This is a platformer. Standard left/right movement and jump, you also have a short-range attack by pushing the X button. You get more powers as you progress, like a long-range attack that consumes ammo and a parry move by tapping forward when an enemy projectile is close enough to you. Unlike Bleed 2, however, there's no visualization for your parry move or its range (it looks the same as every time you begin a walk cycle); you just gotta tap forward and hope you were close enough and that your tap was short enough. Honestly, I'm not sure if there are certain projectiles that simply can't be parried, or if the parry mechanic just happened to fail me every time for those specific shots. The parry move also quickly becomes a requirement after you get it, even though you get it around halfway through the game and it's pretty finnicky.

Oh, and one of the powerups is a dash that's activated by double-tapping forward, which makes the parry mechanic even more finnicky since you might accidentally dash instead. Luckily, you can turn it off in the options so that dashing is just forward and RB, but you have to hold RB after holding forward or it won't register.

The game has a good first impression. Enemies are introduced in ways where you can learn their patterns without being blindsided, controls are responsive, and there's even no momentum with the platforming. Heck, most enemies even die in one hit, allowing for a fast paced game and more complex movement patterns without getting annoying. You'll notice little issues, but those little issues can be forgiven, like the moving platforms not always lining up (forcing you to wait a bit longer) or the wall turrets suddenly fading back into existence a while after you killed them.

Sadly, the issues start getting bigger as early as level 2. This level introduces the trash blocks from Spark Man's stage, as well as bug nests (destroying them releases tiny bugs that do a hybrid of chase you and fly around in a circle) and lasers that instantly stretch from their spawn point to the next wall (as opposed to being another projectile). Fine on paper, but there's an elevator segment where you have to navigate some tight spaces between spikes, where you're not given enough room to avoid the bugs that decide to come at you directly from above. Then, there's a hall going to the left, but there's also a laser-shooter on the left, offscreen, making it very easy to get hit before you know it's even there. To top it off, near the end is a vertical shaft where you have to climb up the trash blocks, but since you can't see the dispenser at the top of the shaft, you won't be able to see it open and won't be able to react to the falling trash blocks (especially since this shaft also has those laser shooters, but at least you can see and react to them).

Stage 3 didn't feel as cheap, but it also has a powerup that shields you while you stand still and only takes damage when you take damage, so it's definitely way easier and even makes the boss of the stage kinda a joke (at least, its 1st phase; its 2nd phase has a sword instead of projectiles, and when I got hit by that sword, it killed the powerup). Also, for some reason, the powerup is drawn in front of the reticle that warns you of where a sky-laser is gonna strike. By the way, this level is also the only time this powerup shows up;

The water snake boss from level 4 really irked me. First of all, you gotta hit enemies to drop them into the water to make platforms so you can attack the boss (and you gotta keep doing it as the boss can destroy said platforms); that's one thing, but there isn't always an enemy nearby when the platforms start to fail you, and while being in water itself isn't harmful, it restricts your movement enough that you won't be able to avoid the snake's underwater charge. Even if you do manage to keep making platforms throughout the fight, there are issues: it has a fire-breath attack, but its weak point is its face, so if you're out of ammo, you can get maybe one or two hits in before you need to run away and wait out the attack. But the worst is its sudden dive out of the water into the sky; there are only two or three units of water on the bottom of the screen, so you're not gonna be able to react to it when it comes up, and for the longest time, I didn't think it even had a foreshadow animation. After a few retries, I finally noticed what it was: small bubble sprites, the same sprites that show up when you fall in the water, or when an enemy falls into the water to make those platforms, or when the boss itself dives into the water (which happens all the time, not just for that one attack).

Level 5 is when you first have to work with that finnicky parry mechanic, but the level also introduces spikes that only come out of the ground when you get close, and of all the gimmicks that were stage-exclusive, this ended up being the one that was reused in future levels. Technically, there is an indication that the spikes are there, that being the ground is made of pink tiles, but the problem is that those exact same pink tiles are also regularly used as normal ground, without any spikes. Plus, there can even be pink foreground objects above the pink tiles, further obscuring the pink spikes that spawn from them. It really shouldn't need to be said that it'd be better if the spikes were visible by default.

One of the bosses in level 5 is a pink mass in the center of the screen that shoots pink projectiles without warning, some of which end up being chasing enemies and all of which come from the weak point, but the boss can also shoot a pink projectile straight down on the ground which causes a chain-reaction of fire to spread outward from the boss, and due to a combination of the shot being hard to see and your proximity to the spawn point necessary to damage the boss, it can be easy not to notice it and get hit by the fire.

Level 6 has a wall boss that shoots a projectile to the other side of the screen, then proceeds to have it shoot lasers up and down and slowly move back to you. After you break the projectiles shield, you can knock it towards the boss to deal damage, but it takes so long if you try doing it without taking damage that by the time you've sent it towards the boss, another one is on its way, causing both of them to destroy each other and leave the boss unharmed.

In level 7, there are bubbles that spawn from green pits, and the large ones spawn a chasing enemy when popped, which is one thing, but they're introduced in a room where you need to go above where you can stop them, so you'll still have to deal with them chasing you from below as you deal with other enemies. Plus, they also take a few hits to die, so it's not like you can just react to them; you gotta stop what you're doing and focus on just them, at which point another one will spawn, and so on.

Level 8 (at least most of it) ends up being a drop in difficulty because even though your hitbox is larger, you get a ranged attack by default for this stage. It's also partly an auto-scroller, so the level design isn't as complex. Level 9 brings the challenge back up, even reusing that awful sudden-spike-spawning gimmick, but then level 10 goes back to being kinda easy; you're just going up a vertical shaft and waiting on moving platforms while avoiding the occasional chasing enemy. Even the final boss is easier and fairer than previous bosses; the only reason it'll give you grief is because it lasts three phases, and the second half of the third phase puts the weak point at the top of the screen, where you need to wait on platforms to spawn to reach it, except the boss shoots large projectiles from its weak point when said platforms spawn, so again, you can only get a couple hits in safely before you need to run away and wait for another opportunity to strike.

Overall, this one's a bit tough to recommend. Parts of the game are really well made, but other parts are fraught with issues. Wait for a sale.

I could've sworn I saw another BLAEO member say this was a platformer, but really, it's more of a stealth/adventure game. You're mostly just wandering around empty areas, occasionally holding-RT-but-not-quite-all-the-way-nope-now-you're-not-holding-it-down-enough so you can get the other animals to let you progress. Sometimes, the screen will go orange and you have to avoid being spotted by the homunculi, though even if you are seen, you can usually take cover behind some objects so their projectile attacks can't reach you. There's an early part where you gotta steal some eggs from them, and you can basically just walk right up and take them as soon as you see them set them down on the pedestal.

By the time anything resembling platforming shows up, you've gotten the gliding power, so any time you can't seem to make a jump, it's because you didn't find the tree you needed to climb or because you didn't activate the flowers that generate updrafts to keep you in the air, not because you lack platforming skill. The closest the game got to having platforming is when you have to climb the giant deer (90 minutes into the game), gliding between the trees growing on it, but on top of needing to wait for the deer's walk-cycle to line up with the next tree, the game's gliding isn't very precise, making it easy to glide directly beside the tree trunk you were aiming for.

I gave up not long after making it to the island of worms that speak red-triangle. If it's taken this long for some actual platforming to show up (or even more focused stealth gameplay instead of just adventure-game-style fetch quests and trial-and-error), the game clearly isn't for me.

This is a twin-stick shooter. Left stick moves, right stick shoots; no need to hold a separate "shoot" button for this game. You'll find powerups in levels, such as sub-weapons (that cycle to the other sub-weapons if you wait before picking them up) and one that prevents your shots from disappearing after half-a-screen. You also have a dash move that lets you go through hazards without getting hit, but like your sub-weapons, it has to recharge before you can use it again (unless you get the triple-dash powerup, which lets you dash three times before it needs to recharge). That said, there are no button prompts as you play, so you'd only know about the dash mechanic if you checked the controls beforehand (and yes, the dash is required to avoid certain attacks).

First thing you'll notice is that the difficulty selection is stupid. "More enemies" is one thing, but the predominant difference is fewer continues! Not lives, but continues, so if you run out, you have to start the whole game over. Sure, you can easily beat normal mode in far fewer than 99 continues, but only 10 for hard mode is ridiculous. Congratulations, game, you managed to come up with a difficulty system even worse than Wings of Vi! EDIT: Wait, I forgot about Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril; that game did the same thing with its difficulty selection (minus the "more enemies," making it even stupider), so this game isn't even original with its awful idea. EDIT 2: I just remembered Zero Wing also did the same thing! Why is this so popular??

Anyway, when you actually start the game, you'll notice that most enemies just beeline towards you, and when all enemies are killed (or at least all the ones directly trying to attack you), you'll glow for a second, then be automatically rocketed towards the next arena, so level design means very little at first since you can just stand still and let the enemies come to you. That said, the game does start having more enemies that shoot bullet patterns and lasers, so it never gets too bland. There's quite a bit of visual clutter when enemies die, and while it's not much of an issue at first, some enemy types will spawn projectiles on death, and it gets worse as more and more projectile enemies start showing up. And then there's world 3, which is red, the same color as the projectiles.

The arena right before the boss of each world always puts the camera in an over-the-shoulder position instead of its usual top-down position, making it really awkward to control your character in those areas.

The world 4 boss is when it really starts getting bad. It has an attack where it shoots at you while moving its gun from side to side, and you can't run around the shots, so you have to dash through, except this part also has the boss sending out shockwaves, which you also need to dash through, but since your dash has to recharge, there's no way to avoid both attacks as they cycle through each other. I only won because the boss arena has a subweapon box, letting me use rocket launchers to get past that phase before I had to use another continue.

Then there's world 5, which introduces dark-purple lasers. They're effectively the same as the regular lasers, except these can't be dashed through, and since the game doesn't have any prompts or tutorials, you'd only know this after you try it and get killed.

The final boss is actually better than the world 4 boss, but around halfway through, it has a move where it puts a pink ring around your character, which you just know will close in at some point and you'll need to dash through it. Thing is, the boss also sends out pink shockwaves during this part, and even if you discount the pink-on-pink making it hard to track both at once, there's still the fact that you'd have to time your dash to avoid both a shockwave and the ring, so you just have to die enough to memorize when the ring strikes (after the 5th shockwave, so time the dodge with the 6th).

Also, there's a secret postgame boss that I only found out about while looking at the achievements, so I looked it up and found out the only way to unlock it is to beat the game without using a single continue.

So yeah, this game's hard to recommend. I really wanted to like it since it's a twin-stick shooter that's more of a SHMUP (unlike twin-stick shooters like Ruiner that are closer to a military-styled FPS with their realistically-fast bullets), but in channeling retro arcade gameplay, it ended up having near-FantasyZone levels of cheap nonsense. Maybe just wait until you have a Game Pass free trial to play it.

THIS GAME DOES ALMOST EVERYTHING WRONG! UP IS JUMP, PUSHING JUMP FORCES YOU TO DO A FULL JUMP (NO SHORT HOPS), JUMPS ARE SLOW AND FLOATY, MOVEMENT HAS MOMENTUM (SO THE SIMPLE ACT OF TURNING AROUND IS DELAYED, EVEN ON THE GROUND), ENEMIES MANAGE TO BLEND INTO THE BACKGROUND WHETHER YOU'RE OUTSIDE OR IN A CAVE, ENEMIES STAND MOTIONLESS UNTIL THEY HAVE A CLEAR SHOT AT YOU (WHICH USUALLY HAPPENS IN THE MIDDLE OF A JUMP, SO YOU CAN'T DODGE), ENEMIES TAKE FOREVER TO KILL (AND THE GAME DARES TO ADVERTISE ITSELF AS "FAST PACED" WHICH IS A SRAIGHT-UP LIE), ENEMIES JUST GET EVEN MORE UNFAIR AS YOU CONTINUE (INCLUDING ABSORBING YOUR SHOTS TO FIRE BACK AT YOU AND TELEPORTING ABOVE YOU AFTER TAKING ENOUGH DAMAGE), LEVEL DESIGN IS TOTAL GARBAGE (ONLY CONSISTING OF HALL, SHAFT, AND LARGE OPEN SPACE; MAYBE A LEVER TO OPEN A GATE IF YOU'RE LUCKY), AND THE GAME REGULARLY MAKES YOU MANIPULATE OBSTACLES WITH A PHYSICS ENGINE, SOMETIMES BACK ACROSS THE WHOLE LEVEL!

NO.

EDIT: I just noticed the game was made by the same developer as Apotheon. Suddenly, everything makes a bit more sense.

