This’ll be the last DigiPen game I play for a while, so you can look forward to my posts becoming less frequent again.

• Project: Gemini
  

  48 minutes playtime

  no achievements

Platformer. Despite forcing you to play with 2 players simultaneously, the game only tells you controller inputs (which are mostly mapped to the shoulder buttons despite the right stick not doing anything). You have to do trial and error to figure out that player 2’s keyboard inputs are the arrow keys for movement/aiming and VBNM for actions. Worse, player 2 is the one with the ranged weapon, yet up is jump on keyboard, so if you want to shoot upward, you always have to jump first.

That’s not the only issue, though. Player 1’s melee attack has an unreliable hitbox, and enemies have no feedback when taking damage, so it’s hard to tell if you actually land a hit with your punches (especially when their health bars become so big, you can barely notice it being any smaller than before). What makes this extra frustrating is that player 1 is the only one with the temporary shield power, so when you have to take out a Gatling gun floating over a pit, you have to activate the shield, jump over and punch it once (maybe twice), then wait on moving platforms to bring you back up–all while player 2 can’t do anything–and this game’s moving platforms are by far the slowest ones out of every DigiPen game I’ve played.

Oh, and sometimes you’ll get hit and take damage anyway despite being shielded. Speaking of taking damage when you shouldn’t, although bullets are supposed to get blocked by platforms, they’ll sometimes clip through enough to hit you anyway if you’re standing on them and the bullets are coming from below.

On top of all this, the level design isn’t that interesting, and when combined with most enemies being kinda damage-spongy while also being mandatory to defeat to progress, most of the game is quite tedious. It doesn’t even really require having someone else to play with you for most of the game since you can just set one player down in a safe area and take out the enemies as the other character.

There’s one exception to this, though: the first (final?) boss. It starts off just shooting a few bullets at the closest player every now and then, along with a 3-bullet spread on its left and right side. It’s also too high to hit reliably with the melee character, so you’ll likely be standing below it as the ranged character, shooting upward, but that’s a mistake because as soon as it goes into phase 2, it instantly fires a sustained laser beam up and down, then moves around the arena while repeating its initial bullet pattern. Still, I was able to make it past all of that by myself, but then the third phase happened: it’s basically the same, except now the boss and its lasers constantly rotate–slow enough that you can react to it with one player, but since the boss is constantly moving around, no one area is perpetually safe (at least none that I noticed). Also, if you die on the boss, you have to start over from its first phase, and since the boss was already pretty tedious, I decided to call it quits there.

Still, even if you do have another person to play with, the boss is the only noteworthy part. Not recommended.