• BUTCHER, BAKER, AND CANDLESTICK MAKER
  

  2 hours playtime

  10 of 27 achievements

This is a twinstick shooter (one that actually focuses on the shooting part, unlike PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate). Left stick moves, right stick aims, right trigger shoots, and left trigger jumps. You might think that whole “ability to jump” would make this a platformer, but no; similar to Apotheon or Dust: An Elysian Tail, actual platforming is near nonexistent, with the main focus of the gameplay being on combat. You move though a couple hallways, then get trapped in a room with enemies spawning in around you, and when you kill most of them, you get to move on, usually to another arena. You can also collect secret skull icons, but they’re usually hidden behind fake walls that obscure your vision, so it isn’t really worth trying to collect them.

First, a special mention to how bad the graphics are: everything looks samey and blends together. If that were limited to the backgrounds and solid tiles, that would be one thing, but enemies can also be hard to make out from the surroundings, which can result in you taking hits or even dying to something you didn’t even know was there (and despite how large the game claims your health can be, it drains pretty quickly in certain scenarios).

It gets worse when you realize that most enemy projectiles are military-shooter-style “too quick to dodge” attacks rather than arcade-shmup-style shots. It’s basically if you took Shadow Complex and removed everything the game did right. Combine this with the fact that later enemy waves teleport in with the exact same effect that items use to teleport in and the fact that enemies barely give you a second to react once you’re in their line of sight before they shoot at you, and you’ll see that the game essentially combines the worst elements of repetitive and unfair: each arena isn’t different enough from the others to change the winning strategy of “wait behind a wall and shoot anyone who spawns near you before making your way to the other side of the arena.”

Plus, not only does the game rarely have any variety in level design, but a few of the instances that do manage to have level design end up being very obviously cheap (as opposed to the more subtle cheap hits you’ll take as a result of not seeing the enemies). For example, the game has elevators: they stay in position until you hit a button, then they move vertically until they reach their destinations. However, in the third level, the game introduces platforms that look exactly the same as the elevators, but they start falling the moment you land on them, and the game also introduces them over a lava pit (so you’ll likely die when you first make it there), and they also only show up in this one level. There’s another level that consists only of two arenas joined by a short hall at the top, and after a couple waves, one side fills with lava and you need to jump up to the hall to go to the other side. However, if you’re not fast enough, the hall doors will close and either trap you with the lava or trap you in the hall, at which point the hall fills with fire and you die.

The final boss is kinda the best part of the game. Sure, when you get it half-way down, more enemies start to appear and it chases you faster and faster until it moves faster than you can, and sure, it can basically kill you in one hit, and sure, only the grenade launcher will knock its attacks back, but you always auto-target the boss, which lets you focus on dodging until you realize that you have to move away from it in a figure ∞ instead of just circling the arena. It’s the closest the game gets to having an honest challenge.

But yeah, this one isn’t recommended. If you’re looking for a platformer, I’d sooner recommend Oniken or Maldita Castilla. Sure, they had problems, but they at least did a few things right.