• Overclocked
  

  4 hours playtime

  13 of 36 achievements

First thing you’ll want to do in this platformer is go to the options and turn on “Dedicated Dash Button.” Without that enabled, the controls are unresponsive because a quick tap of the X button will only do a basic punch that stuns enemies and breaks a rarely-occurring shield. To actually defeat enemies, you have to HOLD the X button for a bit in order to activate your dash punch. What’s extra frustrating is that you also have to do this with your ground punch–which the game never tells you also requires holding the button, but is still required significantly more than basic punches since its shockwave disables various switches and kills certain enemies that are immune to your punches. Turning on the Dedicated Dash Button option makes the game significantly more manageable and enjoyable since it makes the X button always do a dash punch no matter how quickly you let go, and you can always push the Y button to do those basic punches in the rare events they’re actually required (though there’s still a noticeable delay between pushing the button and the attack actually happening–a delay that can get you killed sometimes).

The level design starts off maybe a bit too basic, but the difficulty curve is pretty solid. Each level requires defeating all enemies before the goal unlocks, which is annoying both at first and in level 6-2 where the path splits and its not clear which way you’re supposed to go first (which is the top route; it dead-ends with two required drones), but all enemies die in just one dash-punch, and the game is usually pretty good about putting enemies in your way so that even doing basic progression means you can’t overlook them. Also, killing an enemy gives you an extra dash-punch before you have to land, and many levels are built around chaining dash-punching enemies to keep yourself from falling. That said, dash-punches send you further than the edge of the screen, so the game has a bit of a blind-jump problem: it isn’t uncommon to be caught off guard by something you weren’t expecting and end up dying as a result. Sure, levels are only a minute-or-so long, but it’s still an issue. The optional Challenge levels are particularly bad about this: the fifth one ends by requiring you to dash-punch upward, hitting three drones and using your last dash-punch to get above some hazard walls, but if you start your dash-punch at the peak of your jump, you’ll end up killing the second and third drones in the same dash-punch, leaving you no way to get the height required to reach the goal. You just have to remember that’ll happen and fall down a bit after the peak of your jump before dash-punching.

Sure, holding X stops your fall for however long you keep charging your dash-punch, and you can push the B button to cancel that charge and start falling normally without spending your dash-punch, and you can then re-hold X after the cancel to stop yourself again as needed, but 1) it’s very easy to forget that mechanic exists (I beat the entire main campaign without it), and 2) it only helps when falling, not when dash-punching in any direction–which is where a lot of the game’s blind jumps are.

Another annoying thing is that, sometimes, instead of having a linear stage, the game has an arena level where you have to fight waves of enemies. However, once again, all enemies die in just one hit, so these levels aren’t too annoying and generally do a decent job at not killing the game’s pace.

What’s more annoying, though, is the fact that the vast majority of the bosses are wait-to-attack, but even though you die in one hit, you still get sent back to their first phase even if you reach their second or third. Did you think you had to jump under the fourth boss’s wall of missiles, only to get blindsided by another wall of missiles coming at you from the other side of the screen? No time to experiment; back to the start of the fight. The only boss that ISN’T a wait-to-attack boss is the final one, and while that fight is much more engaging and fun than the others, the boss does still activate a shield for the length of one attack after each time you damage him, and some of his attacks can hit you while you’re unable to really do anything if you dash-punch at him at the wrong time.

By the way, unlocking challenge levels requires doing extra objectives in the main levels (which you’re not told what they are until after you beat the level), so although I did beat the challenge levels I unlocked, I didn’t replay levels to get any more of them.

Overall, the game does have some issues, but it’s free and has plenty of fun parts, so I can recommend it.