Roguelite turn-based tactics. You have your standard normal attacks and resource-consuming attacks (though ranged abilities can only be used in the four cardinal directions, which can be annoying at times), but what sets this apart is that the further you move in one turn, the more dodge-points you accumulate, which reduces damage taken the same way staying on a shield/cover tile would. This means that you'll sometimes be able to take no damage from attacks if you can get your combined dodge and cover high enough. It's a unique mechanic that's executed well. Plus, there's no miss-chances or fog-of-war, so you can focus on the main tactical gameplay.

In fact, a lot of the individual components of the game are well made; my main issue is that it's a roguelite. Besides new team members (whose unlock requirements pretty much demand you to beat the game first anyway), the only permanent unlocks you get are the chance for new upgrades to show up during future runs; other than that negligible detail, a single failed mission makes you lose all your progress, forcing you to start the entire 5-8 hour campaign over from scratch. Plus, like you'd expect from a game without fixed progression, the difficulty curve isn't too great, either: on my first run, I got wrecked by a tower miniboss on the third level, and on my second run, I never encountered a single miniboss at all--and that was the run where I beat the game. There were "survival" missions in the late game where I managed to defeat all the enemies and just had to wait for the turn counter to run out, in contrast to the early game where I actually had to survive for the set amount of turns.

However, the worst part was when I finally beat the final boss, only for him escape and the game to cut back to the base without any kind of epilogue or staff roll. Turns out (according to this reddit post at least), the only way to reach the actual ending is to do FOUR MORE RUNS, with each unlocking exactly one new boss fight that wasn't available before. Yeah, I'm not doing all that. If that's what it takes to truly beat this game, then I give up.

Overall, this has the makings of a solid tactics title, and it deserved better than being a roguelite. I wouldn't recommend trying to get 100%, but if you're okay with just finishing one run, I'd say wait for a good sale.

Platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps (though the second jump isn't nearly as high and it also kills your forward momentum), X does a spinning attack that not only hits enemies and objects around you, but it doesn't lock or interrupt your movement like so many other games. Bosses even have checkpoints between each time they allow you to deal damage to them, which I greatly appreciate after having to play wait-to-attack bosses in one-hit-death games that don't do this. That said, the game can be a bit gimmicky with how spread out the introductions of each mask power and new character are, as well as how underutilized they tend to be. Heck, the side characters often don't even get full levels to themselves for their limited appearances, with the levels' second halves switching back to Crash/Coco for a harder version of one of the main levels (and exactly how much harder they are varies greatly, from "way harder" to "almost no changes"). Still, level design as a whole is pretty good for the most part.

There were a few moments where it felt like enemy hitboxes were too big and I died from hitting the space beside them, but the bigger issue for me is that checkpoints are sometimes spaced about twice as far apart as they should be. Keep in mind that this is a one-hit-death game, so there's no pretending that this would increase the difficulty; all it does is make the game more tedious by forcing you redo a bunch of stuff you've already cleared before you can retry the part where you died. If there's one trend I really hate about modern games, it's this. I remember seeing the video of the Celeste dev talking at GDC where he tried acting like this was a valid way to design games and would actually make the game harder, and even back then, I remember thinking to myself "No, you're wrong; stop using your platform to make games worse." But lo, Celeste made a lot of money, so the industry blindly follows without thinking about whether its success was because of certain details or despite them.

Plus, you can tell the devs/publisher truly believed that fewer checkpoints was real difficulty because if you trigger the built-in dynamic difficulty by dying enough times, one of the things that changes is an extra checkpoint is placed where there should have been one from the beginning. The other thing that changes is you start with an extra hit before you die, which sometimes makes the game easier, but other times has no effect due to the section's hazards all being instakill stuff like pits. Still, I would have preferred a way to toggle off dynamic difficulty and just make the extra checkpoints permanent from the start.

