• Owlboy
  

  5 hours playtime

  1 of 12 achievements

This is a switch-hunt game with elements of stealth and twin-stick shooters. You’ll spend most of your time flying around large, empty areas, which make the controls feel sluggish (this is on top of the fact that your vertical movement is slower than your horizontal movement). You can dash with the B button, but that puts you closer to the edge of the screen (which, combined with the fact that the game likes to put hazards not far from screen transitions, can easily result in you getting hurt before you can react to what’s there). Sure, you can use the right stick to adjust where the camera points (since that’s how you aim your gun), but good luck doing that and dashing with the B button at the same time. It gets worse when you realize there are some shielded enemies that can only be made vulnerable by spinning with the X button, so you have to switch from the face buttons to the right stick to aim and shoot at them. The game knew to move the shoot button to the right trigger, so why didn’t it do the same for the other action-oriented commands?

However, this is far from a precision action game: for all but one dungeon, enemies and hazards are either non-existant or so sparse that they barely provide any challenge. Plus, despite this being a 2D sidescroller (the genre that basically invented level design), the level design does next to nothing to make up for the lack of challenge with the hazards. The most notable example is a zig-zagging hall in the Owl Temple: it’s completely empty except for one part where there are spikes on the ceiling. Those spikes don’t make it any trickier to get past that hall; they just waste your time by making you go slower so you don’t hit them.

Knock-back in this game is also absurd. A single hit from literally anything harmful will fling you further across the room than Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden combined (it’s literally half a screen before you can break out of the animation), and if you hit a wall during this animation, you now have to sit through a “slide down the wall” animation until you hit the ground and can get up.

Frankly, the fact that much of the game-play consists of switch-hunt-style “puzzles” means there are long segments that can be summed up with “bring X to the obvious Y, then push/hold the corresponding button, repeat.” The first level seems like it would be an introduction to the puzzle mechanics, featuring buttons that stay down and buttons that need to be weighed to stay active, but then you make it to the second dungeon and see that that’s basically all the game has. The only new things here are clouds that summon rain, wind that will destroy the clouds, and corks that block the wind, but rather than make it an action thing where you have to avoid the gusts or, dare I say, an actual puzzle, it’s just a linear path where you move the cloud up a bit, then fetch the cork and plug up the next gust, then repeat until you’ve made it to the end. That isn’t a puzzle, that’s a tutorial, yet the cloud/wind mechanic never goes beyond that (and it’s even dropped for the rest of the game).

To be fair, the action part of this picks up a bit with the mid-boss…well, half of it, anyway. The first phase actually has you shooting at the boss while avoiding its shots, but then the second phase has it retreat into its ship where it can’t be damaged, so you just wait near the ceiling until the cannon fires so it knocks some rocks loose that damage it for you. Then there’s the actual “boss” of the level which is just a “run away from the unstoppable hazard” segment, except this one has rubber-banding AI, so if you run too far ahead, it’ll speed up and give you less time to get around/shoot through the blocks.

After this is an extended, out-of-nowhere stealth segment: enemies immune to your gunfire will slowly walk back and forth, and if they notice you, proximity bombs will be spammed from the top of the screen on top of the enemies also throwing proximity bombs at you. Plus, they way forward will be blocked until you defeat all the enemies, and as you might be able to guess, since they’re immune to your gunfire, they can only be defeated from an explosion by a proximity bomb. However, the hit-box for said explosions is surprisingly small, so the bomb has to be dangerously close to the enemies for it to kill them. Combine this with how slow the bombs fall and the fact that the ones appearing from above spawn in random positions, and you can see how tedious this can be. I get that stealth games need some way to incentivise avoiding detection, but avoiding detection literally only requires you to wait on one or two slowly-moving objects to get out of your way, and waiting is boring (I still can’t believe there are developers that don’t realize this).

