Aggelos is a very good Wonder Boy like. Not too long, not too easy and not too much backtracking. The level design is well done and so are the pixel art and the soundtrack. Furthermore, those last two fits perfectly the Wonder Boy spirit and brings us back to the 8bits/16bits era. It has a smooth gameplay ; just a bit modern for not to be unpleasant to play nowaday. The story is rather simple but the adventure is fresh, interesting and has some challenges ; and the little RPG elements are welcome. I feel that this game was made with love, love for those old adventure games. With Aggelos, Wonderboy Bobi had delivered them a lovely tribute.

I loved the Genesis/Mega Drive art style and gave it a punt on sale. The music and graphics were great.
I also enjoyed the enemies and world it offered. The upgrades and new abilities were great to earn.
The dudgeons and puzzles has a good challenge and interesting to solve.
I did not like no check points near the boss after you die. The bosses were bullet sponges being too hard compared to the rest of the game.
I really did not like the map and fast travel coming after 1/2 through the game. Because of this, expect to get lost at times.

This, like Trash Quest, was a $2 game on sale on the Switch eShop that Prfsnl told us about a week or so ago. It looked like a really great little Wonder Boy-like, and I snapped it up as quick as I could. It took me a little under 5 hours to play through the English version of the game with a 94% or so item collection rate.

Aggelos is a pretty standard fantasy story. The land is under attack by dark fantasy forces, and you, the hero, must venture forth and collect the four elemental orbs to gain the power of light and seal it away again. It's very explicitly constructed as a love letter to old Wonder Boy games, but compared to another retro-inspired metroidvania like Alwa's Awakening, this game actually has quite a bit of dialogue in it, and quite charming dialogue at that. It does the job of getting the story going and telling you were to go nicely, and the combination of good character animations and well done dialogue make it a treat to go through despite it not ultimately being all that important.

Mechanically this game is certainly a Wonder Boy love letter, as it's a Metroidvania more based around moving across a flat world than one with much verticality. Now it isn't as flat and stage-based as something like Shantate often is, but it's a wide open world with a welcome teleport feature to help get around once you hit around the halfway point. You go around, fight monsters, collect money to buy new equipment, and go through dungeons to collect magical orbs and get more powers. You can learn new sword moves from secret scrolls and those combined with the magic powers you get from rings in dungeons help augment your movement and power to explore more and more. That aspect gives it almost a Zelda 2 kind of feeling just as much as it does a Wonder Boy one. The whole mechanic of regaining magic via landing melee hits on enemies is a really cool idea, and it allows them to do some very cool stuff with platforming and puzzle design. It also lets them make some pretty damn brutal (though almost always optional) platforming challenges for those daring enough to try. The game is definitely on the harder end of more modern metroidvanias I've played, but it's generous enough with healing items that it's not too too bad.

The presentation is also very nice. The music is very good, and the graphics are pretty and vibrant. It all gives a good retro feeling while still feeling very modern. It's not quite as high quality as something of a Shovel Knight, mind you, but that feeling of "this is what Wonder Boy would be if it were made today" really shines through, just like how Shovel Knight so often feels like a modern day 8-bit Capcom game.


Verdict: Highly Recommended. There is very little to complain about with Aggelos. Honestly the only complaint I can really come up with is that I wish it were longer so I could've kept playing it! XD. If you don't mind a bit of a difficult time with platforming, this is a real joy of a metroidvania to play, and it's an absolute steal at $2.