An Imp? A Fiend!

It really bothers me that this game's controls are so tight and refined, but the rest of it feels so slapdash. I'd compare this game's platforming pretty favorably to Super Meat Boy and They Bleed Pixels, but its Metroidvania-style world layout involves a lot of backtracking for keys and doors, and not the "fun" kind. There are no power-ups or abilities, no obstacles to overcome other than platforming skills, and the bosses are either laughably simple or aggravatingly erratic. I'm complaining a lot for a $2 game, but the lost potential here is killing me. If this game is essentially a proof-of-concept for the inevitable, fleshed-out sequel, I'd throw my money at it with reckless abandon. The whole thing SCREAMS Metroidvania, but lacks all of the elements that make those games fun. It's like the dev was going to make a full game, spent 90% of the time on the controls and combat to make them shine like a mirror, and then stopped after designing a few dozen jumping puzzles. Argh, this is KILLING me. PLEASE make a full sequel!

[h1] Feels repetitive and shallow. [/h1]

Fun little game definitely worth the cheap price. Some levels can be a little tricky others can be very very similar to one another. I think its a good little game. 7/10 Buy it.

The controls are smooth and refined, but the game does not adjust to my gameplay style. You need to find keys and go back and fourth to do it, and I don't know...

I have to give it to the developer, they made an eye-catching name for this game. When I saw it was called, "An Imp? A Fiend!" then I was going, "Okay, I have to see what this is about." I am a huge Metroidvania fan, so hearing it had those elements was enough to convince me to get it. I traded a game I had no interest in for this one, and I just blindstreamed it for some friends over the past few days. Long story short: fun game with a lot of flaws. Long story long: read below. Let's start with my favorite part about An Imp? A Fiend! The controls are glorious. You can double jump, dash on the ground or in midair, and attacking lets you "hover" if you keep hitting the button. This makes your character (who has no name as far as I know) feel light as air, yet completely responsive to your inputs. It was so enjoyable to run through the areas simply because of how smooth and reliable your protagonist controls. Major props here. Now for some splits. One thing I find interesting is that there are no power-ups at all. Five areas exist, each with a dungeon, and you can tackle them in any order. Sure, I would call some more difficult than others, especially ones with tricky platforming sections. But you never get more than three hearts for life, and you never get any kind of items besides keys. This means you have complete freedom on where you want to go, and in some ways, I like this subversion to the genre. Then we come across a serious flaw. This game has no maps. None. You had better hope you remember which generic path leads to which generic town, because it is very easy to get turned around if you don't. A lot of tunnels and corridors look the same, to the point that I sometimes wondered if I had somehow looped to go back the way I came from. There are no warp points, which also sucks because these rooms get tedious. You can only stay excited about spike-filled rooms that are easy to wall-jump around for so long. Oooh, what's that, a third screen with a wimpy dragon, rabbit thing, and annoying bird? How dangerous... no, the word I want is unnecessary. Speaking of which, let's talk about the game's difficulty. I found some platforming rooms to be challenging, and most of the time, I felt it was my fault that I died rather than the game being cheap on me. That's a good thing. I will also note that you respawn in the same room that you die in. I personally like this, because there's nothing as dull as running back from a checkpoint to die in the exact same way as before. Some people might not like that, but I do, so there's that. What is pretty lousy is the bosses. The bosses are absurdly easy and stupidly tedious. They all have very basic patterns that are jokes to get around. But since they have tons of HP, you are going to be wailing on them for a long time with pretty much no chance of you dying if you can play platformers better than a mushroom could. I personally would not want insanely difficult bosses, but there's pretty much no satisfaction to creaming these losers. Oh, and one other complaint I have? Death by juggling. You do not get much in the way of invincibility frames. If you land on spikes or a sawblade wrong (and there are a LOT of sawblades, fiends must get them in bulk at HellCo), you will get flung up just enough to land on them again, and again, and then probably die. It didn't happen to the point that I wanted to toss my controller or anything, but it was annoying when it came up. So, on a complete change of topic, how about the music? It's pretty average. The town theme is nice, the dungeon theme is okay, the outdoor sections are shrug-worthy, and the boss theme is so bland it makes crickets chirping sound like fine opera. The graphics are not bad. I could tell what things were most of the time, barring bizarre monsters. Your sprite is kind of cute. Kind of. I still don't know if this guy is really a kid or not, because he looks like an adult from his sprite. Oh well. I did not go into this game expecting a lot of plot. You know what I got? A fair amount of plot... that was completely nonsensical. One of my friends commented that it made less sense than Evangelion, and frankly, I agree with him. It's so bad that it's actually pretty funny. I had a great time laughing about some of the conversations that took place. That being said, the grammar could use some work. "Lets" and "Let's" are two different things, but that error cropped up a ton. At least the spelling seemed fairly good, though it didn't help decipher the jargon that was the "plot." This game has no trading cards. Boo hoo for those who get games just for cards. I personally don't care. Heck, the game's so short that most people probably wouldn't naturally get them all anyway. No achievements either, but I don't really think they're necessary, either. I guess some generic ones could be added for beating dungeons and the game. I also don't see a reason that they're needed. No complaints here about them not being present. All in all, there are a lot of problems in An Imp? A Fiend! That doesn't change the fact that I really liked playing it. The controls just make this game, and there are so few games I will say that about. It was the right length in my mind, with three hours or so meaning it is entertaining for a while, but does not overstay its welcome. If you can get it in a bundle or for cheap, go for it. Otherwise, I'd wait, since it's really nowhere near perfect. Do give it a try if you like the genre, at the very least.