The next dungeon has an annoying darkness gimmick that limits your vision even more, because apparently the camera issue wasn’t enough. Once again, you have to move really slow so you won’t get hit by what you can’t see. Once you get past the first part and light up most of the rest of the dungeon, you’ll encounter a couple new enemies: one that stays still and shoots a projectile at you when it spots you, and worms that will jump out of holes in the ground at regular intervals. There’s even a part where the level design changes how you approach a situation by having a small hall with a projectile shooter, but putting a worm’s path right where you’d need to be to kill it, so you have to shoot the worm first. Dare I say, it’s actually kinda fun. Unfortunately, the game eventually remembers that it doesn’t actually want to be a fun action game and throws in another tedious switch-hunt mechanic where lighting certain torches summons a lamp, and killing the lamp causes it to generate the same too-small explosion as the earlier proximity bombs. There’s no challenge, you just need to lead the lamp to the next obviously-destructible block and kill it when it’s close enough. Later on, there’s a segment where you have to shoot a lever around a gear while also keeping two torches from reaching the bottom, lest they reset the lever. Not only are the torches constantly moving down, but the lever is also constantly rotating back to its original position, and since your gun barely moves the lever forward, you can only shoot at it for a few seconds before you have to go back to the torches and shoot them back up. Again, it’s not challenging; it’s just really tedious.

And then the game makes you do it again, only this time you don’t have to worry about the falling torches.

After this is the dungeon’s mid-boss, and for once, we have a boss that’s all about avoiding its pattern and shooting back! Unfortunately, the game expects you to be able to switch from shooting to dashing instantly what with how fast the boss attacks, but as mentioned earlier, that’s not really possible given how the controls are set up. Plus, stray projectiles can still hit you after you trigger the between-boss-phases cut-scene (the one that prevents you from moving).

After beating the mid-boss, the game sends you back to one of the large, empty areas from earlier so you can pull two switches and go back to the dungeon. Could’ve just set a fast-travel point and called it a day, but activating switches is this game’s raison d’être. Yeah, don’t actually build on that mechanic or make the path to the switches more dangerous or anything; who wants mechanical progression, anyway? Just throw some more gimmicks in there, it’ll be fine.

Going back to the dungeon, you’ll see that it introduces a new type of enemy (monkeys) for the second half, and what makes them hard is that they can spawn from behind the ceiling without warning. Other than that, this part of the level isn’t much different than the earlier part, being more focused on action and even having a bit of level design affect things, like when one of the fire-breathing shield-faces is placed on the wall next to the room’s entrance, but you can’t just go up and kill it since the destructible blocks on the side make that area too thin to avoid its flames. The boss is a giant worm, and while its attacks are well choreographed, it’s really easy to just float behind its head and shoot it a bunch whenever it comes out of the wall. After this is an auto-scrolling part where you just move up and down to avoid hitting blocks, but it’s really annoying since the camera keeps rotating and changing which direction “up” is (and because it’s hard to see when the floor and ceiling are closing in).

After reading all that, you may be thinking “that was a lot of action, and all in one level, no less! How can you say this isn’t really an action game?” Simple: aside from, like, two bosses (one of which is the final boss), THE GAME DROPS THE ACTION PART OF IT. After all of that is another stealth level, only instead of being forced into battle upon being caught, the gas gets turned on and you slowly lose health until you reach a switch (which may be too far away to reach before your entire health bar gets drained, so you’d better just keep waiting). Don’t worry, there are also some switch-hunts here to break up the monotony. The closest it gets to an action segment is when you pull a switch and a door opens, but it’s TiMeD, sO yOu’D bEtTeR hUrRy!1! (the path to the door is empty, by the way; not even any guards, much less hazards). The boss and its pattern definitely resemble something one might find in a challenging action game, but it’s actually easier than the second dungeon’s mid-boss once you realize you can just use the grapple ability to pass through the boss and its projectiles without getting hurt (and the boss may very well be impossible without said exploit). Then, you just wait for it to become vulnerable, attack it, repeat.

After that is the final level, and surprise surprise, we’ve got more switch-hunts, only this time, there are ZERO enemies!! The occasional set of spikes managed to slip through the cracks, though, but similar to that one part in the Owl Temple, they don’t really make much difference. Also, despite the entire rest of the game being built around flying, the game decides to take that away so it can add some extremely simple and bland platforming segments; the only thing you really need to watch out for is that you have to jump a bit early since your hit-box is thinner than your sprite. The final boss is done okay: it has decently conveyed attacks and its satellites are color coded so it won’t take much to figure out that each one is only vulnerable to one of your weapons, though I’m disappointed that the second phase is just a clone of the first phase.

So yeah, I don’t think I’d recommend this one. There are some good ideas, but its attempt at combining different genres just comes off as unfocused, not to mention the fact that it has to rely on basic switch-hunts to fill up most of the game-play (at least Ever Oasis and the 3D Zelda games knew to give the action equal focus). But hey, at least it has pretty graphics and smooth animation, eh?