I saw a bunch of giveaways for this one a while back and remembered that it was part of that 1700+ itch.io bundle, so I added it to my list of games to play.

Platformer. If you check the options, you’ll see that available inputs include up, down, left, right, jump, attack, and pause. What you’re not told is that you can do a MegaMan-esque slide by holding down and pushing jump (not an attack, just gets you under one-tile-high gaps); this is important because you never need to do this until the water/lava levels, meaning you’d never even know you’re missing secrets in the intro, ice, and desert levels until then. Oh, and it’s also possible to drop past certain platforms; now, you may be thinking “if not down+jump, what is it?” You have to stay still and hold down for a second.

The game starts off promising. Level design is bland and hitboxes are a touch larger than you might expect, but controls are responsive (no momentum) and the delay between when enemies notice and shoot you is enough so that when you attack them, your sword hits their bullet, showing you that you can attack projectiles to destroy them. The boss of the first level is also fairly designed, no cheap hits.

However, once you make it to the stage select, the game starts to show its hand. The ice level (which is red, lol) has ice floor that not only gives you momentum, but speeds you up drastically, and you need that speed-up to make a series of blind jumps; my first death was trying to do an ice-jump, only to overshoot a platform and just barely miss the next one (and it’s not simple to stop yourself due to the aforementioned momentum). Plus, this level also has icicles which fall and hurt you, which wouldn’t be that big a deal if it didn’t also have identically-looking ice as background tiles (which it uses frequently, on the ceiling). The desert level has warehouse-looking robots that shoot homing missiles upward, but if you attack them enough, their outer shell breaks and they immediately begin shooting forward, which will hit you because you can only do a 3-hit combo before you get a slight attack delay (also, attacking in midair has this delay after each attack). The water level has platforms on rails, but the rails keep going past where the platforms abruptly start moving the other direction, and also enemies will spawn moving towards you as you make jumps, giving you little warning before you collide with them. The lava level has glass tubes as background objects, but some of them can break open and spawn a blob enemy that can’t be killed unless you attack it while it’s in midair, which it only does when it abruptly jumps forward. Oh, and all these levels are long, making it all the more sinister/tedious that the only difference between normal and hard mode is limited lives (checkpoint placement is okay, though).

The bosses also suck. The ice level’s boss has a lot of instant claw attacks that you just have to know are coming to avoid, and it can also shoot fast-moving crescents whose trajectory is impossible to predict. The desert boss’s arena is wide, which can put it offscreen (especially if you learned from the ice boss to keep your distance), and one of its low-HP attacks has it shoot the ground–but this isn’t what hurts you; instead, the spots it shot explode upward after a bit, AND the boss shoots a bunch of homing missiles as this happens. The water boss is actually designed pretty well, but its frequent use of waves of projectiles means you can’t attack it often. The lava boss is also okay, but one of its attacks has it move in a figure-∞, meaning if you get caught in the corner, you wont be able to jump over the boss since it’ll just move up into you.

After you beat the four stage-select levels, you unlock the city level, which reintroduces the desert robots and has another blind jump with a drone placed right where you’d need to be to make the jump. The boss of this level is a giant robot with its weak point on its head, but the only way to reach it is to wait for it to send its fist out. This is immediately followed by the forest level, which has a lot more of those small, abruptly-change-direction platforms (now without any railings!) which are combined with lots of a newly introduced enemy: an eye that shoots at you and is only vulnerable right when it’s about to shoot, so not only can you not really get rid of them, but their aimed-shots combined with the small, moving platforms means you also don’t have much chance of avoiding them, either. The boss of this level has almost nothing but instant melee attacks; not as bad as the ice level’s boss but still annoying.

After that, you get sent back to the stage select and are told that there’s “no going back” from the next level, but at this point, the game also won’t let you replay any of the four initial stage-select levels so you can get any floppy disks you missed (required for the good ending). The level itself is once again quite long, but mostly okay, with the Quickman-esque lasers only firing when you get in front of them, and the jet-platform segments giving you time to react despite once again interfering with your forward momentum. That said, there is one major problem with this level: it makes you refight ALL of the four stage-select bosses! This isn’t even like Mega Man where you have new powers to use; it’s literally just the same bosses in the same arenas again…and then afterward, the game abruptly reintroduces the blobs from the lava level for another cheap hit! The level’s own boss is actually invulnerable most of the time, once again forcing you to wait until it splits up and makes its core vulnerable.

The final level has little more than two boss fights: the first one is designed okay, but the fight can be pretty slow since the only safe way to get hits in is to wait for the boss come to you instead of chasing after it. The final boss’s first phase just involves two very cheap hits: 1) it can toss its massive scythe at you, which then immediately shoots a massive laser beam upward, and 2) it can come down and charge across the arena; both attacks require doing the slide move at specific locations to avoid and counterattack (the first time the slide move needed to avoid an attack). Also the boss’s hitbox is quite a bit smaller than you’d expect; several of my attacks missed despite my sprite clipping into the boss’s sprite. The second phase happens when its health bar is halfway down: it suddenly spawns lighting from the center of the arena outward (you can only avoid it once you know both the timing and which of those white sprites are just foreshadow and which actually hurt you), but its projectiles and moving hands aren’t that bad (though it can do the lighting attack again).

Overall, I don’t think I’d recommend this one. Maybe play it if you got it in that 1700+ itch.io bundle, but I wouldn’t recommend paying for it.