A nice retro romp with an interesting visual presentation.
PROS:
- I don't much know why, but I love the player character animation. He's just so prancy and fancy, lol.
- The world is large and takes advantage of the full set of upgrade skills so you really feel the power curve and get to put it to practice as a player.
- Boss fights were well imagined and a nice change of pace from the regular platforming gameplay.
CRITIQUE:
- Enemies tend to hide just around corners where they're not in the "visibility cone" of the player and it's easy to feel cheap-shot when you're in a flow state going around corners and get bumped by a bug just waiting there.
- Quality of Life notes on the boss fights ...
- Boss 1 (Missile Conveyers): There's a lot of RNG with the movement of the platforms that makes actually lining up hits feel too random and consequently there's a lot of just waiting for the thing to line up rather than the feeling of taking direct action against the boss.
- Boss 2 (Spinning Blades): The boss moves very fast and consequently gets really punishing if they do run into you since you almost can't get out of the way before being chain-hit 5 times. If he just hit you once and then went through your collision it wouldn't be as much insult to injury. I also attempted to climb the platforms on the side to missile them after they had perched up top but was blocked by the platforms on the side, which made me sad-face a bit because I thought I'd figured something out.
- Boss 3 (The Swarm): Not sure if this is officially a boss, but the music did change. It's very skippable if you just dash through them so I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
- It was a bit easy to feel lost at a couple of points so some form of either regularly available mini-map on the HUD or even just landmarking some interesting visual pieces to let players learn the world layout better would help with that.