This is a hack 'n' slash and a SHMUP stitched together with little regard for cohesion. X is melee attack (which, in typical hack 'n' slash style, has varied animations for your combos, including boomeranging your sword well past the enemy you're trying to attack), Y is secondary attack, A is jump (though there isn't much platforming here, much like Fe), RT is dodge, RB is your ranged attack (rapid fire, unlimited ammo), LB is your special attack (a laser that has a cooldown period before you can use it again), and LT is the lock-on button. The lock-on mechanic does something I don't remember seeing in any game before: being bad. For the longest time, I thought it only worked while the button was held down since it would deactivate whenever I let go, but sometimes, it would stay on. Turns out, you have to tap the analogue trigger button for it to stay locked-on; holding it for too long transitions it into "let go to deactivate lock on" mode. Oh, and when you kill the locked-on enemy, it turns off automatically instead of switching over to another enemy.

A while back, I played the predecessor to this game, and while it had its problems, I thought it was worth checking out if you could find a used copy for maybe five US dollars (or just emulate it). There's a lot I don't remember from that game, but I do distinctly remember its awful introduction. In contrast, this game has a much better opening, starting you off in SHMUP mode and telling you what different buttons do (and not letting you use buttons it hasn't told you about), then switching to twin-stick mode (where you still have to hold RB to shoot) so you can get a feel of that, then finally going into hack 'n' slash mode where you fight a significantly lower amount of the exact same enemy over and over, followed by a miniboss (a giant saw on a mechanical arm) where you learn about your special attack. There's also one brief part where the camera goes behind your ship and you think it's also gonna have Star-Fox-esque gameplay, but seeing as that never happens again, I'm starting to think that was just a cut-scene. Before this opening is over, you'll get a level-up, letting you know the game also has RPG mechanics.

After beating the mini-boss and being told what the lock-on button is, you'll go forward a bit and encounter a dead end. But…there didn't seem to be another way to go, right? Well, after wandering around for a bit, it turns out there is a thin, barely noticeable fork in the path, and it isn't until a few seconds after you go down this path that you unlock the map. Oh no, the game has new problems that weren't in the last one!

As you continue through the first level, you'll mainly be fighting the same enemy, but unlike the previous game, you're not just trapped in a room and can run past them if you feel like it. Later in the level, the game traps you in rooms and makes you fight waves of them before you can progress. It does get kinda repetitive, but the game also introduces shield enemies where you have to do melee attacks to break their shield before you can deal damage to them (though otherwise, they're pretty similar). You'll also occasionally see the basic SHMUP enemy floating around and shooting you. After a while, you'll make it to the end of the level, a seemingly endless and very-much-in-tact bridge, and have to fight two of the saw mini-boss from earlier at the same time on said bridge. One of their attacks is to lay on the bridge and move across it, so I though "I can just run away to avoid the attack," except it turns out there's an invisible wall on the bridge not far from the level (even though the graphic still shows bridge going away from you), and since I also didn't know the mechanical-arm-part of the boss was safe to touch and since I was pretty low on health from earlier, I died here, and that's when things really got on my nerves. See, if you die in the first level, the game does a fake bad ending, even having a super-quick credits scroll like in Half-Minute Hero (which is, admittedly, kinda funny) before booting you back to the title screen. Problem is, not only does the game not have autosaves (which is one thing), but the game also doesn't have any manual saves in the entirety of the first level, so if you die at the boss, you gotta play through that entire half-hour-long, repetitive level again from the beginning, even if you select continue and reload your file. I wasn't a fan of the previous game's opening, but at least it didn't last half an hour before you could save!

Oh, that's also not the end of the first level. After you beat those two mini-bosses, you have to fight the stage boss: a giant damage sponge. It's too far away for you to use melee attacks, so you have to use your much weaker ranged attacks, and also shooting at a locked-on enemy scatters your fire (non-locked-on shots all go straight), so the fight will inevitably take longer as some of your shots will inevitably miss. Also, the boss has a move where it dives under the bridge and comes up through the bridge, destroying the part closest to the edge, but for this boss, the game forces you into a 2D sidescroller mode, so how do you avoid the attack? Simple: when the boss dives, the game suddenly shifts back to 3D without any indication or alternate camera AI, all of a sudden allowing you to walk into the camera to escape the attack. Still no save point, by the way; you'll just have to burn through whatever healing items you got from within the level so as not to redo the half-hour, repetitive dungeon again again.

Oh, but this boss also has phases. The second phase puts you back in twinstick mode, though the fight is mostly the same, just without the boss's dive attack and without your lock-on. After a while, a cut-scene plays that shows you get the boss's arm, and without any kind of button prompt, the game expects you to know that you can do a melee attack in SHMUP mode (thus finally dealing more damage to the boss and killing it), even though the game never let you use that button until after you were in hack 'n' slash mode.

And then you can save.

For the first time.

You know, I don't think this game's introduction is that much better than the previous game's.

Oh, and after you beat the level, the game has the audacity to follow it up with a forced brightness-and-audio-setup like you didn't just put up with a ton of unfair nonsense. There's a self-destruct mechanic, which you might think could come in handy at some point, but it turns out you activate self-destruct with the B button, the same button you use to pick up items and talk to NPCs. I turned it off.

The game also has an upgrade system, separate from leveling stuff up. Upgrades have weight, represented by the thickness of horizontal lines, and you're not allowed to go over the limit. Fine so far, but you have to manually place the upgrades' horizontal bars in an empty slot on the rectangle, and when you de-equip an upgrade to put something in its place, the other upgrades won't automatically sort, meaning each previously-equipped upgrade has to be painstakingly selected and moved up so that you have space for the new upgrade you already know you have capacity for. To be clear, this isn't like opening the gates in The Talos Principle where you need to fit the differently-shaped pieces together; none of the upgrades in this game have unique shapes, nor do they have arbitrary qualifications regarding placement on the equip rectangle. They're all horizontal bars that stretch from one end of the rectangle to the other, so if you have capacity equal to or greater than the upgrade you want, you have room to equip it; you just have to make that room manually. I've definitely seen worse problems, but I don't think I've never seen one this…petty. It would've been easier to do the right thing and just make it a fraction! But no, the game's gotta be tedious for no reason for stuff that 1980s RPGs got right.

Anyway, after you're done with the brightness and audio settings (and saving your game, finally), the game gives you your second objective: fly to the resistance base. This leads to another SHMUP segment, which is okay, but after transitioning back to hack 'n' slash mode for the open world segment, you're placed on top of a skyscraper and have to work your way down. Thing is, falling down the holes in the floors of each floor of the skyscraper is really tedious since it's empty and the holes are all in different spots. It is possible to double jump and hold the jump button on the second jump to glide down, but the game never tells you this (you have to figure it out on your own, likely by accident). Not only is the open world sparsely populated by enemies, but when you make it to the resistance camp, your next objective is to go to the desert and kill more enemies (and your optional side-quests involve going to different points in the city ruins and killing more of the same enemy), the same type you killed a bunch of in the first level. Just like the previous game, this game's opening also ended up being an entirely superfluous difficulty spike that would be better removed from the game and tutorials reassigned to different locations. Oh, and speaking of the desert, when you're almost done with the mission, the last one runs away into a large, circular pit, and you think "oh, this is a boss room; I'm gonna fight a boss soon," but no, it's empty; you just keep running forward and go through some small corridors until you come across another large, circular pit, and as you start to work your way down, the ground collapses from under you, and when you reach the bottom, you discover the game has fall damage.

There's also no boss here, at least not at first. Instead, the game just spams waves and waves of the same basic, cannon-fodder hack-'n'-slash-mode-exclusive enemy. Not only does it take a while (comparable to the previous game's introduction), but it soon gets to the point where they're crowding the arena and there isn't much you can do to avoid them. Eventually, the game decides that enough time has passed and the enemies go away to make room for the second boss, and wouldn't you know it, the boss is much more appropriate to be the first boss than the game's actual first boss. It'll just walk towards you and do melee attacks at first, but around half-way through (which happens way quicker than the half-way point of the first boss), the boss gets immunity to your ranged attacks, so you have to use melee attacks and dodge when you see the boss's wind-up animations.

The third area doesn't have much combat outside of a 2D rollercoaster segment, but the boss introduces a new type of projectile: a yellow circle that sends you into a "hacking" minigame if you're hit. The game transitions back into twin-stick mode and puts you and a single enemy in a small, featureless room, and you just shoot the enemy a few times to kill it and be transported back to the boss. Even outside of the hacking shots, the boss will still transition between hack-'n'-slash and twin-stick modes, except this transition is awful: rather than pull back the camera and tilt it down as it moves up (putting you on the bottom of the screen and the boss on top), the game turns the camera 180-degrees so you're stuck looking at the freaking wall while waiting for the camera to crawl its way into position (eventually resulting in you being on the top of the screen and the boss being on the bottom, which is functionally no different than the reverse).

After this, you're lead to a town in the forest where you meet another character and have to run back and forth between this town and the resistance camp back in the ruined city to do some mandatory fetch quests. Oh yeah, there aren't any fast-travel points in this open world game, and you don't even get a car like in Anodyne 2; you just gotta run. After this, you're told that there's a giant robot in the ruined city that you gotta go kill, and once this cut-scene happens, you're locked from completing any side quests (even if all that's left for you to do is talk to an NPC), so I reloaded my save, finished the sidequest, and tried to pre-empt the cutscene by running back out of the town while they were still talking, only to be met with another fake bad ending saying (complete with another fast credits roll, only much less funny this time) that I went AWOL, even though I was going back to the ruined city, back the way I came. Turns out, the game wants you to go down this new path that leads back to the exact same freaking place, and then you get to fight the first boss again (only it's much less time consuming due to your higher level, and it doesn't have that dive attack). No arena design differences or anything; it's the same fight as before. Then, you go into a bunker where you fight the second boss again (which now starts with its second phase and has a higher level to match yours), except now you're stuck in 2D mode, which makes it significantly more difficult to avoid its attacks since you can get trapped between it and the wall (I'm not sure if it's even possible to avoid some of them once you're backed into the wall). Also, it isn't a real boss fight since they run away when the dialogue is over, but you wouldn't know that at first. And the kicker? After this, you finally unlock the ability to fast-travel between save points (and certain parts of the game later on suddenly disable fast-travel to certain save points for seemingly no reason). It's like the game is aware of good design, but actively chooses not to have it; only just enough to taunt you with it, to give you some idea of how good the game could have been.

By the way, that's the only place I know of that triggers the second fake bad ending; everywhere else, you just get a message saying something like "don't go that way," before your character walks a couple steps back. I wonder how many other fake bad endings you can get before finishing route A (the main game).

Okay, so at this point, you're tasked with infiltrating a castle in the forest. On your way there, you'll mostly just be fighting that same cannon-fodder enemy you fought a bunch of back in the first level and the second level and the open world and so on, but there was this one enemy that charges at you, and now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing that enemy show up anywhere else in the game. Just before you reach the castle, the game makes you fight two not-so-cannon-fodder enemies (I think they're shield enemies, but I don't remember that much about them) and one giant robot which, aside from its leg armor, is immune from the front (so once you destroy its leg armor, you won't even be able to damage its actual legs). That's one thing, but its second phase has an attack where it tracks you before firing a giant laser, which means if you dodge at any time besides the last second, you'll get hit, and if you get hit, you'll be staggered and unable to dodge away, thus getting hit again and again until you die. This was the second point in the game I died (after the first level and its fake ending), and where I learned how death normally works in the game: it's Dark Souls. You lose your equipped upgrades and experience points (and I think your items, too), and you have to go back to where you died and examine the corpse to get them back. At this point, you're given the choice of "retrieve" (which gets you your experience back as well) or "restore" (which only gets you your upgrades, but turns the corpse into an ally NPC who will attack enemies for you until it dies again). Not bad on paper, but while your corpse has its location marked on the map, there's nothing done to help distinguish its actual in-game model from the ground, making it difficult to find even with the map marker (and yes, the corpse uses a different model than the protagonist).

When you actually make it inside the castle, the game goes into side-view mode again, but rather than scroll, it's more of a screen-by-screen mode, where the camera moves forward once you reach the edge. At first, you might think it'll be like Battle Kid where each screen is its own thing and you don't have to worry about the next screen until you make it there, but not only can enemies shoot at you from the next screen, one of them is placed right after the screen transition, so even if you time it so you go forward between shots, you'll get blocked by the enemy right before where the transition happens and get shot again. There are also bots equipped with spears (which, again, I don't remember seeing outside the forest or castle), and they have a dash attack that, once again, reaches from offscreen to where you are. Near the end of the castle, just after its last save point, is a room where you get swarmed by more cannon-fodder enemies (again, in 2D), but they'll come from the foreground and background, and I swear even just show up out of thin air. What especially makes this part annoying is that they never stop spawning. In every other part of the game up until this point, no matter how many enemies there were, you could kill all of them, and sometimes, you were even forced to do so (except for the second boss's first arena, but even then, you were supposed to keep fighting them until the cutscene happened). In contrast, at this part, even the game itself wants you to avoid its own repetitive combat and just go straight to the boss room.