For a dollar, this game is worth it. A map function would have been nice (if there was one I never found it). The gameplay was decently fast and the controls were tight. Soundtrack was quite wubbly in a generally pleasant way, though a few of the loops did get to me after a while.

As there is no neutral option at recommendation, I picked negative - better for you to keep your money. An Imp? A Fiend! is a precision platformer / adventure game that just doesn't really make it (Imagine an easier Super Meat Boy that plays in a metroidvania game's map, without the metroidvania elements. It has a lot of promising things in it, but overall lack in game design makes it an unpleasant experience in many parts. Maybe to balance out the problematic map design, the player has 3 hearts, a damage / spike takes down half, and some enemies drop a whole one, and if you'd die, you respawn in the same room (screen) The most problematic thing is the hit-recoil. Get hit, and the character will jump up - if a flying enemy descended onto you, you jump up into it, damaging yourself again. Same with wall-mounted spikewalls, a wrong jump can effectively cause a stunlock that takes more than half of max health. With the forgiving respawn system, the needlessly annoying (but halting only in very few cases) knockback the game is STILL easy, the jumping/traversing the map provides some variety but the enemies are same, and only the "dungeon" parts have some challenging moments, but because of the mentioned stunlock-effect they are less fun as they could be. All in all: the game works nicely, except from one particularly weak aspect that's still solvable. If you want to play the game I wouldn't talk you our of it, but neither would I convince you to play it. It's really a truly neutral experience.

A big improvement over the previous game, Shin Samurai Jazz, in basically every respect, but the game itself (level design, specifically). What stroke me first was how good the game felt to play! The controls are very tight, and both the movement and combat feel very nice! The animation go much better with the moves, and the combat is much clearer in regards to your range and how enemies are affected by the attacks. The second thing that stroke me, on the negative side, was how the game had 20-30 rooms of meaningless combat/platforming until anything even remotely like an objective was given to the player. And even then, it was very vague. It was filler, like the previous one. And the worst was to come later... It appears that Blaze Epic likes making the same game over and over again. Usually, that's a bad thing. In this case, things are improving, so it could be worse! You have the same moveset: double jump, dash, attack. These moves serve both for combat and platforming, which is nice. The biggest problem with the platforming (aside from how much of it is filler) is that there are spikes in every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wall. But the infuriating thing are some chandeliers that throw fire at you. In the middle of the platforming sections, of course. And they're indestructible. And the worst thing about them is their random firing time. It makes it impossible to predict when they're going to shoot, so you're just have to pray that they shoot at a convenient time, in the middle to this very precise platforming you have to do... Later on there's also 1-hit kill lava (for barely touching it, too), which wasn't satisfying at all - the reason being that you have spikes above you, lava below, and a very, very tiny margin for error. Some rooms get frustrating, but it could have been worse. The game is more or less (mostly less) a metroidvania, in the sense that you have a full map to explore as you feel like. It's a very bad metroivania, though. You have all the abilities from the start. Which makes the exploration rather redundant, doesn't it? Well, too bad. The map is fairly large, and it's all absolute filler. There isn't a story to speak of. It tries to give you hints of a story, but there is none, since the end [spoiler] is simply a tension and not-release deal, because the character dies before revealing the big secret [/spoiler]. This could be interesting, but not in this case. It was just a poor excuse for not having a story. I mentioned about Shin Samurai Jazz that the level design was just about getting keys to unlock doors to unlock other doors, right? Well, it's exactly the same here, if not worse. Worse, because sometimes you have to go to the extremes of each area to open the door you wanted from the beginning, going back and forth, accomplishing absolutely nothing. Same rooms, same enemies, same abilties, etc. etc. Each area seems different, but it's purely its coating, because every enemy and platforming ends up virtually the same. The only design to speak of are the Bosses, but even them have a single pattern, and not a very interesting one in any of the cases. It's almost disrespectful to design levels like this, as silly as this sounds. It's literally about making you go back and forth to unlock doors, filling your time until it's worth any money (because people really like talking about time/money in videogames....). Even though the controls are pretty good, the game ends up being worthless, because it has no purpose, and so makes the player wander aimlessly back and forth, collecting keys and destroying crystals for no reason... Because there was some improvement, I'm still hopefull about Blaze Epic's games (Nil Ninjahtic actually looks really good), but it will decline soon, if every game is the same, with the grand purpose of unlocking door and lead into other doors, that lead...

I liked the pixel art but to be honest this is a super boring platformer.

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