However, the game is at its worst with how it handles optional stuff. For example, I'd always try to break all the crates in each level, but out of all the main levels, I only managed to do it in one of them (the second level); for all the others, the game would keep telling me that I missed a few somewhere, even when I was confident I'd checked everywhere. On top of this, there are bonus platforms in many levels that'll take you to a short, optional challenge segment (which of course has its own set of crates that count to the level's total). The early ones are decent challenges, but for a few of the late-game ones, I couldn't even figure out what actions the game expected me to do to get through the segment at all, let alone get through while breaking all the crates. Turns out, the tutorials really don't tell you all the controls or mechanics: it isn't until world 6 where the level design shows you that sliding off a platform keeps you hovering in midair until the slide is over, and the game never tells you about the Triple Spin until AFTER YOU BEAT THE GAME. Who knows what other mechanics those bonus segments require that I missed entirely?

And that's just for breaking all the crates. The game also has a set of short, optional levels called Flashback Tapes that you can only unlock by reaching a certain point in each level without dying (so again, more tedium). I only unlocked four of them legitimately, with the rest being accessed by using the Everything Unlocked mod, and ironically, many of these levels are better designed than the main levels. No enemies means no hitbox issues (challenge is still there due to pitfalls, timed blocks, and exploding TNT/Nitro crates), their shorter length means dying doesn't usually make you redo too much, and their linear 2D nature makes it harder to miss crates, so I even managed to get 100% in most of those levels. Unfortunately, when these levels falter, they falter hard. The timed blocks are fine when you're running against the clock, but then the game also sometimes makes you wait for them to disappear, so if you're having trouble on a segment after the waiting but before the checkpoint, you have to redo that waiting each time. This is so much worse than redoing segments in the main game because not only is it boring to have to do all that waiting each time, but Flashback Tapes don't have any grace checkpoints to alleviate the tedium if you die too much. Oh, but the waiting isn't limited to timed blocks; this also includes waiting on fruit-crates to break (they take five jumps) and Flashback-Tape-exclusive bounce-crates to transform into destructible Nitro crates (three jumps for each one). Almost every Flashback Tape where I didn't break 100% of the boxes, it was because I got tired of waiting on the same stuff over and over in order to regain my progress. The only exception was the final tape, which I gave up on entirely because it demanded way too much precision compared to what the controls reliably allow you to do: you have to land on the edge of a bounce-crate while moving away from the spring so you don't die to the Nitro Crate above you, then pull back and do the same thing again for the bounce-crate/Nitro-crate combo above it. I'd sometimes manage the first, but I could never do it twice in a row.

And then there are the four colored gems. The Everything Unlocked mod doesn't actually unlock the gem platforms, so you have to get the gems yourself if you want to unlock those segments, but when I looked up how to get them, it was bad-Adventure-game levels of "how was I supposed to figure that out?" and since I'd already given up on the final Flashback Tape, I just didn't bother with the gems at all.

Overall, I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to get 100% on this game, but if you're okay with simply beating games and skipping the optional stuff, wait for a good sale.

I didn't really notice this until my brother made an off-hand comment about a year ago, but there's been a new subgenre of 2D plaformer for some time now: Celeste-clones. These are distinguished from ordinary 2D platformers by having no real enemies or combat of any kind, with challenge based pretty much entirely on avoiding pits/spikes and with chase sequences instead of boss fights. Also, while they start with a decent amount of challenge, they also don't have much of a difficulty curve, just like their patron game. Sure, Celeste does a lot right, so these games usually won't be too bad, but because they also blindly copy its formula without really thinking about what worked and what didn't, they also inevitably copy some of the problems Celeste had, so they can never be better than just okay.

Between all these games copying both the general formula for Celeste as well as its lack of a difficulty curve, they all start to feel the same--not just within themselves, but also as each other, and this game is no exception. The main gimmick this game does to try to stand out is that pushing RT pokes the ground with your stick, which causes you to jump higher than a regular A-button-jump on solid ground but will stick you to red-cushion ground so you can launch yourself left/right, but this isn't enough to give the game its own identity; ultimately, it just got me confused sometimes where I'd accidentally push one button when I meant to do the other button's action and I'd get killed because of it.

