October Assassination #4

Nostalgia is a tough thing. I remember being absolutely blown away by this game back in the day, with its big, wide and detailed levels, the riddle-based goals that lead you toward the hearts, the overall badass vibe, the combat, and the movement.

Well, 20 or so years later I decided to go back to it, and it wasn't a pleasing experience. Take combat -- it is very simple, you have no defensive options, and limited healing options mostly involving getting life back after defeating enemies (which can be an issue when the health pickup falls out of the map). And it's repetitive, throughout the game it never improves or gets better than the first level, and the game overuses flying enemies which are just annoying.

The movement system is actually pretty good, but not without flaws. The first being depth perception, with many platforming sections requiring precise positioning but being very hard to read. The second is that the same key inputs are used for both long jump and high jump, which makes it less than ideal to switch between the two and makes what could have been a very satisfying system into something clunky.

The levels, in retrospect, are smaller than I remember. I think they are indeed detailed and verticality adds a lot of fun to it, but you navigate them too quickly to modern standards. Most goals are well signaled so you generally have a good idea about where to go and what to do, but every level has a sundial goal that is generally a pain to find, a bigger pain to solve the sundial dimension which tends to be a platforming gauntlet without context. And that brings me to possibly the biggest flaw in the game, the lives system. It adds nothing, just wastes your time.

The game has transformations, but only two and they are sparsely used (each used maybe 2 or 3 times throughout the game). It's a sign it was abandoned before being fully done. There is some lore but it is very skippable and contributes little to nothing to the game in the end.

In summary, this game helps to explain why Acclaim went broke after releasing it. Acclaim was all the rage during my SNES years, it was incredible, but then it clearly became less relevant during the PSX years, and if a game like Vexx was the one supposed to put it back on the map, I understand why it floundered. Vexx was supposed to be a bad boy with attitude, but just wasn't a really good game after all