• Mekabolt
  

  39 minutes playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

This is a platformer. Along with your standard left/right movement and jump (which is always a fixed height in this game), you can shoot horizontally, with only one bullet allowed onscreen at a time. It’s not as bad as it seems, though: enemies are sparse, and rather than bullets killing them, bullets toggle them between moving (hurt you) and stationary (can be used as platforms).

With those mechanics, you might think the game is trying to be a puzzle game, but the only times you’ll be tripped up regarding what you’re supposed to do are when the game has blind drops into hazards.

As an action platformer, it fares better, but the difficulty is quite low throughout the whole game. Like far too many games before it, the game tries to mask its lackluster level design by giving each world its own gimmick: world 1 has grass blocks that can only be destroyed by enemy shots, world 2 has blocks that disappear when you stand on them, world 3 has stalactites that fall when you walk under them or shoot them (and they look identical to stalactites that don’t fall under any circumstances, so have fun with that), and world 4 has switches that’ll disable lasers or toggle other blocks. The game is good about introducing the gimmicks safely, but it neglects to build on them that much. The one standout level design moment in the game was when you had to drop a stalactite into lava, then stand on it as it sunk until it was low enough that you could make the jump to the goal without the low ceiling cutting your jump too short. The game needed more moments like that.

The graphics are also misleading. The protagonist’s sprite is just barely taller than one block (by only a couple pixels, and it’s all hair), but unlike every other game with similar sprite discrepancies, you’re unable to enter a one-block-tall tunnel. This is especially frustrating if the point you figure this out is when you’re standing on a disappearing block above some spikes.

Oh, and despite having 14 progression-based achievements, often having multiple ones for reaching the same point in the game, there’s no achievement for beating the game or beating all the levels.

But yeah, this game is kinda mediocre overall. It doesn’t have any major issues, but it also doesn’t really do much and is kinda boring at times (especially when you need to wait for an enemy to shoot so it’ll destroy the blocks blocking your path). Wait for a really good sale.