The boss itself isn't much of an improvement. First of all, every now and then, the boss runs away offscreen, then does a dash attack from off one side of the screen to past the other side of the screen, then falls down from the top onto where you're standing. When the boss isn't doing that, it has the same melee attacks as you, including suddenly boomeranging the sword half-way across the arena (meaning if the boss is in the center, nowhere is safe). Oh, and on top of the boss being dark in front of a dark background, whenever you get low on health, the game goes black and white, making it even harder to see where the boss is. This boss also made me think there's a delay with the dodge button since there were many times I was sure I had hit the button in time but got hit anyway.

Also, it turns out there are specific cutscenes that CAN be skipped, but you can't skip other cutscenes, and some cutscenes (like the one before the forest castle boss) can only have part of them be skipped. What's with this half-measure? If you're gonna play the cut-scene each time I die, the least you could to is let me skip the whole thing! I'd also appreciate if you didn't start the cutscene before I reached my last corpse just because I dared to die on the left side of the arena.

Next, your mission is to fly towards the water and fight a giant ship, which results in more SHMUP segments. It was during this part I realized something: this game isn't good at being a SHMUP. You've got maybe two or three enemy types total, and you're not only fighting the same formations of enemies, but also the same formations in the same order and spaced the same amount apart. The whole thing about auto-scrolling SHMUPs is that they make up for lack of level design with their different bullet patterns, which become the level design. In contrast, this game approaches SHMUP gameplay with a hack 'n' slash mentality; when I say it's more of the same, I mean it's literally identical to earlier SHMUP segments and even other parts of this exact same SHMUP segment. You know, the hacking segments from earlier actually had a couple exclusive enemy patterns that never show up in non-hacking SHMUP segments, but I guess sine-curve-movement-occasionally-shooting-five-shots-moving-in-separate-directions is just too intense for the average player unless the enemy is isolated like a mini-boss and dies in one second.

What's worse is that this particular SHMUP segment drags itself out way longer than it should, much like my posts (thank goodness there's no character limit on this site). After a while, you'll reach a boss of sorts: a yellow dome surrounded by four yellow domes, but due to the segment being 2D, you can only hit two of the surrounding domes at a time (unless they're rotating around the larger one, in which case that number is zero). After you destroy all four surrounding domes, the center becomes vulnerable and you can kill it. The boss itself is fine, but afterward, you've got some more repetitive SHMUP gameplay, and then you fight the exact same boss a second time! The only difference is that the camera is now on side view instead of top-down, which effectively changes nothing. Oh wait, I do remember one difference: invisible ceiling and floor, so you can't go as high or low as the game makes it seem like you can. Why not just letterbox the battle?? Then you've got even more repetitive SHMUP gameplay, and then GUESS WHAT. You fight the EXACT. SAME. FREAKING. BOSS…..AGAIN. Oh, but it gets worse: the ONLY difference is that now the camera is cockeyed, so pushing up doesn't actually move you up, it moves you up and to the side! Rather than do literally anything worthwhile, the game adds challenge by screwing up the controls instead. It's not even, like, a plot point or anything; it just happens out of nowhere, and you're just supposed to accept that this is your life now.

There's also, like, a first-person segment in there somewhere where you need to aim at the ship's mouth and hit the button when it opens, but it only lasts, like, a minute or two, and those mechanics never show up again.

Next, you're given a radar and are tasked with tracking down allied soldiers, and you'll need this radar because the allies stand out from the scenery just as much as your corpses do (that is to say, anywhere between 'barely' and 'not at all'). You have to equip the radar--thankfully not in that grey rectangle with your other upgrades, but instead in your special weapon slot, and annoyingly, you have to hold LB to keep the radar on. Plus, the radar doesn't work by showing locations on your mini-map, but instead by having a visual and audio cue get faster as you get closer, then when you're close enough, spotlighting what it detected (which could just as easily be an item instead of your objective). You've also got to deal with open world enemies, and while you technically don't have to fight them, they make using the radar even more annoying if left alive.

Once you've found everyone, you have to go to to a new area: a white city. There are no enemies here, but there is a boss, and I'll go ahead and tell you: this boss single-handedly brought my verdict down from "maybe also worth $5" to "not recommended." See, not only is this boss basically just the second boss again, not only is it still immune to your ranged attacks, but now its attacks have a much lower window to dodge AND your own attacks barely do a sliver of damage to its health bar! You can maybe only get one or two hits in before you need to dodge away, lest you lose 1/3rd of your max health at a minimum. The second phase makes things even worse, further reducing the dodge window. Now, you have to tease an attack out of the boss, dodge it, then attack ONCE, then immediately dodge away because you're sure as heck not going to get another hit off when the next attack starts. Oh, and don't forget that each of your attacks barely does any damage. Oh, and don't forget about that barely-perceptible delay with dodging. It's slow, it's repetitive, it's tedious, it's long, it's absurdly precise and difficult, it's seriously Grimoire of Souls levels of bad, and for those of you who don't wanna click that link, that was a pay to win game! Like, for real, THIS game got GOTY?? This?? Just off the top of my head, Super Mario Odyssey came out the same year, and it blows this game out of the water! You could argue it's my fault for going up against a level 25 boss at only level 16, or that I didn't explore enough and find enough upgrades, but even if we set aside that grinding should never be necessary, none of the other bosses were this bad, not even the bosses afterward--not even the FINAL boss! I did manage to beat this boss without dying, but only because I burned through 75% of the healing items I had gotten throughout the game, which I had barely used up to this point. After this boss, the first thing I did was upgrade my weapon from level 2 to level 3, at which point I hit the level cap and couldn't upgrade it further, so I doubt that would've helped much.

What else…there's a factory level after this, which is mostly the same hack 'n' slash gameplay but sometimes the side-scrolling segments have conveyor belts and pressers, so yay, we get scraps of level design. There are also suicide bombers who will just suddenly fall from above with zero foreshadowing (even going so far as to fall from behind the ceiling) and blow you up, so boo, cheap hits. There are also some 2D halls with a low ceiling and a bunch of enemies, so even though the game doesn't trap you like a traditional hack 'n' slash setup, you still can't really run past them and have to fight your way through. Oh, and some parts (notably one that also has a conveyor belt and pressers) will have white smoke appear from foreground objects, further obstructing your view. It's also pretty long and more of the same. The boss has parts that are okay-ish, but you gotta wait, like, 20 seconds for its shield to be disabled every time you die and restart the fight, and its ass-stab has a tiny dodge window...or maybe its more that the attack tell is so long as to be pointless: it turns around and starts tracking you, but the tracking lasts for so long that if you actually, you know, react to it, your dodge's i-frames will be over by the time the spear suddenly shoots out (also, the spear is around 4/5ths as long as the arena itself, so it's not like you can just run away). This is why I stopped playing hack 'n' slash games, so-called "spectacle fighters" or "character action games": it's not about reaction, but about memorizing through trial and error which animations lead to which attacks and when (it's also why I hate when hack 'n' slash mechanics poison what could have been a decent platformer). As if that weren't bad enough, near the end of its health bar, it turns into a ball and suddenly tries to run you over (very fast), at which point it suddenly becomes immune to your ranged attacks for no reason, so you gotta be right next to it to attack and also dodge when it suddenly tries to run you over again.

After you finish the factory level, you've got a couple more mandatory waves of enemies, then fight a boss that recycles the model of the factory boss, only now its first pattern just has it stand still and shoot projectiles at you, making it way easier to fight cuz you can actually see and react to and avoid the attacks. Crazy concept, I know. The game also knows this, so after a while, in an attempt to add some more challenge, it summons more cannon-fodder enemies that keep getting refreshed if you try to kill them, so now you're just doing the same stuff while occasionally moving to the side to avoid the slow enemy mob. Eventually, the boss goes into its second phase, which is the same as the factory boss's second phase, only now if you go too far from a designated spot on the world map, the boss runs away and parks itself in the middle of said area, making it even more annoying to fight since you can't just dodge it willy nilly and expect to be allowed to counterattack it like a reasonable game. It can also bounce and create shockwaves on the ground now. Oh, and you've still got the perpetual enemy mob coming after you, so it isn't uncommon to dodge the boss but end up in the path of an enemy you didn't notice or was offscreen. If you die here, you of course restart the boss from the beginning of its first phase, and you'll finally realize why it electrocutes the nearby pond: to make it a pain in the ass to retrieve your corpse if you die on its final phase, which again, your corpse is already difficult to spot in the best of times. This was the first time I died before retrieving my previous corpse, and in typical Dark Souls/Shovel Knight whatever-it's-called, dying before getting your last stuff means it's gone forever (unless you reload your last save cuz there's no autosave, lol), and as I looked through my upgrades, I realized that my "attack+10%" upgrades really weren't meant for this kind of game on top of barely doing anything already, and you're really supposed to equip stuff like "heal X% of the damage you deal" and "heal X% over time when you're not taking damage" while also using normal healing items.

After that is this orb thing that has a shield you gotta break down every now and then, and it's only attack is to shoot out projectiles, but since your melee weapon destroys all types of projectiles, you can kinda just tap the X button and win eventually. Afterward, I think it goes into a flying snake mode or something, but I forget if you actually have to shoot at it or if you just gotta go somewhere else. I do remember you gotta fight the regular orb mode again, cuz it wouldn't be a NieR game without copy-pasted bosses, lol.

Final boss…is okay. Way easier to dodge its attacks, especially compared to the crap boss from the white town. There's one part where the boss goes up and you gotta ride a platform going up, but the boss can attack you before you go up all the way and you might think "oh no, if I dodge, I'll fall off the platform," but invisible walls to the rescue, that won't happen. Last phase it shoots bullet patterns at you, and again, they're pretty easy to dodge. Even when the game goes all story mode on your ass and decides you can't use melee attacks or move faster than a snail, you can always slip through an opening while shooting the boss. Then the game is over, roll credits for real this time.

So yeah, just to reiterate, this game is NOT RECOMMENDED. Parts of it are almost good, but the bad parts are so numerous and so bad for so long, it just isn't worth it. I swear, some of these games only get praise because people forget about all the crap they pull (either that, or they've been so starved for any actual good games that this is sadly the closest they've gotten in a long time). If you still wanna play it despite my rant, please wait until you have a Game Pass free trial, or wait for the chance it goes free on Epic, or go ahead and straight-up pirate it. Just promise me you won't spend money for it; you could use that money to get something better, like a sandwich or something.

P.S. I did play a bit of the postgame, partly out of morbid curiosity and partly because I was waiting for some other Game Pass games to download, and it hits the ground crawling by making you play as one of those slow, cannon-fodder enemies for a minute or two (you have to jump constantly to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and then the game makes you walk at the end). Afterward, you get to control a proper character (thankfully) in a SHMUP segment, and wouldn't you know it, they're still the same, more of the same…except this one part where the camera goes cockeyed and up isn't up anymore, except now you're fighting the same SHMUP enemies as before instead of a boss! Progress…? Oh, this character can hack into specific points, and unlike when the boss hacked you back in route A--I'm kidding, it's exactly the same. Same enemy types, same isolation, same super-quick deaths for the solitary enemies. Some special hack points do something a bit different: rather than have you fight one enemy, they have you fight zero enemies! You just shoot black boxes to work your way through a small labyrinth, then shoot the weak point which just stays still and dies in the same amount of time as the hacking enemies.

Oh, but then there's the first boss: your character gets paralyzed, so all you can do is shoot at the incoming enemies, slowly witling their health down, and using healing items on your character for when they inevitably reach and attack you. Around half-way through, maybe a bit more, I suddenly noticed the hacking icon on the enemies (which I swear wasn't there before), and as you can guess, killing them in hacking mode is significantly faster than killing them in hack 'n' slash mode. Then the boss itself (which doesn't attack you) has a few hacking points, but they're all just more labyrinths…but then you reach the last one, and suddenly, you're in, like, a much larger arena and there are multiple enemies, and you gotta shoot weak points to disable the shield around the core! You mean to tell me the game knew about variety this whole time, and we could have had one single campaign that's actually a bit fun to play, but instead the game stretched itself way the hell too thin just for the sake of having multiple campaigns that play slightly differently? That almost makes things worse! The more I play this game, the more I understand why Square didn't wanna make it. Maybe they should've just let the other guy quit.

And when you beat the boss, you're shown an FMV of when you had to set up the brightness and audio on your first playthrough. Ugh, this game does the stupidest things...

This is a platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, and pushing A in midair does a swiping/slashing move (X does nothing, and I'd occasionally have to remind myself of this as I'm used to pushing A to jump then X to attack). The game's whole gimmick is that, rather than just doing regular jumps all the time, you jump and hit floating lanterns to bounce yourself higher and reach more platforms and lanterns. Blue lampposts act as checkpoints.

