I really tried to give this game a good shot. I played it long enough to fight 2 boss rooms. I love Metroidvania games; they're a strong passion of mine to the point where I seek out ones that aren't popular to find some hidden gems in the flooded market. This sadly isn't one of them. I want to use this review to help the developer in the future.
Hiding blocks in hidden walls with no discernible way to know which blocks they are is a disaster. You can't see what's happening to know if what you're doing is right. It's so bad that at the point where there's a hint as to what to do in the area, yet I still didn't get through that wall to get the secret. I'm a completionist when it comes to games, and this is so frustrating that you'd have to go back through every single area with each weapon, while constantly farming ammo just to see if you got everything if you're trying to 100% this, and that just sounds like torture over enjoyment.
Random enemy spawns in a map where traveling back and forth is so commonplace is a bit weird, but even moreso the mine being an enemy in this rotation just doesn't sit right. I get that the enemies are mostly the same just with different skins, but them having the same spawn but for different enemy types throws off the immersion. In different areas the types are different skins, but really? You're a sci-fi character getting hints from computers scattered across the land, but you're shooting skeletons, knights, seemingly minotaurs, blobs, oversized bugs and flying aberrations. I assume it's just the free assets that come with the gaming program used, but it doesn't fit with the game at all. I also want to mention that a lot of the enemies don't do anything except get in your way. They don't attack, they don't hurt you unless you run into them, yet it takes 5+ shots to kill them even though they're useless, and they're moving around so you have to constantly fix your aim.
I have a bunch of problems with the "hint boxes".
- They don't stop the gameplay even though they cover the bottom half of the screen and they expect you to read them while fighting and maneuvering.
- After the first few happened, I clicked on one and the text stopped staying on the screen. It just started scrolling off the left side of the screen through the text box that appears. This didn't stop happening once it started; every one I clicked on after this had that same issue.
- I clicked on one while I was moving, then I lost all control of my character and they just kept running into a wall until I reset my game.
- The sound that happens while it's supposed to be showing text doesn't match sometimes and it just clicks while nothing is happening occasionally. I had one that locked over the bottom half of my screen just clicking away while no text appeared until I left the room.
Now this game has multiple different ammo types. Sort of like Megaman in the aspect that you would use them to do different things. This system was clunky, and switching to a gun just to open a door feels like a waste of time and ammo. I feel like either all guns should have unlimited ammo, or there should be a way to get ammo on a consistent basis rather than waiting for an enemy to hopefully drop some. An example; I needed to get through a red door, but I used all my red ammo trying to figure out how to get the secret that was hinted at that I never figured out. I exited and entered a doorway with enemy spawns on both sides over and over until I finally got some ammo after about 20 enemies. It wasn't super time consuming, but it was annoying because I had full health, yet the enemies kept dropping health instead. There's another time this was more relevant, but it stems from door issues, which I'll talk about separately. My suggestion to fix this is to have the different ammo types as an upgrade to the main weapon instead of have them separate attacks, then you wouldn't have to switch over and over for no reason, and the enemy types that are only hurt by specific ones doesn't cause you to flip back and forth between ammo types while fighting.
The layout of the game causes you to backtrack constantly because other doors are unlocked by upgrades you get way later. The issue with this is there's no traveling system and you go through multiple areas to get a different upgrade, then you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the game to go to a door you couldn't enter 20 minutes before that. This sucks! The layout could be better, making it so exploring isn't so awful to the point where you have to backtrack that much to get to one door that could just have a couple ammo upgrades in it. The lack of flow in the level design makes not having a way to fast travel to other areas detrimental to the game's design. You could make the save points teleport pads that connect to each other so you don't spend your time backtracking all the time if you want a layout so erratic like this.
The other big problem I had with the door design is if you're going out and back into the doorway, the door can trap you in place when it spawns. This is fine and all when you're talking about the regular doors, but when you get trapped by a door you don't have ammo for, you're now softlocked in the door. this happened to me with a red door I didn't have ammo for so I had to reset my game. That's 2 times the game's flaws caused me to reset in less than an hour, erasing progress since my last save.
The last thing I want do discuss is the reason I finally gave up. I had just defeated the green shot boss room, then I was exploring past it and I ran into an enemy. Unfortunately, I didn't save before this... I had my flamethrower out and decided to just use it to kill the enemy. This crashed the game and gave me an error code:
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Step EventoLancador
for object oVoador:
Variable oWasp.pode_queimar(100283, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_oVoador_Collision_883b5ca8_4a1d_401c_9f18_e29ae0ce460a
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stack frame is
gml_Object_oVoador_Collision_883b5ca8_4a1d_401c_9f18_e29ae0ce460a (line -1)
It looks like either
1. The wasp enemy can't be killed by the flamethrower, or else it crashes the game since there's no variable set for the collision of it getting hit by this weapon.
or 2. The enemy code didn't spawn fast enough before I tried attacking it since it was right next to the door I entered and the value of it wasn't completely set from the random enemy generator.
Either way, fatal errors in a game that are over 2 years old are unacceptable when you're paying for the game. At the point that this game is now (Which I'm assuming it's not going to change) I wouldn't even suggest buying this for $1. I think of price range in the aspect that I'm getting an hour of enjoyment out of each dollar spent, and I did play this for an hour, but I had to redo areas from two times the game locked up and backtracking to go to different areas isn't content IMO. I'd say I played maybe 20 minutes of content, and that was iffy at best.
