Shin Samurai Jazz

Soundtrack is great, some really nice loops and smooth beats. Unfortunately the game is very frustating to play though. The melee combat is not good with only one button attack and one button parry (that you can use against like 3 types of enemies). All melee enemies approach you extremely slowly and once you start attacking they are stunlocked and easy to take down. The problem is every time you die or leave the screen all the enemies respawn. This makes getting through the game extremely tedious as there is a sort of overworld hub you have to go through multiple times and you just want to jump past the enemies without fighting them because it's so dull but they will get some cheap hits in and kill you. You will die more times to accidentally standing in an enemies hitbox while trying to attack them than you will from any actual attack the enemy does (touching them hurts you for some reason). Even the boss battles are trivial when you start attacking them and they can't move as you just keep spamming attack. The later acts will spawn a ton of enemies on the platforming sections which makes retrying them a slog as you have to slowly kill these same enemies over and over each time you miss a jump. Don't let the store pages spedup video footage fool you, the game is not really fast paced as you have to do a lot of finnicky platforming in this game to get through most sections. The platforming is not very good in this game, although the jumps and dashes are quite responsive the actual movement felt very floaty to me and there would be times trying to attack a midair enemy and a melee enemy at the same time I would die because I kept swinging over the enemies head as swining your sword stops you from falling. There is a developer update note saying they improved the platforming so god only knows how bad it must've been before. A tip for anyone that has the game is when platforming just press jump or dash to get off the wall, don't hold jump or press any other inputs or try to combine jump and dash at the same time. You usually want a very light jump to get past some spikes then you use the second jump or dash to get to the next empty part of wall. Once the platforming 'clicks' it feels a little better that you can move around but you will keep clipping spikes here and there due to the weird floaty feel and some questionable design of a few sections. Unfortunately the difficulty for the rooms is not linear and seems to spike all over the place between hard and easy rooms. The game is an okay way to spend an hour and a half and I suppose you can't be too critical of a game that only cost $1.50. Try their newer games for bitesized action though, there's a few without the platforming sections that makes them more enjoyable. I'll throw this game a thumbs up for the soundtrack even if it is lacking a lot in the gmaeplay department, keeping in mind the cost. If they were charging $5 or more I would give it a thumbs down.