, though it's not quite at that caliber.

Overall it's a great little game for a decent price. Get it on sale if it's a bit too steep at full price. The game will best be enjoyed by retro gaming fans and hardcore arcade fanatics. For casuals it'll be a bit frustrating unless you are actually willing to LEARN how to play games. There is an easy mode, but I didn't bother with it. Normal felt alright, I died a good chunk of times on some stages especially early on, but as i got familiar with the controls and the game's design habits, I quickly learned how to deal with the threats. It's more of a shooter than a platformer, so like any good shooter, you should ALWAYS BE SHOOTIN'.

8/10

Odallus is a game I should love. It's inspired by my favorite games of all time and looks the part. But unfortunately I found the game to be frustrating and tedious most of the time. Giving it an out-right not-recommended isn't my intention but alas, that's all Steam allows us to give. If possible I'd give it a "mixed" score because despite it's short-comings (of which there are many) I still managed to make it through the game and stayed fairly invested. BUT I am pretty much the prime audience for this sort of game. To the average gamer, I would NOT recommend this game for the following 3 reasons:

1 - The game is jank. Numerous bugs, clunky physics and unfriendly design decisions lead to a frustrating gameplay experience. Firstly, the bugs are aplenty. Visual glitches, collision pop-ins, even freezes I all encountered. But nothing was game breaking and it never crashed once. The worst bug I got was when respawning I was stuck in the floor and couldn't move. I had to quit the stage and come back in - losing progress in the process. When you die, the screen often flashes a few times showing a frame from where you died and where you will respawn, this process looks very janky and indicates that the engine is barely holding it together. You will often spawn in the ground but the game usually pushes you up out of it, sometimes it doesn't. Also I had a funny bug where I died during a boss fight, respawned and re-entered the boss room only for the boss to not reset, it was still attacking as if I was there all along, but it was partially frozen and the camera wouldn't move so I had to leave and come back.

As for the physics and or design decisions, the biggest annoyance to me was the inconsistent dash-jumping. Sometimes you have full air control, other times you don't. I couldn't figure out why this occurs, it appears random. What I mean by this is that sometimes you can change direction in the air during a dash jump and other times you cannot. This leads to frustrating platforming and cheap deaths.

2 - Combat is rough. Your main attack is SLOW, with long recovery time. Enemies do NOT react to you hitting them, this means no knockback or stun for them. This prevents you from walking up and attacking an enemy, they will just bulldoze right through you. As you can imagine, this makes combat slow as you have to play very cautiously, only dipping in to attack at the perfect opportunity. That is if you want to bother with killing enemies at all. I ran from most of them as there is little incentive to kill them, especially since they respawn as soon as they re-enter the view (respawning infinitely). You do get some ranged attacks in the form of consumable items you have to BUY with money monsters drop. These help take care of annoying enemies and bosses at a distance, can even trivialize some, but for some odd reason you can't use these items while crouching.

If you rely on them a lot you will run out of them quickly and will have to grind for money to restock. This is a considerable problem with boss balance. Since you may use all your items during 1 boss attempt, die and then respawn with nothing. Your options are to grind for money so you can buy more (where the price continues to increase every time you make a purchase) or retry the boss at a disadvantage. Very annoying. Fortunately most of the bosses aren't that challenging. They have a small set of moves and don't really react much to the player, so once you learn their patterns, they aren't too bad to deal with. But the fights are extremely tedious like much of this game!

The reason being, most of the bosses feature a really annoying design trope, you cannot hurt them until they reveal their weakspot! Often this is totally random, or only occurs after a long sequence of patterns. This really inflates the play time and pads out fights. And for some fights this does result in frequent deaths due to the terrible ICE physics.

3 - Obtuse Design nearly ruins this game. Progression is linear despite it looking like a kind of open non-linear game. And progression isn't steamlined at all, many of the REQUIRED ability upgrades are hidden in secret areas and you'll need to find them in a specific order by going back to previous stages, eventually gaining access to the alternate stages and defeating every hidden boss to get to the final stage. It's often cryptic and there's no map. Though the game doesn't claim to be a metroidvania, it's designed MUCH like one. So much so that it leaves me confused as to why they took the stage-based approach if they wanted you to constantly have to go back to previous areas to access alternate paths and gain new abilities to progress.