The game has a pretty good first impression. You can push Y next to a lamppost to view the map for the level, but you can also just go ahead since there aren't any surprises or blind jumps. There are brief moments between specific levels where your character suddenly walks much slower, presumably for atmospheric reasons, but there aren't many of them and they don't interfere with the levels themselves. Even the stupid difficulty selection, which admits hard mode has fewer checkpoints (which is a stupid way to increase difficulty, but it also said it has more levels so I just gooootta play it…), isn't too bad at first because even hard mode felt like levels are either short enough that they don't need any checkpoints or they had a decent distribution and frequency so you never felt like you had to make up too much to get back to where you died. The hazards are also all bright to contrast with the dark blue night background, so nothing blends in for a cheap hit.

Thing is, as the game gets harder, the game's issues become more apparent. For one, there are no short hops; you so much as tap the jump button, you're sent through a full jump arc. Second, the height the lanterns send you is variable. You can always count on the broken ones to give you a small bounce, but the only other type are fixed ones, and they can be anywhere from a slightly-larger bounce to sending you well above what you can currently see onscreen, possibly even hitting a hazard up there you weren't aware of (maps can't warn you about the exact location of moving hazards, especially when you're by a lantern instead of a checkpoint). Plus, each individual lantern has a fixed height you're sent up, which wouldn't be an issue if some of them didn't also sync up with the rate of fire for projectiles, meaning if you happen to get bad timing after all the other obstacles you went through, you're just screwed (it doesn't help that this first happened to me in the optional world 1 level right beside level 18, which is easily at least twice as long as any other world 1 level and could definitely benefit from having a checkpoint in the middle, or anywhere). Oh, and speaking of those optional things, they don't show up on the map (not ?-lanterns that contain extra world-building and not those split-paths that lead to optional levels), and some of the optional levels I did find were behind fake walls, so it's very easy to miss them and never even know they're there.

The last level of world 1 has the background turn from its usual dark-blue night to a more orange evening color, and this is where things get really bad. See, the level also has a sky laser hone in on you and fire every few seconds, but the warning line to let you know where the laser's gonna hit is also orange! And it's drawn BEHIND solid tiles! This means you simply won't even know it exists until after it kills you, and because it fires based on a timer instead of based on location, it has the same issue with the lanterns as mentioned earlier (and the issue is exacerbated near the end of the level, where the lasers' rate of fire suddenly becomes much faster). Oh, and it also turns out it takes your character a moment to turn around, and since the last stretch of the level involves bouncing left and right between lanterns, you really need to just get lucky with when you approach that point in order to avoid the lasers and climb up to the end of the level. Also, the level has no checkpoints.

The lasers never show up after that one level, but world 2 introduces its own problem: switch lanterns. The idea is that you hold the jump button in front of them and your character will hover next to them, continually slashing as the lantern fills up with blue, and when it's filled completely, a wall or something moves out of the way. At first, it seems like a good idea that all lanterns should've had in order to mitigate the bad timing issue, but it turns out switch lanterns have a wonky hitbox. See, for regular lanterns, you can hit the jump button at any spot in front of, on top of, below or beside them, and it registers as a hit and bounces you up. In contrast, switch lanterns need you to be directly beside them when you press and hold the jump button, or you'll just fall right through. In front of them? Fall. Beside them but slightly too far away or too close, slightly too far above or below? Fall. It took me several deaths of trial and error to figure out what the deal is (no joke, I almost gave up right when they were introduced), but even when you think you understand it, there are still times where it just won't register when you're pretty darn sure it should've.

Oh, and later, the game makes you deal with finnicky physics. There are parts where air currents are in a circle and point toward the center, and if you don't jump into the vortex properly, you can fall out the bottom or get sucked into the center uncontrollably. The issue is especially noticable in one of the optional levels, where it's just four circular vortexes in a parallelogram setup with spikes in the center and more spikes around certain edges, and you basically have to get lucky to beat that level given how imperceptible changes in input result in vastly different consequences.

After the game gets bored of its new vortex gimmick, it moves on to yellow wind, which is basically a laser hazard: it's as wide as your character is tall, stretches across multiple screens from one point to another (though not always all the way to the opposite solid tile), and it turns on and off at regular intervals. That's one thing, but literally the second level that has them changes up the pattern so that the ones on the edges are off twice as long as the ones in the center, and the left and right ones alternate with each other. This means you gotta keep going from one side of the level to the other to avoid dying, but of course you wouldn't know that until after it kills you. Later levels have wind that turns on/off for the same amount of time but has its timer offset, which is fine, but every time you die, all the yellow winds turn off for a second before the game remembers "oh, these ones are supposed to be on!" and it's seemingly always the wind that's one second in front of your last checkpoint. Effectively, you can't immediately retry a level when you die; you have to wait a second for the wind to turn back on so you can get your bearings and keep up with the level's timing.

I should also mention that the instant you die, moving platforms quickly bolt back to their starting positions, and since hitboxes are maybe a bit too big sometimes, it can give the false impression that you died because the hazard sped up suddenly, not unlike how running into the back of a Koopa in the original NES Super Mario Bros causes them to turn around. It's just a minor visual issue for the most part, but at the end of world 2, there's a race, and you're stuck between two moving spike walls for most of it. Thing is, when you die, the spike walls sometimes take too long to reset their position, causing them to be in front of your spawn point when you respawn and immediately killing you again. Also, half-way through the race, there's a switch-lantern which causes your opponent to stop and wait for you to trigger the switch, effectively making the first half of the race not count. It's still way better than the last level of world 1, though.

World 3 has additional flaws. For example, not far into the world (maybe it's third level) you have to bounce up a shaft of lanterns, but there are also saws falling down as the lanterns shoot you up, so you have no time to react to them. This world is also where you find out that if you're walking one way when the platform you're on is moving another way, you still end up with full forward momentum as soon as you walk off that platform (as opposed to platform-affected momentum), which can result in you moving much faster than you anticipated. There are also spike wheels that go back and forth, but they change direction instantly instead of stopping for a moment, making the sudden redirection hard to react to. Also, there are other spike wheels that take their sweet time moving from one end to the other making you continually bounce on the same lantern waiting for them to move out of the way.

Eventually, the world gets its own gimmick: fog, except instead of being solid grey like normal fog, it just turns the background greyscale while still making solid tiles and hazards in-range entirely invisible. Some moving platforms are surrounded by non-fog (so you can see the hazards when they get close), and some levels have fat lanterns which toggle fog in the surrounding area (off if in fog, on if not, but you'd only think it just removes the fog at first and get blindsided by the new mechanic later). Oh, the game also decides to introduce platforms that are only visible and interactable in fog, and it doesn't take long for it to combine them with fog lanterns, so you have to memorize how long the fog lanterns stay enabled (because there's no warning or anything for when they're about to shut off) so you can move forward in time.

Oh, but that's not all of world 3's new gimmicks. The game also introduces splotches-lookalikes that'll grab you, and you have to tap the jump button to escape. It can be anywhere between three taps and seven taps, even for the same one, so good luck trying to be precise with them among all the moving platforms and hazards. The game does combine the fog gimmick with the grabbers, but there's one point where the fog makes it seem like you're in a wide open space, when in reality, you're directly between two walls and have no wiggle room, so it's pretty obvious the fog's main goal was just for cheap deaths (the walls are on the level's map, but you're likely to forget about it by the time you make it to the spot in question).

The last level of world 3 is also pretty bad. It starts off okay, but when you reach the switch-lantern at the end and activate it, the level design suddenly changes (the map represents these changes as a separate room). If you die on this second part, the game opens up a shortcut, but if you die after the second time you reach a switch-lantern that changes the level, you're granted no such leniency, and the level otherwise doesn't have any checkpoints despite being quite a bit longer than most normal levels. What's worse, if you aren't fast enough on the third part, an easily-unnoticed shadow will slide in from the left, and if it reaches you, some junk will suddenly fall on top of you and kill you (during a part where background junk that won't kill you can already bee seen falling from the top of the screen).

However, world 4 is where the game gets really bad with its lack of checkpoints. It starts off easier than plenty of earlier levels, but checkpoints are clearly spaced out longer than before, and as the levels start getting harder again, it becomes more and more of an issue as you have to start redoing parts that you've already done more and more. Oh, and despite the start menu saying you've gotten past more than 100% of the game at this point, the game still has some new gimmicks to introduce: there are lanterns that turn on/off (you can't bounce on the ones that are off), but rather than have them all cycle after the same amount of time, the "on" setting moves back and forth across a set, so if there are three of them diagonally, the first one will be on, then only the second, then only the third, then back to the second again before going back to the first. This is a linear game; it's not like you'd ever have to go back, so by making it 1232 instead of 123 just means you have to wait longer if you miss it. The world also has invisible platforms where you can only tell where they are by looking at where the rain stops, but after a bit, the rain goes away for some parts and you'd only know where those platforms are if you memorize their locations on the map. The rain also turns certain moving lanterns off on contact (with them only turning back on after exiting the rain), but despite this being a pretty crucial gameplay element, rain isn't marked on the map like fog was, so you gotta hope your timing with the moving lanterns lines up with getting past the rain because chances are you're not gonna have time to react to it when it shows up onscreen. Later on, you're in a giant wooden house that has saws moving in different patterns, and one point has five saws moving up and down. Four of them are moving the same speed but with slightly offset positions, but the one in the middle is moving slower, which makes it really difficult to time moving forward, and dying here means you gotta redo quite a bit of already-tricky platforming just to make it back. Luckily, although there's no checkpoint right afterward, it does unlock a shortcut past it if you die afterward.

The part I finally gave up was when the game introduced water currents. They push you forward while you stand on them and they affect your jumping physics, unlike regular moving platforms. If you hold back while being pushed, the water pushes you slower for a couple units until you finally come to a standstill, and if you hold back while falling onto the current, you'll slide backwards for a couple units before coming to a full stop. Thing is, after the first, easy part that's supposed to get you used to how the water currents work, the difficulty spikes back up by making you jump between pairs of rotating spike balls. Not only do they rotate in and out of the current, but the safe spot inside where they rotate is smaller than the distance it takes you to stop moving after pushing back against the current, and since you also don't have short-hops, there's no way you can slip under the spike balls while waiting for them to be in a good position; you HAVE to keep moving forward, even if it will probably kill you, because trying to stop will certainly get you killed. Plus, if you somehow get lucky enough to slip past the four pairs of rotating spike balls, you're greeted with three sets of four rotating spike balls, which require even more precision/luck with when you approach them. To add insult to injury, there's no checkpoint before this point; dying means you have to go through the water current introduction segment again. Also, the spike balls are hidden from view when they go below the current, making it even more frustrating to play. After a while, I finally gave up (and if it just had a checkpoint, I might've kept trying).

Not recommended. Even without the checkpoint issue, it's still a precision platformer without precise controls.

This is an adventure/pinball game. Left and right moves the ball while you're on a flat surface (when you're in the air or on a pinball slope, you're completely at the mercy of the game's physics), the A button interacts with NPCs and stuff, and the shoulder buttons trigger the flippers or whatever they're called (the things that make the ball go up).

I admit that I'm not a big fan of pinball, but this ended up being one of the best games I played from this Game Pass free trial. One of my main issues with other pinball games is how the ball will sometimes bounce when it lands on the bottom slope, making it hard to time your next shot. In this game, there is a bit of a bounce, but it's only a couple pixels or so, at which point the ball smoothly rolls down the slope. Another of my issues from other pinball games is how the ball will sometimes be shot directly between the flippers, giving you zero chance to save the ball before it falls, and this game…also has that issue. Its attempts to mitigate it include 1) a powerup that'll protect the ball from falling one time, and 2) negligible consequences for failure: you only lose 3-or-so units of currency (which is very easy to earn back) and can immediately shoot yourself back onto the board to resume from where you left off. Even when the game has you flip into a tunnel to travel to a higher board, you never have to worry about falling back down to the previous board as they all have their own catch at the bottom. If you fall too much, the game will cut to a board showing how many times you fell, then after the board glows for a bit, you're sent right back into the game. Presumably, this does something if you fall too much, but I never got it much further than 30.

The only time there's any consequence for failure is on the juicing board: if you fall, the game locks the board from you and won't let you play it again.

On the adventure side of things, you have fetch quests. Most, including your main objective, are marked on your map, but the one where you have to plant mushroom spores doesn't show you where to go next, and if you find a mushroom-planting spot out of order, the game won't even let you have that. The overdue packages will show you where to go, but you can only carry one at a time for no reason, and if you switch to another one and back to the previous one, the map marker will be reset to the first point of interest, even if you already went there and found out you have to go somewhere else (luckily, you can just ignore that and go straight to where the objective marker was last time to continue the quest). Also, the third one requires you get an optional suit to reach its objective, but never points to where to go to get said suit.

There's really not too much else to say. The pinball boards have different designs, but they all involve shooting the ball to a certain spot first to unlock the rune gems (whether you're breaking them out of something or just spinning a sign around), then shooting the ball to wherever the stones land to collect them and open the gate forward. Sometimes, instead of having a pinball board, the game has Sonic-the-Hedgehog-style tunnels that just wind around and shoot you forward, occasionally stopping to make you hit one of the shoulder buttons. There's also at least one part where it's just a loop with zero challenge, but you gotta keep hitting the button to go around the loop because there's a rune sign there. Yeah, game has padding.

