Nakiti Generations

The game itself - what there is of it - is promising. However, the developer has a long, [b]LONG[/b] history of failing to deliver promised updates and failing to communicate with his customer base. This culminated in an update that was announced on February 2nd, 2020, supposedly scheduled for February 21st, and never arrived (at the point of this writing, close to [s]a year and a half[/s] [b]four years[/b] later). Why? Nobody ****ing knows - except the developer, and [b]he[/b] ain't talking; feels like he's just taking the piss. Because of this, I cannot in good conscience recommend purchasing the game. EDIT: Yes, I am aware that the dev has since made some posts about resuming updates. However, that was a year ago - since then, we have received no patches and no updates regarding the game's development state.

Full disclosure: I am old friends with the developer, and I am a Kickstarter backer for this game. It was the first Kickstarter I ever backed. Nakiti Generations is a Metroidvania that falls somewhere between feeling like an Amiga game and a PS1 game. It fits well within the genre, with very intricate map design jam packed full of secrets and reasons to backtrack to earlier areas. It sticks close to the Metroid structure, but puts a decidedly more "space military" spin on things. You toss grenades instead of drop bombs, you get a pistol instead of a plasma cannon, etc. It controls and animates well, though there are a few minor hiccups every now and again -- a white square will sometimes flash on Nakiti after taking damage, for instance. But this is the very first early access version, so those sorts of issues are perhaps to be expected and will be presumably sorted out. The current version as of this review takes you a little bit past the game's first boss, and I had quite a bit of fun exploring this alien planet. The boss itself feels a little too simple for how much health it has; I found myself quietly saying "I get it already!" to myself, because I used all my grenades and must've emptied what felt like 50-100 pistol rounds in to it before it finally died. On my old laptop, the game experienced some pretty heavy graphical slowdown in many areas. Switching to the game's "Reduced" visuals helps a bit, but it doesn't entirely allieviate the problem. That's probably less of a problem with Nakiti Generations and more just the age of this laptop, however (my desktop tower is out of commission for the time being, but I'm sure it'd run it just fine). I mainly say all this to explain that the in-game clock said I finished all of the content in this version of the game in around 35 minutes, when actually, it took me closer to twice that. That being said, once you reach the end of what's available in this version of the game, you unlock the ability to play around in a massive debug zone; it's almost like its own separate game, with its own secrets, and even sneak peeks at future power-ups and enemies. I'm definitely a bit bias, but I'm recommending the game because I'm excited to see what's next.