Crystal Catacombs

This game had promise, but the way jump works ruins the entire experience. You have zero control over your character in mid-air. Despite many people complaining about this, the dev remained stubborn and decided to keep it that way. If that were changed, it might be a fun game, but that won't ever happen. Just play Vagante or Catacomb Kids instead.

Jumping and combat in this game is as responsive as a blind person in a dodgeball tournament.

Extremely buggy. It runs sluggish even for a game whose highest resolution is 720. But that doesn't really bother me as much as how impossible it is to play. I first tried playing with a USB controller, and immediately noticed when binding my buttons that left and right in the menus don't work. They don't work with my keyboard or with a gamepad. I exited to the main game to see if I could move left or right at all, and I couldn't. Then I messed around in the menus and came back and I could. But that's how the bugs in this game are. I eventually figured out that hitting the left and right arrow keys AT THE SAME TIME let you move the menu cursor over so that you could access the full menus. Then I finally started playing the game. I made it all the way to level 3 of the first area before I started getting suspicious that I wasn't leveling up. I didn't know what the green bar was under the health bar because the game is devoid of tutorials or a manual. While mashing buttons I froze the game by hitting the map button. But I also noticed that I leveled up. After mashing buttons again hoping that the game wasn't frozen I realized that hitting the map button moved the game forward by one frame each time. So I rapidly started smacking the button until I was in the map menu, then started doing it again until I was back in the game. I kept playing and sure enough, when my experience bar maxed out again it just stayed full and I didn't level up. So I hit the map button again and just like the first time I leveled up by going to the map screen. But after I got back in the game I looked in the inventory menu and saw that I was still level 2. The next time I leveled up I correctly went up a level. So I started to wonder if all of these problems might be from the controller I was using, so I whipped out my Steam controller. I reset my buttons, and started playing. Leveling up worked perfectly and besides not having a good d-pad, at least the game was somewhat functional -- until I died the first time. Then jump no longer jumped. B was now the jump button instead of A, and Y was now the attack button instead of X. I went to the bindings menu and everything looked normal, but I reset the bindings to the default anyway (by going to the keyboard and hitting left and right at the same time since you can't do that on a gamepad.) Thank sweet Jesus this fixed it -- until the next time I died. 4 deaths and 4 binding resets later, you could say I'm... frustrated. On top of everything the game just isn't that good. Leveling up isn't satisfying because you don't immediately see any effects of doing so. I think that your weapon has an experience bar, but I never got it to the second level, even after getting to the end of the 3rd level. You have a mana bar, but I never picked up anything that used it, and I picked up at least 4 powerups. I also never got a ranged weapon which made some big enemies almost impossible to kill without getting your health bar destroyed. Don't get me started on the ice level with the most slippery ice you've ever experienced. It's some mystical ice that defies the laws of physics and you never stop sliding. And by reading the reviews I found out that this game was MORE buggy before, and that the devs haven't updated it in a long time. Also, the soundtrack IS good, but there's only one track per area (not level, AREA) so in a game where you will be dying constantly you can look forward to hearing the same track for a long, long time.

I was really starting to love the game but the Snow/Ice level changed all that. First, my computer is a potato, I'll admit that, but the snow effect coupled with all the enemies made my framerate drop like crazy, I'm talking between 10 and 2 fps. My computer is a potato because I enjoy retro-style games that require little power, and I buy retro-style-games because they can run on my potato... This is very dissapointing. I managed to kill the problematic enemies and continue my game but then I found a game breaking glitch. When using a teleporter, if the character isn't locked in the middle of it, the player loses all control (not even able to open the menu) and waiting for the destroyer doesn't even fix it as they just hover on top of the character. My guess is that the character gets locked in the teleporter by removing all control from the player for an instant. There is ice physics on the teleporter, meanning you activate the teleporter, lose all control, the character slides off the teleporter, game soft locks. I wish the dev would make a quick patch (or someone would make a fan pach) because this game had a lot of potential.

