Super Roboy

This was the metroidvania equivalent of ballpark nachos for me. If you like "nachos", even a slurry of taco meat and pumped cheese can be enjoyable/fun, but aesthetically and mechanically it's a bit messy. The environments are mostly a spare and uninteresting shadow of Hollow Knight's staid monochromes. The half-cuphead/half-metroid art styles clash with the bullet effects-- though it seems like there's been an effort to upgrade visuals since release. Combine these issues with weak cohesion across the conceptual designs (environment, enemies, hazards, etc) and there's just not much of a sense of place or specific danger while you're exploring. I was never excited to have unlocked a new movement ability. Some of this is personal preference, but the gameplay "runs together" as well. The free aiming let's you be pretty sloppy and you have enough health/damage to sloppily wade through many threats. Nothing feels especially clean. There's a clear power curve and lots of upgrades, but the way you manage them is incremental and "sloppy" too. From enemy placement to boss patterns, everything just feels a little too loose and unpolished. There's some enemies without health bars, objects with behaviors that change depending on what "kind" of room you're in, and mechanics without clear (or any) cues. I do really like the "lock on" targeting, but there's a lot of other mass weighing it down. Do we need all of these dense, multi-step menus? Do soaring orchestral themes make sense here? Does any of it feel "inseparable" from the rest? At the end of the day this is a small team's game and I enjoyed it enough to finish-- I'm able to forgive the shortcomings-- but it [i]does[/i] affect the way it feels and you'll probably notice, especially in comparison to the genre's most beloved titles. Now all that being said, there's an exuberance to small indie projects. That's what ultimately edges it into a reserved "thumbs up" for me. Developers are trying out pet ideas, remixing their inspirations, and being creative with their limitations. The biggest sin for a passion project is being boring, and the game is difficult and new enough to avoid that pitfall (aside from some spongy foes). So if the trailer looks like fun to you and you've got the appetite for it: go ahead, grab a fistful of napkins, and dig in.

Super Roboy is a really good metroidvania with a absolutely baffling map system (more on that in the cons system). Game is clearly inspired by Super Metroid, but not derivatively so. It absolutely has its own identity. Artstyle & music is solid and it has a decent narrative, which is told through comic-book pages, which I thought was a nice change and fits with the game. Combat - really nice. It's based around (once you get your first ability) shooting enemies (and bosses) to fill up a target meter than using that to basically trigger an explosion within them, matching the right enemy to the right element. Other than that basic shooting gun and dodging stuff. The target system is surprisingly fun. He also gets an added arsenal of nice stuff. It's a very fun combat system. - Bosses: They're fine, but except for 2 of the last none were really interesting in any way. The overwhelming feeling was "uuuggghh, glad that's over with" not any kind of positive feeling for beating it (and honestly sorta the 2 of the last 2). Also the game has basically one trick to differentiate the more difficult bosses from the easier ones and that's to give them a billion hit points. Moves are rarely difficult to analyze or anything, you just have to keep doing the ♥♥♥♥ for ages. Progrression - It has a leveling system, which yeah you get to pick into health, power, or increasing the target acquisition speed (KEY stat, do not neglect) and then there's a skill system where you get to learn skills from defeating certain enemies. Mixed thoughts here. You don't get abilities by exploration, or at least not only - you need to find different coloured crystals and use them to learn abilities from the menu (divided into purple, blue, yellow, and green). Purple are boss abilities, one for every boss no issue, green is combat, yellow is combat and some exploration support abilities (like fast traveling from but not to save point - oh and one traversal ability), the issue is blue. Blue are very rare and used both for powerful combat abilities (like extending I-frames) and for some traversal abilities. The issue with this is they are indeed very rare, it's possible for you to beat a boss and unable to get the blue ability it was tied to and have to go find a blue crystal for it - it only happened once, but it really didn't feel good, It also felt I dunno a bit artificial (and yeah, I know he's a robot) compared to being tied to exploration directly. No problem with the direct combat abilities, just the traversal ones. Exploration: Exploring the areas is fun and exploration of the MV map is also really good, although basically linear. There are a few points where you have options between areas to go to, but you won't really ever go back to an early biome and have an ability to access a new area from that, which yeah, but it's still fin. Ok, my main issue - the map. This is one of the worst maps I've seen in an MV. First off for some reason (I'll get to it next sentence) they decided to do the super metroid thing and have you just being able to view the map from the area we're in. MY GOD, can we get nostalgia devs to STOP confusing technical limitations of the past with creative decisions. This is annoying as hell as all the backtracking you do (more or less) is for upgrades that you do need. Additionally to that you only have 5 markers for each area (yes, they're divided like that) and you can't pick which you use, which is not nearly enough. There is an AUTOMATIC marking system you get by activating compasses (one regular, one secret for super-special stuff), but they're too much. They basically show the locations not just of stuff you've missed, but of stuff outside of the area you've already explored and maybe if you play an MV this is the sort of thing you'd want to do yourself - explore the space and not get that ruined and just have this stuff instead update when you explore the map as you go. The workaround I found was to just skip it and then go back and activate them afterwards but it adds annoying backtracking and I shouldn't need to do that. It's hard to put into words exactly how annoying this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the map - both the view only one area at a time & the compass stuff - is. It's the reason for me the game cannot be evaluated past a certain point (I'd say it rose to around mid B-tier for me). It's a very good game and I do recommend it however.