Oh, the game does give you a new mechanic if you go the top path: the ability to latch onto grapple points. You'll spin around them and have to let go at the right time to launch yourself in the right direction. It's never combined with a pinball board, and aside from the top path, grapple points only seem to act like progression roadblocks for optional stuff; you don't need to go that way, but if you want to, you need to get the power and backtrack.

Despite being an open world game, there aren't any traditional fast-travel points. Instead, there are three sets of "beelines." Each set has you hitting the trigger buttons to shoot from one cannon to the next, and you hit the A button to drop off. You can't get on the beelines from just any cannon, though; there are only a few locations you can launch yourself into them, and they each only have one spot where you can buy access to them, so you'll still end up doing a bit of backtracking despite this.

There are some bosses, but there are no timing aspects to them; it's all just "shoot the ball here, now shoot the ball here," barely any different from any of the normal boards. The final boss isn't even on a pinball board, just a flat surface with a single flipper to shoot you straight up when the boss is in the right spot. The boss has an "attack" that can sometimes knock you off the platform, but there are flippers below that let you go back up with no consequences. Sometimes, the boss gets stunned and falls to the ground, at which point you gotta go to the walls of the arena and hit the flippers on the walls to go back and forth, mimicking how you'd attack a stunned boss in a hack 'n' slash. It's kinda funny, but the boss doesn't have enough to it when you consider how long it takes to finish the fight.

Also, when you beat the boss, the game saves your progress so you can finish side-quests and maybe unlock postgame content, but like I said, it's all fetch quests (backtracking), some of which don't even tell you where to go.

Still, if you like pinball games, I say this might be worth picking up on sale.

This is a linear platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X attacks. As you progress, you'll unlock transformations that give you new abilities, and you select them by pushing Y followed by a cardinal direction on the left stick or D-pad. Thing is, you get more than 4 transformations, but rather than have you simply push the stick at an angle, the game makes you wait for the next set to show up. You'd think after four or five games, the devs would've worked out all the quality of life features for the basic mechanics, but I guess not. There's an item you can buy that speeds up how long it takes for the transformations to cycle, but none to let them all be selectable immediately.

The first level doesn't give a good first impression. The regular enemies that just walk forward and die in one hit are fine, but the first hazard you come across is an enemy spawner that takes several hits to kill: every few seconds, it tosses three enemies in front of it, further than your hair can reach and in less time than it takes to destroy the spawner between spawns. This means you gotta hit it a few times, then run away before you see anything happen so you have enough time and space to avoid the next wave of enemies that get spawned. The level's boss only makes things worse: it's immune to your own attacks no matter where you hit it. Turns out, the only way to damage the boss is to ring a bell on the bottom-left corner of the screen, a newly-introduced bell that's exactly the same color as the buildings in the background (you can see it in one of the screenshots on the store page!); this causes a bomb to be thrown at the boss, which stuns it and allows you to damage it for a moment until it gets unstunned. Oh, and after each time, you have to wait on the crane to grab another bomb before hitting the bell does anything again.

The second level isn't much better. The level design is slightly less bland, but there are these gator enemis that'll run back and forth on a platform, chasing you, and they take several hits to die. It really bogs down the game's pace, and they're not even the only damage sponge enemy that's best ignored and avoided; there are several throughout the game. The level also has you jump on rings to ride across gaps, but not only do you have to wait on another ring if you miss one, but oftentimes, the next one is already occupied, so there's nothing you can do but keep waiting. The second boss is a bit better than the first since you can actually attack the weak points directly instead of the boss being a gimmick like the first one, but you can only reach the higher weak points by riding on small, moving platforms, which doesn't give you much room to avoid the boss's tracking shots unless you jump back down and wait on the platforms again. The boss's second phase removes the moving platforms, but the new weak spot is above your jump height, so you have to wait on some more rings to come up, which only happens every couple attacks at best. Plus, although the second phase starts on one side of the arena and has an attack that shoots projectiles from the top that force you to the other side, the boss can just as easily go away and show up on said other side, where you're standing, hitting you in the process.

When you beat the second boss, you don't get to go to the third level. Instead, you're forced to replay the first level and use the transformations you've gotten to go down a brief split path to get an item before you unlock the next level. This isn't just a one time thing, either: each subsequent level also requires replaying previous levels to do fetch-quests before you can continue. Now, let me make one thing clear: THIS IS NOT A METROIDVANIA! This is a very linear, stage-by-stage platformer that just straight-up makes you replay the same levels you've already beaten so you can go down a two-screen-long-at-most branching path whose access requires an ability you didn't have the first time. Parts of stages have very minor differences (level 1 just has regular enemies instead of the spawners, level 2 no longer has occupied rings so you don't have to wait as long), but for the most part, these are the same levels again. You even have to replay certain levels multiple times as the fetch-quests expand their reach! This is such a ludicrous problem, I swear it was only done exclusively to pad out the runtime. Do all the Shantae games recycle content like this???

Anyway, level 3 has a gimmick where wind will occasionally blow you back, so you have to wait beside small blocks until the wind subsides. This gimmick never shows up besides the level's first section, and it doesn't even show up when you have to replay the level, so great job on wasting our time with another mechanic that'll never be built upon, game. The second section is a vertical room where you have to run from a hazard slowly moving upward. It's hard to say for sure if it has dynamic difficulty, but near the end, you crawl into a pit with a chain leading up (which you need to get out of the pit), but if you climb the chain all the way to its top (as you'd be encouraged due to being chased and due to that being how the rest of the section worked), you reach a dead end with some currency and have to go basically back down to the bottom of the chain and go to the other side of the room to progress, but every time this happened, the hazard was already down there, just high enough that I couldn't cross and had to die. Oh, and while this section has yellow solid tiles, it also has some purple solid tiles despite the background also being purple. The third section has archers that fire a few shots and wait, and the game somehow managed to give them two conflicting issues: sometimes they spawn in their idle state, which lasts so long that you might mistake them for friendly NPCs at first (by this point in the game, you've already encountered a bunch of those), but other times, they'll start firing their arrows from offscreen before you even know they're there, and since this section also has disappearing blocks, you can often be forced to take a hit as the arrows cover the only safe platform at the moment.

The boss of level 3 deserves special mention because of one specific attack it has. At one point, it'll drop its weak point on the stage and have it roll around the arena (which is a ring, so going in one direction eventually loops you around), and as you attack it, it'll start going faster. Thing is, there's a brief delay after you hit the attack button before the attack actually happens, and the boss's weak point already moves faster than that from the get-go. In other words, you can't just hit the button when it's in-range because then you'll get hit; you have to hit the button when it's some nebulous distance away, and once you figure that out, you have to remember to adjust where in the ring the boss is before you hit the button (which is easier said than done since the low camera perspective basically has the boss stay in the same spot onscreen when it reaches the edges of the ring). It's the first time the delayed attack was an issue but my goodness is it a big issue. What makes it even more infuriating is the rest of the boss's attacks are really easy to dodge! It targets your last-known-location and starts shooting there from the center? Just keep moving in one direction; the arena is a ring with no level design. Hazards falling from the sky? The fall pretty slowly so it isn't tough to just walk out of their way. Oh, and the boss's pattern loops 4 times, so even if you get past the weak-point-batting part, you still gotta sit through the same boss pattern and do it again and again.

Oh, and the kicker? If you go to the shop, you can buy an item that reduces the attack delay. They knew the delay was a bad decision and that players would rather not have it, but they kept it in anyway just to add another slot in the shop. Ugh, yet another example of devs inventing a problem and selling the solution; why can't the game just be good from the start?

And hey, the faster attacks even make the damage-sponge enemies more bearable since you can kill them without also killing the game's pace.

The fetch-quest between level 3 and 4 is especially stupid because not only is there a split path you need to go down, but another item you need is from an enemy-drop, but it's super rare unless you go out of your way to buy and use fire magic on them, which, even if you upgrade it, deals less damage than your non-upgraded regular attacks.

Level 4 isn't too bad, but the dialogue implies you'd be part of a race when instead you have to jump onto other racers' vehicles, treating them like moving platforms. In contrast, the boss still manages to have problems even if you buy the "less attack delay" upgrades: it summons enemies around itself to act as a shield, and just one enemy in front of it puts you too far away to hit the boss, so you need to kill the surrounding enemies to reach the boss itself. Problem is that, while the enemies are mostly stationary, the boss can rotate their positions on a dime, giving you no time to move out of the way if you're attacking the boss. Plus, the boss will refresh the enemies every now and then, so it's a fool's errand to try to kill all the enemies before going for the boss as you'll never have time to actually attack your target. Oh, and later phases have additional layers of enemies between you and the boss, exacerbating the previous issues.

The next fetch-quest makes you replay level 3 up to the second area. While you aren't being chased anymore, this section is arguably worse on replays because now there are enemies that will suddenly fall from unmarked ceiling tiles, resulting in countless cheap hits. Plus, the fetch-quest item is hidden behind the face-statues, which you would never think were destructible unless you speak to the NPC a second time. The fetch quest also involves making you navigate slow, boring, top-down labyrinths (another gimmick just for the sake of having a gimmick); the closest these parts came to having anything resembling gameplay is when you replay level 2 again and find that this level's labyrinths sometimes have enemies, but since you can't attack during these parts, avoiding them means going down a long, winding corridor that basically puts you not far from where you started, so it's easier just to take the hit and keep trudging along.

Level 5 takes place in a castle with lamps hanging from the ceiling. If you attack the lamps like this is Casltevania or something, they'll fall down and explode, leaving behind a fire hazard you'll need to wait out before you can pass unscathed. If you learn from this and just try to ignore them by walking under them, they'll fall on top of you and damage you before you can pass them, and also create the same fire hazard from before. Also, despite being fairly close to the end, the level design has remained consistently pretty bland throughout. This level even has a part where it's just flat ground and the same enemy type coming at you repeatedly. Due to the bland level design, most of the times you'll take damage will be due to cheap hits, like how certain chests in this level spawn enemies when all identically-looking chests in earlier levels spawn currency or items. The boss of world 5 may be one of the better bosses in this game, but there is one move where it zig-zags up to the top of the arena (where you can't reach it) and shoots downward for a bit before zig-zagging back, and if you're close enough to the boss to hit it with your attacks, you're close enough to get hit when it starts zigging upward, even if you're ducking. The second phase has you fighting two bosses at once, which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that one of them can teleport, so if you happen to be on the boss's destination when it respawns, you'll take damage.

After this, the game informs you that there are now four concurrent fetch-quests available to do, but unlike the previous ones, it lets you know that you can just go straight to level 6 instead. Awesome! Level 6 starts off with a bland SHMUP segment where you'd only take damage from enemy spears because they'll instantly bank 90-degrees and aim towards you when they move above or below you (and you move so slow, you only barely have enough time to avoid them if you're already moving forward and are a few units away already). After this is some more platforming, and of special note is the floating enemy with the three way shot: it doesn't have a foreshadow animation for its shots, but it waits even longer than the archers between attacks, so you'll see it sitting there doing nothing and you'll think "oh, I can attack it" but after a few hits--blam, you get shot, so the only way to progress safely is if you stay back and just wait until they decide to shoot again.

Also, this level makes regular use of the flying ability you got for beating the previous level, except the flight controls are pretty bad. Not only is it Flappy Bird controls, where you have to tap jump to bounce up and stop tapping to fall, but your left and right movements now have momentum when it didn't before! This means you'll be slow to start moving and slow to stop, making it unnecessarily difficult to avoid enemies that quickly and suddenly jump from out of the lava. What's worse, you'll eventually reach a part of the level with a spike corridor too short to slip through with your flappy bird controls, but since you can't transform in midair (except back to normal, which will just cause you to fall into the lava below), you'll have absolutely no way to get through. Only thing I can think of is that the fetch-quests from earlier were secretly required, or there was some other required fetch-quest the game never told me about, so I gave up here.

Not recommended.

This is a 2D hack 'n' slash. You've got standard left/right movements and attack ability, as well as a jump for airborne enemies and the occasional light platforming. There's some momentum with the jumping, which makes the basic platforming deceptively tricky until the game lets you know that pushing down in midair kills your momentum and sends you straight down. As you progress, you'll unlock more abilities, like a dash/dodge, a laser that needs to regenerate after use (and acts as a less-powerful shotgun if used when not full or if you didn't hold the button down long enough), and a healing move with its own meter for when you can use it.

One of the game's tags is Metroidvania, but there isn't any interconnection between areas, and the areas themselves don't have much intraconnection, either. You'll have to do some running back and forth across the game's almost-entirely-flat rooms for fetch-quests, but that's about as far as it goes. Looots of running across empty, flat rooms. The most complicated the fetch quests get is when you reach one of the teleport pads that requires a three-symbol passcode to activate, so you gotta run back around the nearby areas looking for where the symbols are.