What an odd game. Beautiful, but buggy. Clever, but a bit confused. The game is a difficult platformer with inventory and limited character development, and procedurally generated dungeons. It has many small bugs (on Linux, anyway) but only very occasionally did they interrupt the game. Crystal Catacombs does a great job of setting a particular, claustrophobic mood. Lovecraftian monsters, an intentionally tight field of vision (made more-so by darkness), and random maps populated by both easy and brutally difficult enemies all add to this vague sense of panic. The music, which I adore, is also unusual (is it modal? Is that right?) and adds to the experience. The beautiful pixel art is the main attraction, but the graphics are not nearly as retro as the gameplay. That's neither an insult nor a compliment. While it's a platformer, the level design and advancement are a lot more true to the spirit of Rogue than glut of roguelike and roguelite cousins. Death is common, especially at first, and sometimes can seem unfair or arbitrary. Again, not really a insult or a compliment, but if you're approaching this with a strictly modern sensibility, I have a feeling you're going to be frustrated. And yes, the controls are difficult. Perhaps slighty more difficult than other similar retro games, but I didn't find them dramatically so, and I don't really think this is necessarily a bad thing. The game is very obviously designed to be difficult. There are a handful of game-mechanic innovations I haven't seen anywhere else, also. As an example, the use of exploding... flower-petals? I don't know that they are supposed to be, but they slowly drift down the screen on later levels, and do a fair amount of damage when hit. Usually easy to avoid, they sometimes make otherwise simple encounters more difficult, and provide an added source of urgency. This is either genius or criminally unpleasant, depending on your expectations. I go with the former, but it's a matter of taste. Everything about this game feels like it was a labor of love. It has flaws, and many debatable aspects, but it's definitely a work of art.

I think this is the first negative review I've made. TL;DR you play as some chameleon-eyed ass mother ♥♥♥♥♥♥ who can't jump right and is really bad at finding cool things. It's been said by basically everyone; the map design and controls combine to make an experience that is very difficult to enjoy. But none of the reviews I read really went into detail about why the controls fail. The original Castlevania was even more static than this, but it was fine because the enemies were also very rigid in their movement and attack patterns. In this game, you're expected to be making wall jumps and avoid flying enemies and projectiles that can move at any angle while still being stuck with very stiff movement. In short, the enemy and level design are in direct conflict with the fundamentals of how the game plays. Half the time you'll engage with an enemy, but have nowhere to jump because the hallways are all too short, and no way to back off quickly enough to avoid whatever it's probably shooting at you, and with the starting sword, you have be just about inside of an enemy to hit it. I found a shield once, but it had a durability bar that didn't recharge, and you couldn't move while using it, rendering it just about useless. The shield was also the only thing I found during my playtime besides health potions, so I can't even speak for any cool powerups to be found. The problem with the platforming is that your jump momentum remains constant, even if you let go of whatever directional button you had pressed. I'm a novice when it comes to programming, but this should be an extremely fundamental problem that would take very little change to fix, but the devs have ignored it regardless. Wall jumps are wonky, and with how often you have to do them, it gets old quick. With the movement and combat as it is, trying to navigate the dungeons, I feel I'm fighting the controls more than the enemies. It simply lacks the mechanical fluidity we expect of a modern metroidvania game. The idea is nice, and with some polish, it could be a great game, but it's received no love from the devs. The game's main saving grace is that the pixel art environments look pretty good. Get it if it's like 75% off and you're willing to subject yourself to the endless repetition of "how was I supposed to avoid that" deaths, or if they ever revamp the controls.

The game feels really broken

I absolutely adore the concept of the game. The music is wonderful, and a lot of the concepts are very easy to understand right off, so it's easy to get immersed in the game. But you can't get too comfy, because these will break you right out of that immersion: -Randomly-generated levels that jumble up combinations of six room types, tops, and throw enemies wherever. -Awful physics that make landing jumps tricky, or just bug out in impossible ways that often force you to die or quit. (Try the ice world for the worst controls of 2015.) -A darkness system that I almost like, except your character's "light radius" is too small. (A veil of darkness hides enemies and terrain until you get close and "discover" it, but since the game often employs vertical shafts, this usually means you don't see enemies until it's too late to avoid falling on them.) -Limited weapon selection, plus an XP system where they get stronger the more you use them, means you don't switch weapons nearly as much as them saying "Megavania" would have you believe. I want to love this game, and I've cleared three worlds, but I don't know if I can bear much more of issues like this.

A pixel-art action roguelite that plays like a metroidvania although it is very flawed. the most glaring flaw is it is repetitive and withholds any cool power ups to make it actually interesting. I played this game for about twenty minutes and did not get a single item drop. Are there items? I assume so. There is an inventory. There is a weapon quick select bar on the top of the screen. But nope. Same crap starting sword with its same crap range for the entire twenty minutes I played it. This is like if one of the older castlevania games refused to put any throwing daggers or axes in any of the candles for the first three levels. Of course the game is going to utterly fail to maintain my interest if it doesn't let me do anything interesting. Twenty minutes is a long time for an action game. I don't think it is too much to ask to do something but a single basic sword sweep during that time and haven't seen anything like that outside of coffee break flash clicker games from the year 2000. I will give it one thing - the enemies have some really neat designs.

不管从任何一个方面来讲都应该能够成为一个好游戏。 题材是地下洞窟探险，有很多的随机元素。 这个游戏的操作手感毁了一切！跳跃奇差无比！ 千万不要去买！不然会后悔的！ 虽然我是个手残，但你也不能这样虐待我。