Steel Assault

Hard to recommend when the game is less than ONE HOUR! That's including the optional tutorial. It's 'Okay'. The art style kind of gets in it's own way as the colors all kind of blend together and it can be hard to tell what's going on. Most enemies it's better off just trying to pass without taking damage rather than fighting. Only one weapon in the game, your whip. 2 if you count the stationary gun. The grapple tool is cool. I was laughing hysterically at myself because I've been wanting to try this game for so long and when I beat it in less than an hour all I could do was laugh and say "wtf, that's it?". It barely passes as a demo. Disappointed.

Incredibly tight design, insisting every screen needs your full attention. Some segments absolutely feel like pure BS when you first play them though. I can see this game scaring away a lot of players. believe me, I'm one of them having played the game for an hour, put it down, and didn't pick it back up for a whole year. came back to it and beat it over a few days. Lots of stuff feels like it's going to be impossible. It's possible to no hit this game, it's a consistent game too. If you pick it up, stick to it. The art is fantastic, the music hits the right tone. I mean, you can just see and hear it from the trailers. I love this game, it's not for everyone.

[code]Heavily inspired by games like Megaman and Contra, Steel Assault provides 16-bit retro action gameplay that looks and sounds incredible – but may prove to be too frustrating unless you’re part of its very specific audience[/code] Originally announced through a [url=https://www.siliconera.com/steel-assault-takes-nes-style-2d-sci-fi-action-to-kickstarter/]2015 Kickstarter[/url] as an 8-bit side-scrolling action game citing inspirations from the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), [i]Steel Assault[/i] ended up as a 16-bit title that feels right at home at consoles like the Gameboy Advance (GBA). Emulating the style of the era, [i]Steel Assault[/i] offers a mix of platforming and combat action that looks and sounds amazing – but also offers as an overall high difficulty level that might not be for everyone. While the platforming sections themselves aren’t much of an obstacle on their own, the difficulty in [i]Steel Assault[/i] stems from dozens enemies constantly appearing, often quite suddenly, as well as their ongoing barrage of projectiles to avoid. Unsurprisingly however, it’s the boss fight at the end of each of the five stages that prove to be the real skill checks, with attack patterns to avoid and just enough openings left to attack their weak spots. However, while high difficulty by itself doesn’t need to be detrimental to the overall game experience, [i]Steel Assault[/i] features some unfortunate design decisions that make game-overs feel frustrating rather than motivating enough to keep trying. These range from un-skippable intro/boss cutscenes that play every time (!) when dying at the beginning of a stage or during a boss fight, since the otherwise frequent auto-checkpoints are badly set, to some weird hitboxes – large bosses in particular feature can make it hard to discern whether touching certain body parts results in immediate damage or not. In addition, [i]Steel Assault[/i] doesn’t telegraph some sudden enemy appearances & certain boss attacks well enough, which often leaves the player with too little time to react properly. As a result, some first-time deaths may feel quite undeserved, making it seem like dying to an enemy is the only way to obtain the information required to avoid them. While some players may prefer slowly learning the ins and outs of a level through a trial-and-error approach like this, I’m of the opinion that a game – platformers in particular - should always offer enough information, e.g. in the form of telegraphs, that with sufficient skill, first-timing a level should be possible. Depending on the intended difficulty, the skill level required may be higher or lower of course - but dying only due to missing information (e.g. a boss attack suddenly filling almost the entire screen or an enemy immediately appearing in front of you) isn’t fun, as surviving those surprises is left to chance rather than player agency. In sum, these design decisions (un-skippable cutscenes, weird hitboxes, insufficient telegraphs) can turn [i]Steel Assault[/i] into a rather frustrating retro action experience instead of a hard-and-rewarding one. As such, it’s not surprising that despite its short overall runtime – beating the game on “normal”, the second-hardest difficulty mode, only took me about 3 hours – many players seem to have dropped [i]Steel Assault[/i] early on. To illustrate, only 34.5% of players on Steam managed to beat the second boss of the game - considering the short runtime and the game only featuring five bosses overall, one for each stage available, this is saying something. As such, I’d only recommend [i]Steel Assault[/i] to players with a high frustration tolerance – or those who don’t mind trial-and-error approaches, even if the “trial” part is drawn out thanks to the un-skippable cutscenes. [i]Steel Assault[/i] does offer a lot to love otherwise – the visuals and the soundtrack are fantastic, the controls precise and while I found the grappling hook feature to be somewhat janky, it thankfully wasn’t overutilized. However, if you’re just looking for a great retro action game to have a nice evening with, consider picking one of the easier difficulty modes – or other games entirely.