And the stages are HUGE. A lot of the areas look very similar so it can be easy to get a bit lost. You do unlock shortcuts which is nice but that also begs the question, why have the lives system? Once you open up the shortcuts, it's just a mild annoyance to run out of lives and have to restart the stage. But before you open the shortcuts, you can be sent pretty far back. Some stages will save your "puzzle/progression" progress though so it often isn't too bad of a reset.

The worst part of the design for me was the level design. 25% of the game is covered in ice, so you will be slipping and sliding all over the place while getting wrecked by icicles, frost breath, and 2 of the most frustrating bosses in the game, oh and there's wind blowing you around at the same time. Have fun.

Another 25% of the game is under water, maybe even more actually since it seems almost every stage has water. The water physics isn't too bad but it slows you down even more than your already slow default movement. There's also lots of flowing water ontop of platforms that act like conveyor belts. So you are getting blown around and pushed around constantly in this game.

Then there is the most tedious part I experienced. I mentioned how cryptic finding the required items can be, well I made it through 8/9ths of the game without finding a single weapon or armor upgrade. And I only found 3 of the sub-weapons. By the later stages, enemies were taking 8 hits to kill and dealing massive damage to me and my 5 hearts. The later bosses took me ages to kill, like 5 minutes of fighting, made worse by the fact I had to wait around for them to reveal their weakspot before I could even deal ANY damage. And there's no health bar displayed so I had no idea how much progress i was even making.

Having weapons that just increase damage and nothing more in a game that otherwise has no RPG mechanics is just a plain out dumb idea. Now hiding those in obscure locations is even dumber. This serves no damn purpose other than to punish players for not finding all the secrets. That's not how exploration rewards are supposed to function. You shouldn't be hiding basic necessities in secret locations. And i found over 60% of the secrets, most are just chests with money or a half heart container. No weapons to be found.

When I got to the final dungeon I couldn't even get through the forced enemy fight area because it was taking like 20 hits to kill these guys. I finally had to look up a guide to get the sword upgrade and armor upgrade before continuing. And boy it does make a big difference. Was destroying those knights way faster.

Anyway this has gone on long enough. So overall, I don't recommend this game for the average action platformer / metroidvania fan. It is WAY too frustrating, often employs anti-fun design and mechanics that punish you instead of rewarding you. Most people are gonna ragequit this game for the reasons listed above. But, to a small niche of retro gamers who grew up with GnG, CV, Contra, etc. You might still get a little enjoyment out of this, in a sick masochistic way. I managed to get through 99% of it, gave up on the final boss. Couldn't stand the enemies that block your attacks infinitely except if you attack them from behind.

Score? Maybe a 55/100

I really wanted to love this game, it's Castlevania inspired, it's a sequel to a great game, it's got local co-op, great art style, decent music, big bosses, so what happened?

I'll tell you what. Bad game design and total lack of restraint from the director. This game throws everything at you plus the kitchen sink. 7 playable characters, many with broken abilities that trivialize much of the game, but if you don't use them the game is so poorly designed you'll never survive without it. Rooms are filled to the brim with fast moving enemies that hit hard as trucks. Pitfalls everywhere, icy platforms, moving platforms, low gravity, a ton of ♥♥♥♥♥ that doesn't belong in a stiffly controlled retro platformer. You can't dodge in this game on account of how slow and stiff you are, your jumping is rigid with a fixed arc, this works in classicvania because the levels and challenges were designed around those restrictions. That's not the case here. You just get bounced around and eventually fall in a pit before you can really do anything.

That includes some of the bosses too. If it weren't for cheese tactics, they'd be impossible to kill without simply trading hits. There are still some attacks I don't know how to avoid taking damage. But as mentioned before, some sub-weapons are broken and you can melt bosses quickly before you run out of health.

