Been going through my itch.io backlog some more, and as usual, it’s taking me a while to find another game I can recommend without any caveats. Frog Hop has a decent amount of content, but level design is kinda mediocre and sometimes aimless (which makes trying to find the collectibles extra annoying). Plus, the zoomed-in nature of the screen can result in some blind jumps/cheap hits, and the bosses–particularly the final boss–have attacks that you just have to memorize their foreshadow animations to be able to dodge them. Also, it’s $5, which might seem cheap if you’re used to the standard $20-$30 for indie games, but for this game, that price is a stretch at best.

Then there’s Gun Princess 2, which is a free metroidvania with more engaging level design and enemy patterns, but it also suffers from its final boss having cheap hits. Plus, it has this annoying mechanic where you have to wait for your main gun to reload ammo slowly, and this is on top of your other guns having finite ammo that only refills at save points. You also have to backtrack aaaaalll the way back to the ruins if you want to buy some of the items that you’d never have enough money to afford when you first get there, and I beat the game with less than half of the money you’d need to buy the “earn more money” item. Wasn’t a fan of its forward momentum, either.

Super Robot Ninja Girl is another free game, this one being a short platformer which does away with that slowly-refilling-ammo mechanic and forward momentum, but the game is entirely carried by the enemies’ SHMUP-style bullet patterns since the level design itself is quite flat (even moreso than Frog Hop). Plus, its final boss might just be the cheapest out of this bunch; I was only able to win by tanking hits with a full set of health after dying to it previously. I’m also not too keen on its lives system, but then again, the game is short enough that you don’t have to worry too much about getting game over (I only died twice).

Lastly, Xydonia Alpha 3 was ALMOST a solid recommendation, being a highly polished Shoot-em-up with decent level design, okay bosses, and lots of spectacle. Thing is, when you beat the first level, you get three different choices for which to play as the second level–and it’s already annoying enough having to replay the first stage three times to see everything, but the more you play, the more you start to notice certain things:

• The boss of the middle second level (Stage 1B) has its weak point on top of it, which doesn’t give you much room or time to hit it with your rightward-shooting guns. Sure, the green gun has an upgrade that lets it shoot vertically, but you lose all your upgrades when you die, which will certainly happen when this boss’s missiles blindside you by suddenly shooting out fast, 8-way projectiles when they’re destroyed. Also, these bosses take way too long to defeat if you’re downed to your default guns.
• The boss of the bottom second level (Stage 1C) has a move where it suddenly emits blue smoke from its mouth which is also harmful even though it just looks like a visual effect (in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s just a blue recolor of the harmless explosion graphics).
• The third and final level is always the same no matter which second level you pick, and it’s also the one with the repetitive snake boss that does the same thing it already did twice during the regular stage. That said, at least with this one, you can just pause+quit so you don’t have to replay THIS level again.
• The game never tells you this, but the characters in the character selection have weaker weapons the further right you go. If you play as the rightmost character, it’s bad enough that the levels themselves also become kinda tedious. Meanwhile, if the leftmost character is fully upgraded, he can sometimes defeat certain bosses before they’ve cycled their pattern once.
• The meteors in the first stage don’t stand out too well considering one of them comes at you from the left at a decent speed (and that tiny red arrow warning about it also isn’t very eye-catching, either).

But the biggest one of all: the full game never came out even though it had a fully-funded Kickstarter campaign, last updated 2020. I don’t see much harm coming from playing this free alpha build; just keep in mind that this is likely all that will ever exist (perhaps even all that was intended to exist).