Angel's Gear

I found Angel's Gear to be a very enjoyable experience. Smooth gameplay, stunning pixel art and biomes, and striking sound effects. Short and sweet as far as length goes (I'd say beatable in roughly 3-4 hours of casual play). And in that short time I was endeared to the cast and caught up in the story. Definitely worth the play.

Short and sweet. It's rough around the edges in terms of platforming and some questionable instakills from the enemies but overall fun. The art direction is dope I do wish there was more to the soundtrack to really bring home the atmosphere.

It is a fairly nice action game, though I hesitate to use the term Metroidvania to describe it. On the one hand, there's not much in the way of exploration, merely sidepaths that contain either a health upgrade, an ammo upgrade, a new shot type (of which there are two plus the default and upgrades for the homing and base shot), or a sidequest item. The upgrades aren't that important outside of combat with one major plot-relevant exception, and it isn't until halfway through the game you have options to take on different objectives. On the other hand, I do appreciate not needing to shoot every little crack and run against every wall for destructable blocks or hidden walls for tiny incremental upgrades, and the combat is satisfying enough to make up for it as the upgrades you do get matter more (a single health up adds a whole extra hit from your base of three, making your healing charges get more value, ammo lets you keep firing longer before needing to resort to punching the ♥♥♥♥ out of things, etc). Plot wise, I feel the game was a bit too breakneck for its own good. The intro has us listen to two soldiers, a patriotic one and a cowardly one (which I imagine our hero is the latter) and a CO, which never come back thanks to the apocalypse, and a couple of antagonists set up early on before getting killed quickly in their subsequent boss fight, the third of three appearances relatively close together. Also I swear the difficulty spike in one of the last areas was meant to ensure you'd go over the 2 hour limit for refunds (good thing the game's pretty good regardless). Graphics are the game's highlight, and I LOVE the game's H.R. Giger aesthetic, making the characters, enemies, and even backgrounds memorable, even with a couple of exceptions (wall vaginas were pretty hilarious for how blatant it was). All in all, I highly recommend playing through the game.