• Rex: Another Island
  

  58 minutes playtime

  3 of 3 achievements

This game is advertised as an “open world platformer,” presumably because metroidvania implies gradually getting additional powers as the game progresses (which this game doesn’t do). Instead, you can only ever move left, move right, double-jump, and drop-down thin platforms by holding down and pushing jump.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that, despite the game having controller support in-game, you’ll need to use the mouse to get through the menus. The next thing you’ll notice is that the default camera is awful, snapping forward when you start moving and promptly snapping back to the center whenever you stop. Luckily, there’s an option to change it to a “fixed” camera, so you’ll want to enable that option from the start.

After that hiccup, the rest of the game is pretty solid. The HUD tells you how many coins are in the area, and whenever you reach a checkpoint, it totals them up and shows how much you’ve currently gotten in said area. The reason it doesn’t do this automatically whenever you get another coin is because dying resets the coins you got since your last checkpoint, meaning you need to get them again. Areas are also interconnected pretty well so that you never have to do much backtracking if you intend to get all the coins (and if that fails, there are 5 teleportation spheres spread throughout the map which you can teleport to at any time after unlocking them). The game even gets some tricky platforming near the end, but despite the game having one hit deaths, none of the segments overstay their welcome because checkpoints are always very close together (honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they were a bit further apart).

I only have three main issues with the game: 1) Movement has a bit of momentum, even outside of ice physics, so I found myself pushing backward to stabilize myself to make some of the trickier jumps. 2) Three coins in the Summit are almost completely obscured by background objects; I completely missed them on my first go-around and only stumbled across them later because I collected them by accident. 3) The two secret-ending doors are hidden a bit too well. I had no clue where to look for the gem door and I only found the coin door by pure chance. The normal ending hints that there are other endings, but I wish it gave a more specific hint, like “look near the teleportation spheres,” or better yet, just unlocked their respective endings as soon as you collected all the required items.

But still, those are minor issues, and for only $3, I can easily recommend this decent little game.