TLDR: This game is a rough, but a sincere love letter to the Megaman Legends games, specifically the first one it feels like. There are soft/hardlocking game breaking bugs, the UI is a little wonky and you have to swap to mouse/keyboard from controller for some inputs, but I sincerely hope the developer takes the lessons they got from making this game and continues to make more. But I do have A LOT of critiques because I think if they get ironed out this would be easily much more palatable to others.
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The long version:
The game is called Halcyon days it's a direct deep lore reference to the universe it's inspired by, Megaman Legends. It takes a lot of the broad strokes, typically in the combat, intro, and structure of it's society from that game. And I think this game shows that there's a deep, deep desire out there for something like it, and a profound sadness for the lack of a megaman legends 3, which was ripped so painfully from our futures by capcom so many years ago.
It is, to it's detriment, quite rough in terms of bugginess and UI controls, which will hurt it in the long run when attempting to reach a wider audience than it's intended target audience (of which I am a part of). The easiest bugs to point out are the following:
- dialogue text boxes sometimes overlap (and stay on) when characters speak
- Sometimes if you try to skip through dialogue your character can get stuck and can only jump in place, too far to initiate dialogue again.
- The Controller input sometimes messes up and makes it difficult to know what button you are actually pressing (the Y/Triangle button cancels, but doesent exit the pause menu) (the B/circle button is used for selecting inputs instead of X/A) (You can select parts to equip but they auto default to slot 2, and you need to manually remove the part in slot 1 to equip a new one but sometimes it doesent let you select it (via controller)
Those bugs are, of course, able to be worked around, though you will waste time if a save didn't happen quite recently. But in my experience, if you have to work around them, you will tend to drop players.
Then there's the world design, yes it's open world, but in the beginning, it takes you a VERY long time to walk anywhere. The distance between you and your ship after you leave the first dungeon isn't too far, however there are points of interest that take a while to get there. This is alleviated after you complete the starter town and you recieve the jet skates, but then you're forced into an escort quest which invalidates the use of them until AFTER you're done. I think the maps are about 2x larger then they need to be, and that's even with me knowing that the jet skates are on the table.
The Jet Skates did make dungeon exploration and interaction much more interesting, and honestly they were my favorite part of this game, the way they aided traversal and broke up the circle strafing actually has me wanting something like this in more games. Then there's the custom parts/weapons, which are also elements I missed from this game series.
Though now that I'm talking about weapons, I have to mention combat, and that it feels like half of my shots don't land, sometimes I get hit and knocked over, other times I get hit and do not, but am not given an audio queue of being hit, and there was even a time where I lost 50% of my health in one hit and got a game over and was not shown anything visually that hurt me (during the second boss fight). When it works, it's servivcable, but there's just too much tiny bugs that add up and frustrate me, which I can only imagine means that others are frustrated as well.
And then there's the ledge grabbing, there's issues with the collision detection which makes platforming with them hard, and also the animation takes way too long. I almost wish the jump height was just one box (from the first dungeon) tall, just so this could be avoided.
Another one of my gripes is with the camera, it's hard to get these right, and in closed corridors like this it only gets harder, but sometimes it would clip against a wall and bounce back and forth rapidly, which is disorienting in these close quarters and leads to me avoiding going near walls just to keep everything visually clear.
And my last gripe, and I mean this sincerely. Please for the love of god make doors different colors or something. I only was able to navigate the game for the most part because I understood the design methodology behind the dungeons and the door placements but some of them blend way too hard into the background, and I honestly think the doors are way too small compared to the source material. They should be much more visible and understandable as -passages to the next zone- but that's just me nitpicking at room design at this point.
All of that being said, I think if this game had an extra few months of polish, cleanup, UI adjustment, and maybe giving you the skates immediately upon leaving the first dungeon, that it could be something even more special than it already is. The only reason I am harping on so hard about this game is because I can *SEE* what they were trying to do here. I can *FEEL* the passion towards megaman legends and the bygone era of the PS1 as things were left behind and the 3rd person platformer genre evolved and dropped so many things. I want a title like this to be enough of a success that the dev and others like them see it and want to make more. I can clearly imagine a movement set somewhere between this and pseudoregalia with a similar artstyle to that generation becoming something really special that hits all of us drowning our sorrows in nostalgia with the purest of dopamine hits.
Please please please keep making games dev, if you can polish this up and it's worth your time I implore you to do so. If not, I sincerely hope the lessons you learned from this game can be taken forward into something with more polish and that can be seen by more eyes than just the hardcore fans.
Thank you for reading this, sorry about the intensity of the critique and I hope to see you on the moon!