I tried to like this game, cute robot and graphics, exploration, solo developer. I played to the third boss (Blazer) and had to drop it. The metroidvania aspect is unfortunately the least important one, as this here is a quick reaction bullet hell platformer, where the protagonist needs to jump, dodge, aim and shoot plus activate different abilities in small arenas with -for me- sluggish controls and very quick bosses/projectiles. The three bosses I experienced were bullet sponges even on normal and I had to repeat these hectic boss arenas so many times, all fun was drained out of the experience. It did not help that the boss music in all cases was so aggravating I wanted to scream. You cannot change difficulty mid game, and after 4 hours, I did not care to restart on easy. While I applaud different difficulties and accessibility options, it is baffling you may not change difficulty mid game. Add to this a very unhelpful and unprecise map, an outright misleading quest marker showing you to go to the swamps when in reality you really need to pick up a flame power up in the scrapyard and the annoying feature that upon death, your progress is reset to the last savepoint, and I didn’t quite enjoy the game enough to plod on. I don’t mind dying and losing resources and I play lots of Souls games and MVs, but if I loose map progress, switches are back, power ups still not collected, this forced me to constantly run back to save points and reset enemies. All in all, this made playing the game unpleasant for me. If all this does not bother you and your reflexes are better than mine, give it a shot, by all means, but I did not like these design decisions.

Super Roboy is a great indie Metroidvania that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but is great fun from start to finish. The core of the experience is solid and enjoyable. The controls are on point and the combat feels good, though on Normal difficulty it's not too challenging, making it more accessible. While the story is basic, it drives Roboy's journey through a well-crafted world. For an indie title, this is a highly entertaining adventure that offers a truly enjoyable Metroidvania experience.

Wow, I really relate to this main character for completely unknown reasons! Jokes aside, I did kinda start playing this game entirely for the bit of it just being my name, so I wasn't expecting too much. I certainly wasn't expecting this to genuinely be one of the better metroidvanias I've ever played, and yet here we are. Granted, the story's not much to write home about, but 1. It doesn't really need to be when everything else about the game is so solid, and 2. It's told & presented in such an interesting & heartfelt way that I don't even consider it a negative. I had a blast playing this, and having played a really bad MV right before this, a game this fun was the breath of fresh air I desperately needed.

Unfortunately i cannot recommend it. Some enemies call kill you with three hits, specially bosses and there’s no way for you to restore your health during many boss fights; i was fighting the semi final boss, and if i touch him i lose literally 90% of my health, you pretty much cannot get hit, in his second phase he becomes a sponge and the battle turns into a bullet hell with him flying across the screen. I was enjoying the game but not being able to finish it due to the ridiculous damage i take and cannot recover my health was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it.

For whatever reason, the map doesn't show you where one area transitions to the next most of the time, even after you discover it. It made backtracking and exploring a complete chore. That combined with the simplistic graphics and gameplay and I just lost interest.

Such a fun game, thoroughly enjoyed. Some of the criticisms I've read from others are dumb, complaining about level design, or firing being faster with button mashing vs holding it down. All of these things are resolved as the game progresses. I waited forever for Hollowknight Silksong to be released and that turned out to be an over-complicated dud. If you like Metroidvania games that start simple and evolve to make you a bad ass without being overly-complex or dumb this game hits the sweet spot. Hope they release a sequel.

Ich musste erst mal reinkommen, aber dann war es ein super Metroidvania. Das Erkunden der Map und Freischalten der Skills hat Spaß gemacht. Der Soundtrack war atmosphärisch. Passend zu dem Genre.

This games exploration is its strong point! Unlocking abilities to assist with finding secrets, looking for hidden walls, trying to find that last floater is extremely enjoyable. 50% done the game currently, but a solid 8.5/10 unless it all falls apart during the last 50% lol