Here’s another Twitch Prime game I was looking forward to playing, though I wasn’t as impressed with this one.

This is a platformer. Along with your standard left/right/jump, you can slide on walls and climb up them by tapping the jump button some more. You also have two attack buttons and a special attack button that has a limited amount of ammo. The character you begin with has a gun as a primary weapon, a melee attack as the secondary weapon, and a grenade for the special attack. As you free prisoners, you unlock more characters, with most following this pattern of “gun, melee, grenade,” though the special weapon does vary much more often. With that said, there are a few characters that don’t follow this pattern: one character has his ranged attack mapped to the secondary attack button and the melee attack mapped to the primary attack button, and a few others have two melee attacks mapped to the primary/secondary buttons. Plus, whenever you rescue a prisoner (the only way to increase the number of lives you have) or whenever you die, you’re randomly assigned another unlocked character to play as. Despite this, the levels and bosses are all designed in a way that even melee characters can beat them (though certain parts are obviously much easier to complete with certain characters than with others). My main issue with this is that certain characters have intentionally unresponsive controls: one character only shoots when you let go of the button (as opposed to when you press it), and another has a half-second wind up animation you have to sit through every time. Plus, every character has momentum-jumps: there’s no way to fall straight down unless you drop from a ladder, so if you want to drop down a ledge, you need to turn around right after walking off, but there’s also a mechanic where the character will climb onto the platform if you hit the top of the wall, which is especially annoying if you need to drop down a single-unit-wide hole quickly to avoid a hazard.

Despite all of that, I can forgive it if the level design is good, and at the start of the game, it’s pretty fun. I played on hard mode (looking it up to make sure it wasn’t just another “increase HP for enemies” laziness-induced tedious grind), and even the normal enemies are a threat if you try to face them head-on since all characters die in one hit (and you only have one life per level until you rescue a prisoner). Combine this with fully-destructible environments (outside of the tiles that support checkpoints and zip lines), and the game actually encourages more stealthy play, making it more viable to take out enemies through fall damage (to which you’re immune) than by shooting them. The problem comes in with the game’s attempt at spectacle: not only do a significant chunk of your weapons generate an explosion, but there are also exploding barrels scattered throughout the levels along with canisters that, upon taking damage (usually from another explosion or gunfire), rocket in whichever direction they’re facing and explode. The levels seem to be designed around creating as much chaos as possible, often having canisters rocket upward to destroy a ceiling, causing volatile barrels to fall down and explode some more. Heck, there are even specific types of enemies that explode on death. The worst example are probably the air strikes: on paper, it’s good design since there’s a clear indicator of what path they’ll take and where they’ll land, but in practice, the indicators stand out far more than the actual missiles, making them more of a distraction (why couldn’t the indicators be transparent and the missiles be bright red?).

At first, it isn’t too hard simply to go backward in the level and wait for the chaos to subside, but as you get near to the end, the game starts spawning a larger quantity of enemies with fewer ways to get around them, even going so far as to have NES-Ninja-Gaiden-style infinitely-spawning enemies if you’re standing in the wrong spot. Combine this with the chaotic nature of the levels and the one hit deaths, and it can become nearly impossible to keep up with where you are in order to avoid all the hazards that inevitably show up simply as a result of you trying to defend yourself from the enemies. Normally, I’d say that I’m starting to prefer one-hit-death games (without randomized levels, of course) since it’s a guarantee by the developers that there’s no mandatory damage (because if there was, the game would be impossible), but this game might have found a way around that simply by having you respawn at the last checkpoint without resetting the level (until you lose all of your lives, at which point you’re sent back to the last raised-checkpoint or even the beginning of the level).

This chaos also spreads to the boss fights. Like the levels, they’re not too bad at first, but as the game progresses, they get more unwieldy. There was a wide robot boss that, once you got it to around 1/4th of its health, it would just constantly stream air strikes at you (or as close to you as its range would allow). I would have gotten a .GIF of it if I knew how that recording function worked at the time. It’s way easier to destroy the ground around the arena so when the boss spawns, it falls off-screen and dies before it can really do anything. Not long afterward, there’s another boss that basically just sits still and shoots three guided acid bombs at a time; not only do they have the distracting airstrike indicator, but when one hits a solid tile, it fragments into three separate acid blobs (that don’t have the indicator), and of course, you die if any of those projectiles hits you. While this boss won’t fall down, it’s still way easier to tunnel under the boss where it can’t reach you so that it ends up hurting itself with its acid blobs. Even if we assume that this is how the player is supposed to fight these bosses, you have to admit that it starts to get repetitive simply doing the same tactic over and over. However, the most telling is probably the boss where the only way to damage it is by standing on a dive-bomb enemy (if you ever fall off of said enemy, it charges downward and explodes into acid upon colliding with a solid tile). You can’t safely tunnel over them since those particular tiles respawn after being destroyed, so the only way to win is to tunnel through them quickly, then try to land on the uppermost dive-bomber. There are several spots where dive-bombers spawn, making it seem like you should be able to come up from below, but if you try to do that, they’ll just keep dive-bombing, never giving you a chance to jump on one, and you’ll inevitably die from acid (you can’t climb up the pedestal the boss is on because it has feelers that will knock you off). However, at least the spawn points for the dive-bombers are indicated; the worst part of the boss is that if you mess up and fall down, the only way back up to the checkpoint is blocked by an unindicated spawner of a charging enemy that also explodes into acid, so you have to dodge that enemy (in a literal uphill battle) and all the dive-bombers and all the acid projectiles that spawn when each enemy crashes.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. The first half or so is pretty fun, but the game’s focus on spectacle and chaos only makes it harder to play the game. If you’re interested, I say wait for a good sale.