As platforming and metroidvania-ing in this game is negligible, combat is what you'll be here for. Every now and then, the game will stop scrolling the camera and start spawning waves of enemies. There's a good variety, from the cannon fodder's short-range claws to the sword guys that require dashing away to the ones that just hop forward every second or two. I especially liked how most enemies can be one-shot killed with the laser, and since it regenerates by you attacking enemies, you can usually get two or three shots off per lockdown-ambush. Still, even as more and more enemy types are introduced, it can get a bit repetitive, as the combat is only really broken up by those fetch quests and empty, flat rooms, and rarely is level design used to create an arena that isn't also completely flat. Plus, your health bar is pretty big, and whenever you die, it gets completely refilled, so even though you still have to start the lockdown-ambush over from the beginning, you'll still win as long as you make a token attempt to react and dodge enemy attacks. It doesn't really start getting challenging until the end.

This is despite the fact that the game has the occasional cheap element. The first boss can be attacked whenever just fine, but the second boss is invulnerable until it does one (or two) specific move(s). The third boss has a harmless animation where it dives into the ground, but sometimes, this is followed by the boss immediately turning into a ground hazard that chases you, and if you happen to be standing right there (which is likely since that's about how close you need to be to the boss to attack it), you'll get hit before you can react. One of the common enemies you'll have to fight are bats, but due to how quick they can change elevation and how they chase you (as well as their small hitbox), the game's jump and attack mechanics really weren't built around them, making the bats much more difficult to fight than it'd seem at first. One of the rare enemies you'll have to fight is what resembles an arcade cabinet: if you get too close (within it's attack range but out of yours), it'll suddenly lunge forward without warning and bite repeatedly, and it's also invulnerable until it does a specific move--oh, and it also has a move where it sucks you into it (still while it's invulnerable). Some arenas zoom the camera out, where you can see that your laser move doesn't actually stretch all the way across the screen (like it does for smaller arenas) and actually has a fixed length. There's a fish boss that takes place over water, and occasionally, the boss pops out of the water onto the platform to do some attacks, one of which is a laser that lasts too long to dodge; turns out, when the laser's being charged, a new blue block quietly spawns in front of the blue background to the upper-left of the platform, and you're supposed to jump on that block to wait out the laser.

The first time I died on my second attempt at a fight (and thus having full HP) was against the optional pirate boss in the blue kingdom. It has an attack where projectiles are going both above and below you, so you need to do short hops, except you don't stop going up when you let go of the jump button. You have to tap the button to do what's really more of a mid-hop, and if you hold it for slightly too long, it'll register as a full jump and you'll hit the higher projectiles.

Oh, the game also has a bunch of parts where it just stops you and makes you press X repeatedly, like a mediocre quick-time event. At least with the combat, my pressing X is occasionally interrupted by pressing the dodge button, which requires some level of awareness and reaction. Sometimes, the repeated pressing of X doesn't even completely do away with the obstacle, and you have to press B afterward (the examine/talk button).

The boss you fight on the train has a move where it shoots different formations of projectiles at you, and I thought this was neat since it meant the game actually has a bit of varied platforming (the patterns even get a bit more complicated as the boss's health gets lower). Thing is, the boss's other two attacks are just react-and-dodge moves, and there's no warning for when it cycles back to the projectile moves (and no warning for the projectiles themselves), and of course, they spawn directly from the boss and you need to be next to the boss to attack. Oh, and you still have to deal with the game's subpar jumping mechanic.

Let's see…there's also a tank enemy that's invulnerable until it does a charge (as opposed to having a weak spot), and only for a couple seconds before going back to invulnerability. There's another enemy that hovers above ground and summons explosions that move forward from the spawn point, and unlike most other enemies, it has contact damage, so not only do you have to jump over the explosions while chasing the enemy, but you'll inevitably take damage as the enemy gets cornered and moves through you to get away. The final boss is okay, but it still suffers from having foreshadow animations that don't really let you know what the incoming attack will do, like when it just glows while standing still before shooting a wave hazard across the ground. The ending is also a cliffhanger, so there's that.

Overall, I don't know about this one. The combat is okay sometimes, but all the running around empty rooms is certainly boring, and the combat itself has problems here and there. Maybe just wait for a Game Pass free trial.

This is an RTS-Adventure game; a Pikmin clone. You start off with just the protagonist, but after some cutscenes and tutorials, you gain access to your first minion, which can destroy obstacles and carry objects you can't. You can throw minions toward the cursor like in its inspiration, but rather than a whistle, you have a vacuum to call back idle ones, and even suck them across gaps (it can also break its own type of obstacle/resource cluster that the minions can't interact with). Also typical for these games are that you'll get different types of minions that have different abilities as you progress.

Unlike its inspiration, its missing some notable quality-of-life elements. For example, in the first two Pikmin games, you could use the C-stick to command all of your minions to go in a specific direction, at which point they automatically interact with whatever they come across (whether it's attacking an enemy or picking up a key item). This game doesn't have anything similar; you have to throw every single minion individually every time. Spawning more minions is also made more tedious: rather than just having them carry enemy corpses back to base where they're automatically converted into more minions, there's a two-tiered system where you not only have to collect seeds that only spawn from one specific type of object (which also isn't very commonly spread out throughout the map), but you also have to spend a type of currency to turn the seeds into minions (and of course, you can only do that back at one of your base camps). The added tedium means you're gonna grow a lot less minions throughout the game compared to Pikmin, though the game is built around this with things like a lower field cap (even after you buy/earn all the minion-limit expansions) and lower hold requirements for items. Speaking of hold requirements, the real Pikmin games let you add more than the minimum so the stuff can be carried faster, but in this game, you can't add any more than the minimum needed to move it. Oh, and when you get your second player character, you can't separate them by hitting the "separate minions" command; you can only do it at a log, and as you'll find out later (not by being told but by it suddenly being required), by holding the vaccuum button down when you hit the switch characters button, so splitting up is a bit clunkier than in the official Pikmin games.

There are some differences that actually have some merit to them, though. Rather than have the game stop everything you're doing when night falls, you're allowed to continue doing stuff. This is discouraged, though (you're expected to go back to camp manually to sleep until morning), as a night-exclusive, unkillable enemy has a random chance to spawn. It chases you slow enough that you can run circles around it as long as you don't get stopped by a cutscene (and it only targets you, not your minions), but your second character lags behind enough to be repeatedly attacked and killed by said enemy.

Another difference is that your minions don't die when attacked; they just get knocked down. I prefer how the Pikmin games worked instead since it was a bit more action-oriented with you having to call your minions back before the enemies attacked to avoid losses. Instead, you just tap the "throw minion" button repeatedly and watch the enemies' health go down as they helplessly struggle against your onslaught…except it turns out your minions can die if attacked enough. Problem is that there's no visualization of their health (no bar, no palette/brightness change); they're just fine one moment and ghosts the next (and they regain all their health after battle, indicated by a shwing sound effect and some sparkles). This makes combat strategy effectively nonexistent beyond stuff like "send fire-immune minions to kill the fire enemy" since you can't be like "I'll call these ones back because they're low and send out these other ones with more health" because there's no way to know. You just have to accept that there will be inevitable losses, even more so than in the actual Pikmin games. Still, it's mostly just tossing your minions forward and watching them battle; the only enemy besides the night-exclusive one you really have to worry about are the bushes that are secretly beetles, even though they look exactly like regular bushes until you get close enough to them to be attacked.

Also, the game is open world: all the areas of the game are interconnected, unlike Pikmin where each area was its own level that you had to choose from a stage select. This also means that when you reach a new area, you won't be able to use the "send items back to camp" command until you find and activate that area's camp. What I really don't like about this is not only are you unable to command them to go back to a different area's camp, but if you have minions doing something in one area and you go to another, the minions in the previous area stop what they're doing! Come on, the entire foundational point of an RTS is that you can be micromanaging one thing while your minions are autonomously doing something else somewhere else! What further exacerbates this issue is that the second half of the game tasks you with finding three key items, and all of these items are placed in their own little (and I mean little; like, only one screen large) caves, yet these caves also count as separate areas despite the fact that they contain nothing more than a single chest and a few resource spots. I had my minions dragging one of the optional relics back to the area's fast-travel point when I went into the cave to get the item (in daytime, no less) , and when I came back out, the relic was back where it started and the minions I tasked with its transportation simply ceased to exist. I guess this explains why there hasn't been an open world Pikmin clone before. I had even cleared the enemies from their route, but even if you wanna go with the "they were attacked" explanation, the relic still should've been where they (I) left it, just with an enemy or two guarding it.

I also had some issues with how the game handled different minion abilities. You're given a blurb about them when you first get them, and while you're told the red ones are immune to fire, I swear it doesn't tell you they also burn the yellow bushes unless you go to the bestiary, so I ended up wandering around the map, looking for a third type before discovering it by chance. Also, in the Pikmin games, you can throw any Pikmin onto airborne enemies to attack them (yellow Pikmin can be thrown higher, but you don't need them since the enemies will swoop down); in contrast, this game introduces flying enemies before you get your third minion type, but only the fourth type has the ability to knock flying enemies out of the sky and make them vulnerable. The final minion type is able to attack and kill the formerly-invincible night-exclusive enemies, and also has double carry strength at night. Cool, right? Unfortunately, the camps don't have a "sleep til night" option, so if you reach one of the night-required obstacles in the morning, you'll just have to wait out the whole day; other than that, yeah, it's pretty neat. Oh, but you're still discouraged from doing stuff at night since, as you kill more and more of the night-exclusive enemies, they get faster and faster as they respawn until you can no longer outrun them. I always wondered why the Pikmin games had a hard-limit when the sun set instead of just making things harder at night; now I understand.

Lastly, I should bring up how the game's final (first) boss compares to the Pikmin ones. See, in Pikmin 1 and 3, the boss requires you to use the Pikmin you've cultivated throughout the game; if you get them killed in your battle, you gotta walk back to the Onion and take more from your own resources (and if you think that could result in just cheezing the fight, don't forget about the hard-limit on days, though that can make it annoying if you reach the boss half-way or 3/4ths through). In Pikmin 2 (whose final boss is technically part of the postgame, as you beat the game simply by collecting enough relics), you have to enter a cave where the Onions can't follow you, meaning you have to fight the boss using only the amount of Pikmin allowed on the field (though, unlike the other two games, time stands still in the caves, so you can take things slow to care for your limited minions without worrying about nightfall). THIS game, on the other hand, starts off with the Pikmin 2 approach, where you enter a cave and get locked out of getting more minions(the game even teases you by putting a minion-storage-access inside the room, only to block it off immediately when the battle starts), but after a moment, you'll realize that as your current minions get killed, the game just spawns more minions, so there's effectively no consequence for letting them die and no point to trying to kill the regular enemies that occasionally show up; just go straight for the weak points and swarm the boss afterward with no regard for your minions' safety because it doesn't matter. Heck, the boss even has a move where it just straight-up kills half of the minions attacking it, and I know for a fact it's unavoidable because it always happens right at the start of the cutscenes between phase transitions! Seriously, why should I care about my minions' safety when the game won't even let me? You only need to worry about you yourself getting attacked, but even then, you'll have plenty of healing items by this point and can tank any hits you do receive.

So yeah, this game is hard to recommend. Just because a game is indie (or, more accuratley, not AAA) doesn't mean it can't replicate quality-of-life features from the much-older games it takes inspiration from. If you're a fan of the Pikmin games and really want another game like them, I still say to wait for a good sale, and if you haven't played a Pikmin-style game before, try one from the main Pikmin trilogy first (Pikmin 3 is $20 on Wii U, five dollars CHEAPER than this game).

This is an adventure game with some occasional action elements. The majority of the time here will be spent either running across empty rooms or doing adventure-game-style puzzles, where the mechanics are either recycled wholesale or do something completely new that you need to figure out, like the magnet: at first, you just use it to carry your bikes over the fence so you can get past the mud, but the second one affixes the camera to the room opposite of where your bikes are (so you can't just do the same thing again), and you need to figure out that you need to grab a junk cube and drop it on the gate to crush it, which allows you to go back and bring your bikes through. The game is built to be multiplayer, as not only do both characters have different abilities from each other, but the game just suddenly goes into PvP segments throughout the game. In single-player, you can push a button to switch between characters (even in PvP mode), but you'll find that the computer-controlled character will often solve the puzzles for its character for you. Obviously, this is necessary for stuff like you holding down a switch to keep a gate open so the other character can run through and hold a switch on the opposite side to let you through, but it also happens when only one character can hit the switch to go forward and the other character just has to wait for it. On one hand, it does defeat the purpose of the puzzles in the first place, but on the other hand, these are adventure-game-style puzzles we're talking about; several of them I only got past because the computer-controlled character interacted with something I had no idea was even an option (like how even though you're told the glove can control enemies, it can only control two or three in the whole game, all of which are isolated and easily missable).

