You can jump, drop from platforms, go left and right, and shoot, your shooting is directional and only affected based on weapon drops you can get from chests, so by default you only get a pistol with poor damage, fire rate, and range. The weapons you DO get from chests are good for the most part, but they can also completely sabotage your run, and you cannot pick up a previous weapon once you change it, so if you have an awesome weapon drop like the lightsaber that does good damage and has a good area of effect, but accidentally picked up a flamethrower with horrible range and area of effect, then you’re kind of screwed.
You cannot also keep using picked up weapons endlessly, this relies on ammo and you can only get more ammo by essentially getting upgrades at the end of the stage. The upgrades are acquired by opening a gate at the end of each tower with a key, you can only get the keys by killing a specific number of enemies that increases after you get key after key, so at first you have to kill 10 enemies, then 20, so on and so forth.
You do not have difficulty modes in the game to make it easier, only more difficult, there’s normal mode, and hard mode that you can pick in the main menu; the game doesn’t explain the difference between these, but to me it seems like enemies take a bit more damage and there are more of them.
The only way you can really make the game easier is either by getting better at it, which for a Rogue like, good luck! Or, you can unlock new suits, you get these by playing through stages, dying, leveling up, and collecting gems dropped from enemies. You cannot just unlock the costume by leveling up, you unlock the costume by purchasing it after unlocking the option to buy it, and -sadly- the game can get really, really grindy after a while.
Generally, you really won’t get a shot at finishing the game only after you obtain a number of costumes, and these costumes are incremental in their cost and sometimes have mechanics and systems attached to them that I think should’ve been implemented in the base game in other ways; like there’s a costume that provides you with a shortcut to the second area? And you can only get this after getting a ton of gems? And there’s another costume that multiplies the number of gems you get from each pickup, but this costs 10,000 gems, kind of nullifying the whole point of the freaking thing?
On the other hand I also dislike how some of the costumes claim to do certain things but they don’t really seem to change the gameplay all that much. There’s one costume that claims to increase health drops, yet I didn’t got any through three towers while playing with the actual costume… switched the costume later on, and got a ridiculous amount of health drops, much more than the one I could’ve gotten with the last. It just doesn’t seem that well optimized or polished.
You also have to shoot the enemies from a distance, like if the enemies touch you, even if you shoot at them, you don’t get to damage them, so you have to create a gap between you and the enemy to actually get your shots to register, something that doesn’t happen in any other games like this that I’ve played. Usually if you shoot, and the enemy is literally on top of your sprite, that enemy will take damage and die; here that’s not the case.
I don’t know… after a while it seemed like the game relied more in trial-and-error elements rather than thinking how to actually implement a lot of these systems and gameplay mechanics in a way that they worked together. As such, I ended up feeling disillusioned with my experience, the only time I managed to make any significant progress was after I got a suit that increased my damaged significantly, so this made the boss battles a bit of a cakewalk; even then I died afterwards though, because… the game also has a lot of trial and error design elements by choice, you’ll have to die a lot to know how certain enemies behave, how the second zone actually lets you go through the walls of the tower and loop around, etc.