Another way this game tries and fails to set itself apart from Celeste is by giving you new abilities that you can take back to previous areas to get collectibles you missed. The problem here is that this game isn't a metroidvania; it's a very linear Celeste clone, and it misses the point of why Celeste doesn't let the player take the double-dash into other levels: to help showcase that all optional collectibles can be obtained the first time you see them. No matter how hard it is to get that strawberry, you can get it with the knowledge the game has given you beforehand. In contrast, if you're having trouble getting a golden music note, it can sometimes seem like there's no way you can get it at all…because there isn't; you HAVE to bypass and backtrack for it after getting another ability. Sometimes, the game has an optional room in a split path, and in those cases, it'll even display a message explicitly telling you that you have to come back later:

As for the backtracking itself, the game does give you a fast-travel ability you can do by pushing X, but each section only has three fast-travel locations at best, so you'd still have to replay a bunch of rooms you already got everything in before you can try to get the golden notes you missed. Sure, it's better than Celeste having zero fast travel points, but it's a downgrade from Super Meat Boy letting you go directly back to the level with the warp zone you passed up. Oh, how quickly people forget the past…

By the way, even though I took the time to get around 2/3rds of the golden notes, I still beat the game in only around 2 hours and 30 minutes (not much longer than the Steam refund window), so on top of the game not really having much of a difficulty curve, it's also quite light on content.

Overall, it's not a bad game, but it's very much not worth $20 USD. Play the original, free version, play the free demo for this version, but the full game? Even if it were half price, I'd say wait for a sale.

Fast-paced Hack 'n' Slash with slow, Shmup-influenced enemy projectiles. I've never been a big fan of the hack 'n' slash genre, but having movement-based challenges instead of reaction-based ones combined with enemies only taking a few hits to die really helped this to be an enjoyable experience for me. Granted, it's not always enough to encourage fighting enemies when the game doesn't go into lockdown and force you to, but even running away still results in some challenge since you have to avoid all the bullets being shot at you (it may even be harder to run away in some cases).

The game is somewhat nonlinear. Not only does the map have many winding, interconnected paths, but quite a few of the areas and bosses can be tackled in any order (though there are a few progression upgrades you'll need to access certain places). The downside of this is that it can be hard to figure out which path is forward and which path leads to an optional upgrade, so you'll sometimes find yourself teleporting back to the previous respawn/fast-travel-point to see what's in the other direction.

If I had to say one problem with the game, it's that not all attacks have sufficient warning. For example, the Shmup elements sometimes don't account for the fact that this is a hack 'n' slash: you're often gonna be right next to the enemy/boss to attack them, yet bullets appear and move immediately. And sure, some attacks have red !s pop up to warn you, but others seem deliberately designed to trick you, like how some enemies shoot immediately after landing from a jump despite most enemies just having normal, non-shooting jumps. The worst example is probably the boss Grief: it tries to incorporate your recently-acquired digging ability into a boss fight, but there's no spot to dig in the boss arena at first. What the game does is subtly spawn a dig spot during one of the boss's attacks that spawns thick crowds of spikes across the arena, then its next attack hits the whole stage, so you only have a couple seconds to 1) realize it's even there in the first place since it's graphic isn't all that stand-out, and 2) perform the jump+ground-pound move wherever it spawned to get to safety. Even after you know what to do, it can be a bit challenging, but going in blind, it's quite a cheap hit.

…and if I had to say two problems with the game, it's that postgame super isn't worth it. I tried it since there weren't many other Game Pass games I was interested in, but it just reinforced my decision not to do other games' postgames. Not only does the game suddenly take a turn into arbitrary riddle territory just to gain access, but even after you figure out how to light the cat statues, you still have to find the upgrades needed to light each statue in the first place, and without a walkthrough, that's it's own aimless chore. Plus, the postgame itself is pretty bland and disappointing: the entirety of it consists of 1) a quiz about different story/gameplay details, some of which are rather obscure and easily missed/forgotten (you have to fight six enemies for each question you get wrong), 2) a series of lockdown battles ending with one that's way too long--easily 8+ waves (it's not even in the top 5 hardest lockdown battles in the game; it's just pointlessly long for no reason), and 3) yet more basic platforming across crumbling blocks that isn't meaningfully different than the jumps the game has already been making you do (the enemies here don't even shoot at you, so it's honestly easier). Plus, the cutscene you get after finishing those segments is rather disappointing. The dialogue fits the characters, but it's short and nothing really meaningful or even funny happens.

Wait for a sale.