devonrv
  • FORCED

    5 hours playtime

    6 of 24 achievements

Another CRPG, only instead of standard experience points, you unlock new cool-down abilities by getting crystals: you get one for beating a level, one for beating it below a certain time limit, and one for doing a special objective unique to each level (and the game never tells you what either the time limit or special objective is until after you’ve already beaten the level). Also, even though three of the four classes are melee characters, it has twin-stick shooter controls: left stick moves, right stick aims, right trigger attacks, and the other three shoulder buttons use your equipped abilities (but you have to unlock those slots, too).

One of the loading hints claims that all attacks can be avoided, but this is only true if you’re fighting the enemies individually, and since the game always makes you fight multiple enemies at once (enemies which beeline all their attacks at you and come from all sides of the arena), the game has the same unavoidable-damage-by-proxy as Cross Code. Another loading hint recommends running away from enemies if you’re not ready to fight, but when half the enemies outpace you, that’s simply not possible. What makes things worse is that most of the game doesn’t have set enemy placement, but instead enemy spawn points, and then proceeds to spawn hourglass towers (which increase the spawn rate of enemies) when you’re half-way through a level with barely any indication that they’ve appeared (the rumbling sound effect is used for lots of other stuff, and the hourglass towers often appear off-screen), so now you have to wander around the level looking for the towers while also being swarmed with so many enemies that you’ll likely get trapped between them and slaughtered. At that point, it’s no longer a challenge; it’s an endurance test. Oh, but it gets even worse in world four because all of those levels have dim lighting (so you’ll have even more trouble finding the hourglass towers or even seeing enemies), and on top of that, it introduces an enemy that literally isn’t rendered by the game unless it’s right next to you or you activate a stationary torch (which also has cool-down and isn’t very common to begin with, so no matter what, you’ll be stuck not being able to see the enemies).

EDIT: Oh, and half of all attacks knock you down, meaning you can’t do anything until you get back up, but enemies can still attack you while you’re down, meaning you can just get stun-locked to death.

The game has a bunch of other problems, but what finally made me give up was when I made it to the final boss and realized it was locked behind a 40 crystal requirement. For the record, there are only 25 levels in the entire game, including bosses, and including that locked final boss. Don’t forget that you only get one crystal for beating a level; what you need to do to get the other two crystals aren’t told to you until after you beat the level (and if you die during the level, the game locks those achievements anyway, meaning you have to start the whole level over for another chance). In other words, if you want to beat the game, you’re FORCED to replay the levels multiple times…okay, maybe that one was on me.

Still not recommended, though.