During the rare times when combat does show up, there are only a handful of enemy types you'll fight: one is the typical beeline-towards-you enemy, one moves slowly but bounces in random directions and can throw flaming projectiles in an arc, and the third is closer to a miniboss with its teleportation-on-hit and shooting homing shots in different trajectories. They're okay at first, but they do get repetitive after a while. The fourth enemy is surrounded by smoke, so you need teamwork with one character using the smoke-clearing weapon (which this particular enemy is immune to) and the other attacking, but the enemy has a move where it sucks you in, and since you need to be nearby to clear the smoke and the other character needs to be nearby to be in attacking range, there's really no way to avoid damage here (and you have to fight quite a few of them throughout the game).

There are some bosses, but while they do still have action elements, they're also extensions of the adventure-game-style gameplay. For example, the first boss has some fire as part of its graphic (and it leaves a trail of fire when it moves), but it's immune to your regular attacks. If you're not playing as the character with the water balloons, you'll see the computer throw some water balloons at it and you'll think "oh, maybe it's only weak to water," so you'll switch and start doing the same, only to realize that doesn't work, either, but THEN you'll notice the other character attack the charged-up water balloons that fell idle on the ground, and it's that splash animation that damages the boss. The second boss doesn't attack you directly, instead just having hazards move across the screen and some smoke on the arena (and sometimes a shadow-crowd will spawn, but I don't think it actually hurts you, just obscures your vision more), and all you do to defeat the boss is to hit some switches. The end of the game doesn't have a boss, just more waves of regular enemies.

Not recommended. I've never liked adventure games, and this game is no different.

Another adventure game. Your goal is to explore ruins, which always present you with new stuff you need to figure out how they work (at which point the mechanics are promptly discarded rather than built upon), but the ruins are on different islands, and to get to those islands, you have to get that island's card first (whether you find it or buy it in a shop).

Seriously, though, the ruins aren't fun to explore. The first one has red tiles and a spotlight in the middle that slowly tracks you, and you just need to get the spotlight to pass over the red tiles. Another one has platforms that you can only see their reflection in the water, while another part is completely dark and has you carry light blocks so you can see where the pits are. That's the kind of stuff you're in for. The one time I actually kinda enjoyed a ruin was the third one, where you're supposed to bring a block from one location in the room to put on a water spout: an early room requires you to toss it around a corner (though with the game limiting your camera movement, this is more annoying than challenging), and later rooms have platforms that only move to their next destination when you jump, so you have to position and time your jumps so that you make it across, which is actually a bit fun. Unfortunately, the end of this ruins has just a flat room with five spouts and a…I guess boss? that'll move around randomly and knock your blocks off the spouts; there's nothing you can do against the boss itself, you just have to get all the blocks on all the spouts at the same time, at which point the boss just kills itself. Again, it's really annoying.

Also, after the third ruins, the island card you get sends you to an island that doesn't have a ruin, but instead has a shop with three more island cards to buy. Problem is, currency in this game is extremely rare and finite, and you'll need to spend that money on upgrades like the dash ability. The game also never tells you how you can get more money; the closest it comes is when the NPC beside the arcade offers you money if you can beat all the high scores, but guess what? Playing the arcade games costs money, and the racing game likes to put speedups right before sharp turns, meaning you won't have enough time to react to the turn and will fall off the track (and you need the speedups to reach the next checkpoint in time). Another arcade game is literally just Arkanoid (down to the level design and enemies spawning from the ceiling), only with a higher rate of spawning for powerups and the ball never going faster than its default speed, so you can just grind on the enemies to get the high score. The last arcade game is a Mighty Bombjack clone, and it's my favorite due to being a platformer with level design, though the levels aren't anything special and enemies just spawn at regular intervals rather than have fixed placement (and I swear the powerup that lets you kill enemies for a brief amount of time never showed up on my first attempt, so I had to buy another token to beat the high score).

I gave up after my fourth ruin/third glowing blue cube since I once again found myself strapped for cash needed to get another island card. Maybe if I bought the camera and helped the one NPC with the art museum, I'd get enough, but this game isn't really worth continuing, anyway.

Not recommended.

This is a ball-rolling game. The left stick controls one character, the right stick controls the other character, the shoulder buttons are the characters' respective "interact" buttons, and the A button swaps the controls for those times the characters inevitably go down paths that lead to them being on opposite sides of the screen. The game's base concept of "you can only stay in the light and shadows kill you" has potential, but for most of the game, the only light source is from your ball, so as long as you stay close to it and don't accidentally put one character behind the other, you'll be fine (though sometimes, objects can cast a thin shadow you may not notice, but can still kill you).

Because the game does so little with its lighting mechanics, it has to have switch hunts instead. There'll be a switch to open the way forward, but oh no, there's shadow in the way, so you get one character to move what's causing the shadow while sending the other to the switch. But wait, the game builds on this mechanic by having multiple shadow-casting objects, so now you just move them individually until their opening allows light to be cast to the switch, then move them back after hitting the switch. Ooh, how riveting; it deserves the LIMBO seal of definitely-a-puzzle-game-you-guys-no-really.

When you pause the game, you're shown what percent of the game you've completed. This means I can say stuff like: at around 20-22%, the game has a split path for the exclusive purpose of one path being a dead end with a pit your ball will roll into if you go that way. There's a way-too-long segment where you're on a boat and you crash into piers to get through them, but the pier fragments cast shadows, and if you're unlucky, they can kill you even though you have no way to avoid them and are supposed to destroy the piers to continue. At 43%, the game introduces an enemy that'll track your ball and destroy it (and with it, your light source and yourself), but good luck trying to outrun them. It is possible to kill them, though. How? Put them in shadow for a couple seconds. You'd think that with them wanting to destroy the light source that they'd be fine in the dark, but I guess this game isn't bound by dusty old traditions like "being intuitive." At 52% the game introduces on-and-off wind all of a sudden, so if it's off on your first time, it'll turn on when you're in its path and you'll get blown off the bridge and killed. At 58%, the ball is replaced by a slug for a brief period of time (moves on its own and has a shadow in front, but still not much more complicated than the ball was). If you come across a slug whose shadow is blocking your path, you'll also notice wind chimes; touching the wind chimes causes the slug to face them, so you need to run away as soon as you touch them or you die.

At 66%, the game introduces a new light source: crystals. When on the ground, they produce light like normal, but when picked up, the light goes away but lets the character holding it walk through shadow. Now this is genuinely promising! Having to work out how to get both characters to the other side of the room when only one can cross shadows (as well as how to get the crystal between them) has the potential to lead to some really clever yet intuitive puzzles, so naturally, at 68%, the game gives you a second one. Jeez, these esoteric dystopia games really know how to dash your hopes. It gets especially annoying at 72%, where one character has to hold a key to unlock the gate, so the other character just has to run back and forth, slowly leap-frogging the crystals forward to allow the other character to bring the key across. Oh, and you go back to the ball at 73%, just to snuff out any last hope you had of the crystals' light mechanic being built upon.

The last part of the game introduces platforms that move up (where you need them to be) and down (into darkness where you die). Not long afterward, there are three in a row, and at first you may think you just need to run across them quickly, but it's actually another switch hunt since blocking the pulse to the platforms (whether with a character or your ball) keeps the platforms motionless. At 79%, there's a field of little tentacles that'll slowly absorb the ball's light, but this is more annoying than challenging since this just makes it harder to see where the safe spots are. It gets better at 80% since now the game introduced glowing domes you can run over to restore some of your ball's light as you make your way through the next tentacle field. 84% has the pulses generate wind that blows toward an upward slope, except if a character is blown onto the slope, the character just dies outright instead of getting pushed slower. At 86%, the wall on the top-right of the room, which looks no different than the walls in the rest of the area, is harmful and will kill you if you touch it.

At 90%, the genre suddenly changes to an autoscrolling action game with your characters having to protect the ball from projectiles and barriers that only your characters can break. It's a notable improvement over the previous segments since this part isn't a switch hunt, but your characters weave back and forth even at a standstill, and now they're forced onto their own side of the screen and can't go much further past the middle, which makes movement, if nothing else, feel clunkier. The characters also hold onto the ball by default, and pushing their action button has them roll it to the other character (both of whom don't need to stay by the ball anymore since the whole hall is lit), but it's possible to miss when you throw it despite the auto-aim, and if you hold back, you don't get blocked by an invisible wall, and going too far off the bottom of the screen with the ball will kill you.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this game.

The trailers make this game seem like just another side-scrolling hack 'n' slash with a jump button, but there's actually a strong focus on platforming here, too. Even in the first level, you've got some spike pits you need to jump over, and a slide that gives you enough momentum to jump over a gap. Unfortunately, the combat is still very much a hack 'n' slash, so every transition from platformer mode to combat mode really kills the game's pace. That said, even the combat isn't too bad since not only are there a good variety of enemies, but quite a few of them have slow projectile attacks (alas, there's yet another downside since the hack 'n' slash combat mechanics' short range attacks and inability to move while attacking don't lend themselves the suddenly-appearing projectiles). The game even seems disinterested in the hack 'n' slash segments (almost like they're only there by mandate) since if you die in an ambush, you just respawn right there without the fight being reset, but if you die on a platformer segment (where you're more likely to encounter instant-death pits), the game sends you back to the start of the segment. The game has a dash/dodge button, but you can only dash on the ground at first; you won't unlock air-dashing until after you beat the first few levels.

The game has four playable characters that you'll switch between, but differences between them are minor. At first, you'll only notice that two can double-jump and the other two can float down by holding jump in the air, but then you'll come across mandatory statues where you need to switch to that specific character just to activate the statues' basic effects (effects that really didn't need to be split between characters, like "create a bridge" or "shoot the target"). Also, you'll notice that this one early level makes the "float upward" statue effect last just short of where you need to go, so you actually need to push the statue up a slope and back so the statue itself is high enough to let the power get you to the next area…except as you progress, you'll notice that this power lasts different times for different stages, and that whole "making you push it higher" was just a forced gimmick that never happens again. If you die as a character, you can't play as that character for maybe five seconds until the character's bubble shows up in the level, at which point you can attack it to gain access to that character again (I think it's possible for enemies to attack the bubble and destroy it as there were times it seemed to disappear quickly before I could reach it, but the game is very inconsistent with which enemies/projectiles can destroy the bubbles and which can't, as different similarly-looking fireballs fall into different categories).

That's not the only one, either; the whole game is pretty gimmicky, introducing new mechanics that only get used for a level or two before being abandoned for the rest of the game. For the first couple levels, all the lockdown-ambushes are straight fights: you hit the enemies, they die, and you can go on when they're all dead. Then, you reach this one part where there's a rock suspended from a rope in the middle of the arena, and you might think "oh, the game is starting to use level design in its fights; this may very well be one of the best side-scrolling-hack-'n'-slash-games-with-a-jump-button out there," but after a moment, you'll realize that the enemies just keep coming and coming, unlike before. Turns out, while you're being accosted by the enemies, you'll actually need to ignore them and hit the rock to knock it to the left so that it swings to the right and hits the tower over there, and you can progress once the rock hits the tower enough times to destroy it. Sometimes, when you defeat a boss (or I guess mini-boss since others are saying the game only has four bosses), you can push B to take over its body and get some different moves, and it only lasts for that one level (and now that I think about it, only happens maybe twice in the whole game, probably just enough times so it can technically be used as a selling point without false advertising). The first one lets you throw a spear by holding and releasing the shoulder button, but when you make it to the boss of that level, the button's effect suddenly turns into commanding your allies to throw spears at the (mini)boss while also not moving and being unable to avoid any attacks that happen for the next second or two. The second possession is a spider that lets you crawl up walls, but you can only use your melee attack maybe once or twice per second (and of course can't move during that whole animation), and while your shoulder button scatter-shots arcing projectiles, you still gotta charge it up, so combat is even more slow and clunky than normal; you're seriously better off just exiting the body and fighting the ambushes and mini-bosses normally, then getting back in after the battle is over.

The one gimmick that actually seems to be used a bit more than just one or two levels is the light orbs that put a stop to the invincible chasing bugs, mainly because on top of you having to wait for the bugs to go away, the bugs seem to have irregular on/off cycles, meaning even if you wait to time your move forward to the next one, that's no guarantee you'll avoid damage.

Oh, there are also a couple times where the camera puts you to the edge of the screen, specifically the edge you need to move towards, making it much harder to react to what's coming since you don't have the space to react. It doesn't happen too often, but it happens quite a few times throughout the game.

Oh, there is a third enemy that you possess: lantern-head statues that carry a bug-ridding light source with them, and while they do show up a few times (compared to the other possessibles who only show up once), you only play as these ones for maybe a few seconds to a couple minutes until you reach a switch you need to keep held down to progress (and these ones also control like crap with sluggish forward movement, momentum (more so than default controls), and low jumps, making the simple act of jumping between moving platforms a chore).

