Not gonna lie I bought this game with intention of writing something like
>mom can we have katana zero dlc
>we have katana zero dlc at home
>katana zero dlc at home
And look at me now - after I swallowed the whole game in one go, and now sitting here crying like a little girl. What a pleasant surprise.
TL;DR Game is good, despite everything would still recommend.
Visuals, Narrative - 10/10, Gameplay 6-7/10
If you set emotions aside, the gameplay is probably the game’s weakest aspect.
Not much to say about the stunning visuals and amazing story - it's peak, so I'll focus on the gameplay.
I beat the game on “Veteran” without any major issues, but even toward the end, I still had trouble controlling my character the way I wanted to.
The concept of building the entire game around the hook is a cool idea, but unfortunately, in this case, the execution was kinda clunky.
First of all, I think it was a big mistake to limit the maximum speed. Usually, in movement-based games that feature a hook, you really want to play as fast as possible. You’re supposed to be eager to testing just how fast you can go, and when you, as a player, improve your skills and figure out how to do chain dashes and the like, that fast, fluid gameplay becomes your reward. But here, it’s all a bit of a letdown—there are supposedly large rooms you can fly through, but the game basically takes you by the hand and says, “No, no, that’s not how we do things here, bro.”
Second, the aiming. As I understand it, this was done to make the game playable on a gamepad, but man, it’s such a nuisance. Your hooks constantly fly off to the wrong place, which makes everything less consistent, decision making degrades in favor of spamming.
Third, the additional movement skills are meh. Throughout the whole game, I had the feeling as if a lot of the jump puzzles weren’t designed with these skills in mind. Very often you get stuck somewhere, accidentally launch yourself into traps in places where you thought you’d be able to slip past them using one of the skills because you were off by 1mm, and so on.
To sum it up, the movement lacks a certain fluidity, I guess.
The enemies in the game aren’t particularly impressive either; in the first half of the game, they feel completely out of place because they pose no threat at all - they die in a single hit and hardly ever play a role in the jump puzzles. The latter issue was more or less fixed only toward the very end of the game, where you rush through the screens quickly and the enemies are more like an extra jump.
The bosses are better on one hand, but then there's [spoiler]Major Song.
This is probably one of their worst boss battles I've seen in recent memory, in terms of dev-to-player communication. The boss's moveset is okay; some attacks are annoying, but overall, nothing too extreme. But how does the game communicate to the player what to do with the boss?
At first, you just jump, dodge, and try to learn her attacks, but then you realize you can't attack; you simply cannot target her like the previous enemies. You jump around more and suddenly notice a second of opportunity to press an attack, and the boss is highlighted during this time (like some bosses' weak spots from before).
What's the first thing that comes to the player's mind? Well, they probably want me to hit this tight attack window; she's probably the last boss, after all. So, you hit the timing aaaand... get slammed into the ground. Because of the animation, it's not even clear who hit whom at first. You don't expect a catch there because this has never happened before, but then you start hitting the right timing again and again, and the boss slams you into the ground again and again.
It might seem like nothing special, but the thing is, these counterattacks can't kill the player, unlike other attacks. So, the next thing that comes to mind is: since I'm not dying from this attack, that must be the dev's intention, and maybe I just need to hit the right timing more? What a cool concept: the game leaves you at 1hp and you have to hit very difficult timings multiple times without taking a single hit from the boss's random attacks. Wow!
Except it turns out that's not true at all, and the boss can be killed with one hand, eyes closed, using a dash in the air, which I'd already forgotten about. I probably spent 40 minutes on this boss trying to brute-force her like that, it's was not a very fun time I'd tell you that. This is a perfect example of how not to communicate with a player within a game.[/spoiler].
Another complaint I have is the rather tedious platforming sections near the end, [spoiler]between the flashbacks sections that seemed unnecessary long and just took me out of the mood[/spoiler]. I couldn’t find a better place to mention this, so I’ll put it here lol.
After reading all of the above, you might think I didn’t like the game, but no—quite the opposite, in fact. Even with all its flaws, I still thoroughly enjoyed playing through it, I even wrote a review, like first in years wtf? I focused on the cons just because I think this kind of feedback will be more useful to the developer, and I also don’t want to spoil the good parts for other people.
