Aces Wild: Manic Brawling Action!

[h1]SOLID PLATFORM BRAWLER, BUT WITH SOME WEIRD DESIGN HICCUPS[/h1] I saw this indie a couple months back and ended up getting it [i]explicitly[/i] for the purpose of playing it with a friend. Definitely worth it, honestly. It's basically a platform fighter kind of ala Smash, just... as an actual beat'em'up instead of a "versus" fighter or whatever. Think Subspace except that's the whole game. You get a jump, walljumps and a directional dash for mobility. You have a [b]Wild[/b] meter that charges up from hitting enemies, and you can burn that meter to extend/"hold" the dash into fully-controllable flight. You have light and "crash" attacks. Light attacks are your standard combo that you mash the button to keep doing, while Crash attacks consume Wild meter (they can be charged to use even more meter for even MORE power), and are directional like in Smash Bros (neutral, up, down, and side moves depending on what you're holding before you press the crash button). Light attacks also [I]stop your fall[/i], and you can direct yourself mid-combo long as you keep it going, which lets you basically "carry" enemies around in the air while hitting them with your combo to wherever you find most convenient. You can probably tell from everything I'm saying but this is a very [b]air-combo-centric[/b] game. You also have a directional [i]dodge[/i], again, sort of like Smash, which gives you iframes and lets you go through enemy attacks. Though unlike that game, here you can chain that dodge into a [b]counterattack[/b], which has different properties depending on what character you're playing as. One of them counters with a 360 spray of projectiles, while another one starts doing a really fast controllable slide that lets you deal damage whil egetting out of theway. The visuals are hand-drawn in what seems to be vector graphics, like the best you could get out of an old Flash game (and I'm saying this in the best sense of the term). And the music is [b]GREAT[/b]. Genuinely. EXTREMELY energetic electronic chiptune stuff. Not every song is [i]equally[/i] great but at [i]least[/i] the main theme is guaranteed to stick with you; [b]really[/b] strong melodies here. Honestly my gripes with the game come towards the end. [i]Gripe[/i] really, singular. I love the gameplay, I love the music, the story is basically nothing special but it's not the focus, it's a REALLY exhilarating game to play. ...But the balancing gets really up its own ass at points, and especially towards the end. The stage 4 boss is [i]unbearably[/i] annoying, with super armor, constant lingering hitboxes, projectiles everywhere, and eventually just [i]burning the entire ground[/i] to force you to spend the rest of the fight in the air. The stage 5 boss [i]also[/i] has super armor and spams a neverending swarm of both projectile drones and drones with an electric aura around them, that you can ONLY hit with attacks that have long enough hitboxes to avoid touching them with your main body as you hit them. The final boss has a pretty cool and relatively easy-to-figure-out pattern, but will randomly counter out of your combos with an unavoidable [i]instant[/i] explosion. Also super armor. The boss rush BEFORE the final boss is just... not balanced in the slightest. They start throwing you the bosses of previous stages, [i]multiple at a time[/i]. There's no changes or balancing or attacking-by-turns to balance it out, they just slap down two bosses from different stages at once and go [i]"good luck LMAO"[/i]. Really, my biggest gripe with the game is the sheer [b]amount[/b] of superarmor bosses and even some stronger basic enemies get. I can understand giving strong enemies some damage resistance so you don't just stunlock them to death, but it takes SO long to chip away at their armor until it finally breaks and you're able to combo them. And you have to spend that whole time getting a few light hits in, then immediately dodging through their attacks before they destroy you, since you're not putting them in any kind of hitstun and they'll keep attacking while you're trying to get some chip damage in. That boss rush at the end is really just the culmination of all my balancing gripes I'm mentioning here. I [b]genuinely[/b] like this game a lot but I really wish they spent more time balancing that stuff out. Because again, the gameplay's great, the visuals are nostalgic to the old Flash era, the music's also great, but by the second half of the game their idea of "difficulty" just becomes spamming super armor on everything so it takes AGES to kill anything, with all the dodging you end up having to do (and counterattacks dealing little more than chip damage). I'm still recommending it, just keep in mind that it's GOING to get annoying towards the end. You can always lower the difficulty, but the weirdly high amount of super armor on enemies is still going to be there.