In world 2, there are these lizard enemies in the second world that pretend to be stunned by your attacks at first, only to suddenly stab you after your second hit, so you just gotta remember to dodge arbitrarily every two attacks. There's also a few parts where you need to ride a raft across water, but one of them suddenly has rotating spikes that desrtoy your raft (even though it just looks like the game went back to regular platforming), so you have to attack the weak point and break the wheel before your raft reaches that point or you get stuck and die.

For the duration of world 3, your characters can't attack, double-jump, or float, so there's an even bigger focus on platforming (it's almost a completely different game). After maybe one or two levels, you get an orb that stays affixed to a spot a couple units above your character, and you can now shoot projectiles in the direction you point the left stick (attacking still brings you to a standstill like before, though). That's all well and good, but when enemies DO show up, they still take quite a bit of time to kill, and the game really likes to spam mobs of these damage-sponge enemies that slowly chase you. It's by far the worst part(s) of the game and it happens way too often. Also, despite the world's bigger focus on platforming, there are platforms that only the orb can land on, and you can only jump from these platforms by charging your jump, which means you can't make quick, reliable jumps since your jump height can vary if you don't let it charge all the way (which doesn't have much visual/audio indication for when it happens).

But even that world has its gimmicks. There's one level that has teleportation vortexes, which is only notable since if you overshoot the one that leads to the switch to open the way forward, you can't get back without jumping on the spikes. There's also an entire section that just has you in a rotating maze without any hazards in it, going back and forth activating levers that open a gate to another lever on the other side of the maze. There's a pit below, but that only means you need to wait a while for the maze to rotate when you're going for the levers on the outside.

World 4 goes back to normal controls, but the world's first level has wind that slows your movement and turns harmless objects that just so happen to blend into the background into hazards that'll fall on you if you don't attack them. The next level has rocks that'll fall from the sky, and at one point you'll need to ride one of these rocks across a bit of lava; problem is that the rocks are randomly on fire, and since you can't put the fire out, you'll just have to wait until a non-fire rock falls. Another part suddenly goes into point-and-click territory, with there being a smoke dispenser on the right and a wheel on the left. You need to find out how to drag the smoke dispenser down so that the smoke hits the wheel and opens the gate, but after you attack some wood, you'll be left wondering what to do until you suddenly realize (possibly by accident) that part of the dispenser graphic has a handlebar camouflaged in front of it (until this point, the only thing you've grabbed are ropes), and hanging on the handlebar drags the dispenser down enough for the smoke to open the gate…very slowly (literally 10+ seconds)…and if you let go too soon, the dispenser goes back up and you have to start over. Later on, the game decides to introduce yet another gimmick: now you can suddenly grab and toss the fire rocks that fall from the sky, and later still, the gimmick is dropped for another gimmick where you cool down lava rocks into destructible rocks with a new fan item, and both of these are introduced and abandoned within the last few levels. The fan one is even a little finnicky since it's hard to wall jump when the blocks aren't straight up, but angled slightly (you'll be clearly against the blocks, but the wall jump won't register).

Speaking of finnicky, there's a whole section in this world where the background is dark red and everything else is completely black, in shadow. On top of being kinda hard to see, this section has its own exclusive gimmick: after a while of jumping up, you'll reach a flat platform that seems to be a dead end, but not long after you make it there a rock (pretty small and also completely in shadow) suddenly falls from above, and when it hits the platform, the platform will start rotating. If you're standing on the platform, you get launched to the next one, but if not, you just kinda slide off the platform when you land on it, dying and having to start over. Thing is, you kinda can't just stand and wait on the platforms since you're also getting attacked by enemies. This was a gimmick I was glad to see go away.

Overall, this one's hard to recommend. It's better than a bunch of other hack 'n' slash games I've played due to its stronger focus on level design, but there are still a bunch of issues and gimmicks that get abandoned as suddenly as they show up. Wait for a good sale.

This is an adventure/typing game. When you're not wandering around the game's empty areas, you push spacebar to go into typing mode, at which point words appear above enemies and interactable obstacles; type the words and the enemies die/obstacles are interacted with.

The first thing you'll notice is that movement controls are terrible. Rather than use anything resembling WASD, like ESDF, movement is instead mapped to EFJI, and there's nothing in the options that will let you change this. Even when you think you've finally gotten used to this awkward control scheme, you'll still find moments where you get confused and turned around. For example, E moves you up and left, so if you want to go down and left, you need to hit the key to the right of it: F.

Then there's the combat. It works, but since the game is part adventure, you'll end up running towards enemies before you know they're there, and since you have to take the time to go into typing mode and type however many words the enemies have equipped (some only have one, but most have two to four words, and another type has several), so you'll often find yourself having to turn around and move back a bit before you combat the enemies. The forest also has these white obstacles you can destroy, but sometimes an enemy will spawn from them, so if you think you can just type the word and run forward as its destruction animation plays out, you're only right most of the time. It gets worse later on, as the yellow/mechanical dungeon (where you get the spark power) can have enemies just instantly spawn in front of you with no warning, not even a fanfare or visual flair; they just pop in suddenly, not being there one frame and suddenly existing the next. I only ever died in the adventure mode and not in any parts where the game stops you and just has you type waves of words.

As you progress, you'll get different powers that let you type different colored words, but you switch which power you have equipped by also typing the power's name. I get what they were going for, but it's still a little clunky, and I'd prefer just to switch powers with the tab key or something (and the wind power is terrible since it'll push enemies back, but if it pushes them offscreen, your progress in typing their word gets reset AND you also have to wait for them to walk back onscreen). Similarly, there are switches that open and close sets of doors in the yellow/machine dungeon, but since you'll need to toggle the switch again as you keep going forward and encountering closed doors, you'll have to type the same word repeatedly. Also, I should mention that there's no penalty for typos; wahat you type could ened up being compelpletelys illegeigiiblel, but as long as you eventually hit all the word's keys, it doesn't matter what other keys you hit in between. The only exception is if multiple words onscreen start with the same few letters: once the game realizes you're typing one word, your progress with the other word(s) will reset. Oh, but even that has an issue: some chests' "words" are just one letter, followed by a second single-letter "word", then the two are repeated ad-nauseam, so if the word you're actually trying to type is "iceberg", the nearby I/E chest will mess up your progress since that's what has the shorter "word" (now imagine this, but with an enemy coming at you).

All that said, my biggest problem is that the typing just isn't enough to build an entire game around. I even tried switching back and forth between the normal difficulty and the harder ones to see what the differences were, and just when I thought I found one, I realized normal mode does it, too. Most enemies only having three- or four-letter-words? Same in harder modes. Some enemies only having words with 10-15 characters? Also in normal mode. Enemies that require a specific element equipped ambushing you in adventure mode? Also in normal mode. Enemies moving faster? Thjose are just eels, and they move the same speed on normal mode.

The game also recognizes this to some degree, so there are some adventure game puzzles awkwardly stitched onto the game. Sometimes, you have to walk over all the tiles to light them up and open the gate, and other times, those tiles are numbered and have to be walked over in a certain order (easier done than said). And sometimes, those tiles have runes on them instead of real numbers, so you gotta wander around and find a switch that'll reveal what order you gotta step on the runes in. Riviteting.

Lastly, for a game with "story" in the title, the game's story is bad. Oh no, the girl is lonely and cold, and also fighting monststers, but now she's gained the courage to…fight more monsters, I guess? Wait, nevermind, she's dconld and lonely again. Also, you were in a coma the whole time.

Not recomendedmended. If you're looking for a typing game, I suggest the free Rayman Vs Cullcut instead. Yes, it's an endless high-score game, not an adventure game with an ending, but as a result, the mechanics don't overstay their welcome since you just play 'til you lose and that's it (and yeah, Flash is dead, but you can still run the intro.swf directly using one of the launchers included with Flashpoint Infinity). My only issues with the game are that your target word suddenly changes if an enemy reaches the crank, and that the game takes a couple minutes to really get going.

This is a hidden object game with elements of stealth and tower-defense (but only in a few levels). You're given a list of objectives, and if it isn't immediately obvious how you're supposed to go about achieving them, you'll usually be able to figure it out not long after wandering around the level and seeing what all you can interact with (EDIT: and your movement speed is pretty slow considering how large some of the levels are). The one time I got stumped and looked up a walkthrough was with the camera in the newsroom; turns out you have to find its buttons in the control room since you can't do anything to it directly, so it still isn't a puzzle. Some optional objectives are hidden and won't be told to you until after you do them (or, in the case of quantity-related ones, when you've gotten close enough to the quota, which is around 2/3). You do have a limited amount you can rain, but almost all levels where that has a decent chance of happening also contain places you can recharge your water, so again, not much strategy or thought is required to beat the game.

As you progress, you'll get new powers, and the game is really good about letting you know how they work without using words. For example, when you get the lightning strike ability, one of the first few things you can interact with is someone holding an umbrella, letting you know through level design alone that you can use the lightning to get rid of the umbrella so you can rain on the person.

While the game doesn't really have a difficulty curve (after all, challenge isn't the reason you'd want to buy this game), there are a few levels that contain hazards you'll need to avoid. It starts off with just having an enemy that slowly chases you, but not long into the game are stationary turrets: getting in front of them displays their laser sight and has them charge up for around half a second before firing. That's fine, but the level that introduces them also likes to hide them behind foreground objects. Plus, there are some turrets throughout the game that will track your position, and their rate of fire isn't consistent, making it unnecessarily difficult to accomplish the optional "don't get hit" objective for certain stages.

I also had an issue with the tower defense stages. There's one near the beginning (protect the bomb), one around the middle (protect the frog), and one very close to the end (protect the city), but despite what's implied by their positions in the game, they're all about as difficult as each other rather than having the later ones be harder. In fact, the last one is the easiest since it gives you helper turrets and only has enemies spawn from one side of the screen, yet it still takes its sweet time to be finished (even making you wait 20 seconds between waves). The other two have the same progression, starting off very slow and suddenly spiking the difficulty after a while; the only difference is that the first has a set time you need to last, while the second is more of a high-score deal.

Also, when you beat the game, you'll unlock "new game +" objectives for earlier stages, which usually include using powers you didn't have at that point or maybe something that's quite a bit more difficult/tedious to pull off than even the original optional objectives. I replayed a bunch of levels to see how the new objectives changed things (and because I didn't have much Game Pass time left), but the new objectives don't really add much, and going back to get them often just make the game even more repetitive. That said, it did result in a couple more times I couldn't figure out how to get the objective, like destroying the windmill in the early farm level or beating the first-person shooter level without getting any ammo refills (even lightning uses ammo in that level!).

Overall, the game has its problems, but I guess it does what it sets out to do fine enough. If this seems like something you'd enjoy, pick it up on sale.

Did you ever play the town-happiness side-quests in Dark Cloud and think "wow, this could be its own game!" Well, now it kinda is, but maybe not as good.

This is an adventure game. You wander around the map looking for scraps of paper that'll let you add a new tile to the map and continue looking for scraps of paper.Sometimes, you'll come across an NPC who will tell you something like "my sheep is in a place surrounded by flowers" so you take the tiles with flowers on them and rotate them until they're all pointing and adjacent to an empty space, at which point a new tile spawns there, letting you continue your search for paper scraps. Those are the kind of "puzzles" you're in for.

Map tiles can only be connected to tiles with a similar biome, so you'll need tiles that have two biomes on them if you want to connect separate ones. If you're worried that might result in some actual puzzles, don't worry: you have infinite space to put tiles on the map, so you can just scoot unneeded tiles out of the way to focus on the ones you want.

In fact, pretty much any of the game's concepts that could actually be built upon…aren't, and then it gets quietly abandoned for the next adventure-game-style puzzle. For example, you can't move the underground map tiles of the volcano even though you could move underground tiles for the previous areas. Eventually, you might realize that, unlike the previous areas, the underground and aboveground tiles are connected, so moving the aboveground ones also affects the underground ones. This COULD lead to some tricky parts despite the infinite map space since you'd need to figure out how to connect the pieces so that both sets of tiles line up with what you need to do, but then you'll realize the map is split into separate areas that you travel between not by connecting them (since you can't because they have different shading) but by examining something that'll teleport you there, and seeing as each area only has 4 tiles at max, it never takes long to figure out how to connect them once you've gotten all their paper scraps.

Oh, and despite my initial comparison, once you've completed an NPC's request, you don't even need to keep the map that way like you did to finish the town-happiness side-quests in Dark Cloud. One example is when you need to put the one guy east of the other person's house; as soon as that happens, the guy's house appears on the tile and you can move it again without repercussion. Another is in the ice world: the map tiles always come with four stuck together, but even when you need to connect them to create the shapes on the pillar, they can be removed once the pillar is activated and rearranged to get you to the lighthouse quicker. Heck, even the end of the game, where you're told to connect all the tiles, has no challenge; you can even make the first island into two islands, but as long as the tiles are connected, it counts and you move on.

Not recommended.