The game is a sloppy chaotic mess. And I suppose exploiting the poorly balanced abilities is the intended strat, and that's a shame. The worst part of the game is that when one character dies it kicks you all the way back to a checkpoint, even during boss fights. This is ridiculously stupid and leads to pace-breaking frustration for no reason whatsoever. When you are sent back to the checkpoint all your characters will have less health, so you basically gotta burn a life just to respawn with full health and attempt the boss again.

It's ironic they call the casual mode casual when it doesn't do anything to reduce difficulty, it just gives you infinite lives which you're gonna need. And reduces knock back which is also important given the stages and swarm of enemies everywhere.

Clearly they "balanced" the game around the co-op with 7 characters to swap between and abuse their broken mechanics. They were probably hoping for a "co-op chaos" kind of fun, but let's face the reality, most of us are not convincing anyway to play this game with us. Solo play is how most will experience the game and as it stands it is so poorly designed for solo play, which is why I give it a full blown DO NOT RECOMMEND.

There are better classicvania style games out there. Check out Infernax, it's pretty fun and quite faithful to the classics.

This is a great retro-inspired metroidvania that borrows a lot from Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2. But does so fairly competently and with a little extra flavor. The morality system and side quests were pretty cool, but the strictness and crypticness of it does make for a lot of frustration when you find out your playthrough is cut short because you didn't do things perfectly to how the game's invisible metrics wanted you to.

The music and graphics are great, I loved the gorey details and the impact of the combat. Though it did feel a little lacking in combat options. I was surprised to NOT see any ranged attacks for the main character. The spells didn't really make up for it since they don't really have much combat use.

What I appreciate most about the game is the classic difficulty mode and the lives system, supported by the instant death pits (even if a few cases of them were a bit frustrating). It takes balls to do that these days it seems and in a metroidvania its very rare to see dangerous terrain like this. So i really enjoyed that aspect. The game actually has some fairly challenging platforming sections.

But this does lead me to my biggest complain, the game is still pretty damn easy. It suffers from the curse of the modern indie metroidvania - pathetically simple and easy enemies. Not only that but the game REALLY loves to reuse enemies FOR THE ENTIRE GAME. So get comfortable killing the same small pool of enemies for 7 hours. The game doesn't technically have low enemy variety, it just chooses to use the same enemies the entire time, only the dungeons feature unique enemies, and for the most part they are reskins with slightly tougher behavior. This is a shame and was a big disappointment.

This problem persists with the bosses as well. I beat every single boss in the game except one on my first try. That shouldn't happen for a retro-inspired platformer. They were too simple, far too generous with hitboxes and timings, and had lengthy recovery between attacks, with the one exception (where i died due to falling in an instant death pit during the boss fight). This to me is the biggest issue I have with the game and it makes playing through the game again a bit less exciting. (a hard mode would have been nice, but would have required more craftsmanship in enemy design)

I am aware there is a lot of hidden content due to the different endings you can get and some unlockable stuff but as I mentioned in my opening statement, it's VERY cryptic. The morality system is completely hidden and the choices you are given during the game have ambiguous outcomes. In order to get the true ending with the true final boss you have to have made the 100% perfect choice every single time, which you simply won't do without a guide.

Lastly I do want to mention the lack of variable-height jumping is a bit of a problem. It will get you killed and it does make the platforming sections significantly more annoying and difficult than it really has to be. it also feels bad in combat since the game puts flying enemies EVERYWHERE, you will have to do this awkward high jump every single time to hit an enemy that's slightly above you, timing your attack just right to actually hit them. Luckily they did give us full air control, which makes the lack of variable-height so strange. It's like half modern half retro. Better to pick one and commit the game's design to it then have this kind of clunky jumping physics for a modern metroidvania.

Overall i do recommend playing this, but get it on sale because prices for short indie games have sky rocketed as of writing this. And it's getting out of hand when 3-6 hour long campaigns for 8-bit games is costing $25+ dollars now. The game is fun and will keep you invested till the end which is also quite rare these days. But it has it's flaws and sadly doesn't live up to what could have been it's full potential due to a few significant issues as listed above.