I was going to write a lengthier review but I won't waste my typing efforts here. Steel Assault is an insultingly bad game to anyone who grew up in the 16/8-bit era. It features some of the clunkiest controls I've ever seen in a platforming game. The pixel art is only good at a superficial level, and there is so much sprite scaling that it makes you dizzy (not to mention the awful rain effect early in the game that makes it hard to see pretty much anything). There are baffling game design decisions that makes one wonder what is actually happening with the developers' brain neurons, like having your pitifully short slide be on a cooldown. Difficulty is all over the place, with early levels and bosses being brutally challenging, while later ones are pathetically easy (except for the final boss, which was so annoying I didn't bother finishing it and just uninstalled the game). The sound track is forgettable and extremely derivative. The character designs are beyond uninspired. The early game and tutorial convey absolutely nothing about what the campaign will be like and what one should expect, which makes the bizarre difficulty wave length (because calling it a "curve" would imply the developers understand what a difficulty curve even is) even more apparent. Levels are not fun or even challenging in the traditional sense. The game appears "difficult", and one might say that it is extremely hard, but it's really more annoying than anything else, feature a bizarre mishmash of classic Castlevania gameplay with Contra-style enemy spawns (unless you think trying to use the deployable zipline while trying to whip off little flying guys is "challenging", "fun", or "interesting"; at least Medusa heads had semi-predictable patterns). The game claims to feature "subweapons" but the only ones available are a shield (whose sprites were very clearly traced from Sonic 3 & Knuckles!) and some pathetic three way shot that barely does anything. Absolutely nothing about this game was fun. Absolutely nothing about it was remotely challenging, or interesting, or intriguing, or made me want to keep playing. Instead, I kept telling myself "oh not this" or "oh this is annoying" or "seriously?" or "I don't feel like playing anymore". And in the case of the latter. I eventually did. I reached the final boss and I was so annoyed and bored with it that I quit. Not even sunk-cost fallacy kept me playing, and it was the final boss. If you are interested in this game, do yourself a favor and find something else to play. There are plenty of excellent modern pixel art arcade-style games these days, but this is not one of them.

Really good. High-quality throwback to 16-bit action platformers. The gameplay is most similar to the traditional Castlevania titles with shades of Contra, Metal Slug and Mega Man X. Appropriately short, with multiple higher difficulty modes. I wish the soundtrack tended more towards the SNES-style X games instead of the PS1 but that's a minor gripe. The graphics speak for themselves and the animation looks great.

The game could actually be pretty fun but the imbalance placement of health pick ups in expert and the nonexistent of it in later stages of arcade makes it a terrible game design.. The bosses' placement are also unevenly placed in term of difficulty.. I would say the 2nd boss is way harder than the 3rd or 4th, especially with its required mechanic to dangle underneath the hovercraft whereas falink would means instant death.. The 4th ones are just embarassment.. Even a friend of mine who happened to come by and watch me playink the game said that the 4th chapter bosses looks like a total letdown.. Also worth notink that the last boss can get glitched into out of bound when he dashes vertically to the ceilink, I managed to reproduce the glitch 4 times!! It can be very heartbroken to people who want to achieve 1CC achievement only to have the boss glitched into the ceilink!!

A game made with soul

THIS NAME ITS Steel Assault BUT GUSS WHAT RLY NAME GAME IS ( STEAL MY MONEY )

[h1]High Level Action Platformer![/h1] A beautiful intense pixel art game, with a cool protagonist and challenging encounters. Keeping consistency during gameplay is the key to completion. It requires a lot of focus, concentration and fearlessness. Similar to Castlevania games, the player has a powerful whip, crouch slide (with cooldown) that has iframes and double jump! Knowing how to take advantage from positioning and timing allows to defeat otherwise troublesome enemies very fast. The music slaps, specially from stage 4, Heart of Concrete! I highly recommend it!

Whoa, not bad, not bad at all! A love letter to old Mega Drive arcade platformers! With awesome eye-candy pixel art, great tight gameplay, tough levels, even tougher bosses, and a crazy good soundtrack to top it all off. Made me remember some old games I erased from my memory. Good stuff!