I give Environmental Station Alpha a lukewarm thumbs-up. If you like difficult metroidvania games, then you may like this one.
The game starts off simple. You have a character who can walk, jump, and shoot a short laser to all four cardinal directions. While the enemies aren't that bad in the beginning, you may notice a pattern: Very often they attack you from directions you can't shoot at.
These enemies start appearing right from the start. So you can imagine what will happen when the game progresses and becomes more difficult. There will be more of them, they will move faster than you can run, there will be difficult platforming to do at the same time, there will be enemy spawners somewhere else in the map that are hard to reach and hard to kill, there will be environmental hazards to dodge all the while, so on and so forth. It doesn't get any easier at any point.
Environmental Station Alpha is a metroidvania, so of course there are a bunch of upgrades to get. Surely they help you dealing with all these difficult enemies, right? Maybe help you traverse the environment a little easier? Sure, but they are introduced in a manner that never gives you that feeling of power. Usually the only relevant thing they do is help you get to a new location, but sometimes they add an element to the gameplay that makes it more frustrating to play.
For example, for quite a while you have to deal with your basic, very short laser for damage. Eventually you get charge beam, which both deals more damage and has a bit longer reach, but you have to charge it for a second. After getting it, every new enemy is either tankier or can only be damaged with the charge beam. You can still only shoot cardinally. In other words, all the charge beam added to the game was you having to charge your attack while dodging the ever-increasingly difficult enemies and stage hazards instead of just firing at will. Traversing the earlier areas barely gets any easier because the flies will still come at you from diagonal angles. And charge beam isn't the only upgrade that has a similar effect to the gameplay.
I quit playing the game after getting about half of the upgrades. I don't know how deep that is into the game, but the game just became too much for me. I tried to explore for any kind of upgrades that could make the game easier, but every time I got to a new area with a sick trick, instead of it being a secret with a health upgrade or something it was just a blocked road where you had to come back later with some other upgrade. The graphics also made it hard to see which tile is traversable and which is not, which tile is destructible and which isn't.
Environmental Station Alpha features boss fights. They are quite simple, each boss having something like three different attacks they do, but I think they were still generally pretty enjoyable. Despite the simplicity the attack patterns themselves can be difficult to dodge, so don't expect to just blaze through the bosses like in Metroid games.
I also like the atmosphere in the game. You are alone on a space station, and you are told something has gone terribly wrong but you don't know what. You find messages left by the staff that give you information of what happened bit by bit. You see monsters having taken over, but you also hear there may be survivors. From what little I've seen of the various endings the game has, it seems the story takes some rather wild turns and I'd really love to find out what's going on, but alas.
In addition to these two reason for my thumbs-up, I also really want to support game developers from my home country, Finland. I genuinely believe this game has potential, but man, it's just too much for me. I like to think metroidvanias are close to my heart, but somehow this game still managed to miss.
