I stuck it out the whole way this time and wish I hadn't.
And incredibly interesting premise and lovely looking game that's so full of small baffling design decisions it just breaks the whole thing apart.
It's a Shmup Metroidvania Deckbuilder. Except it's a bad at all of those things.
As a Shmup, your character has a huge hitbox and there's often so many particles on screen there's no way you can dodge them, so you have to rely heavily on bullet clearing cards. Even when you see the bullets coming, you'll often clip one because of your massive hit box.
As a 'vania, it's mostly linear with some very tedious backtracking on account of your slow movement speed. Most of the exploration mechanics you get are used a handful of times and don't really round out your arsenal.
As a deckbuilder, it could have improved the shmup combat, but in practice you get SO many bad cards that there's not much point in exploring. The fact that the cards are randomly assigned to buttons means you're usually best to just spam them.
Enemies are bullet sponges with bullet patterns that often punish dodging (again, pushing you toward bullet clearing spells).
All armor is temporary, except one broke-as-hell late game card that lets you restore a heart.
The writing is groan inducing and reads like a dream conversation with all your pals (and you cannot skip it).
Checkpoints are often terrible.
Difficulty spikes are often.
There's a bad submarine section, which is not as bad as a lot of people seem to make out.
I was so up for this game, and I feel like it's not a million miles away from being good! Building a good deck (eventually) feels great!
But the execution is not there and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.
And incredibly interesting premise and lovely looking game that's so full of small baffling design decisions it just breaks the whole thing apart.
It's a Shmup Metroidvania Deckbuilder. Except it's a bad at all of those things.
As a Shmup, your character has a huge hitbox and there's often so many particles on screen there's no way you can dodge them, so you have to rely heavily on bullet clearing cards. Even when you see the bullets coming, you'll often clip one because of your massive hit box.
As a 'vania, it's mostly linear with some very tedious backtracking on account of your slow movement speed. Most of the exploration mechanics you get are used a handful of times and don't really round out your arsenal.
As a deckbuilder, it could have improved the shmup combat, but in practice you get SO many bad cards that there's not much point in exploring. The fact that the cards are randomly assigned to buttons means you're usually best to just spam them.
Enemies are bullet sponges with bullet patterns that often punish dodging (again, pushing you toward bullet clearing spells).
All armor is temporary, except one broke-as-hell late game card that lets you restore a heart.
The writing is groan inducing and reads like a dream conversation with all your pals (and you cannot skip it).
Checkpoints are often terrible.
Difficulty spikes are often.
There's a bad submarine section, which is not as bad as a lot of people seem to make out.
I was so up for this game, and I feel like it's not a million miles away from being good! Building a good deck (eventually) feels great!
But the execution is not there and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.
A very pretty game made with obvious love for shmups, but some truly awful design choices that make this game so unenjoyable for me that I have trouble seeing how anyone could have fun with this game, or how these design catastrophes even made it through development without anyone on the dev team questioning it.
I do love the idea of a dualstick shooter metroidvania, and this game is made with an obvious inspiration from proper shmups (as in Touhou, Cave, etc; the designer of this game not just some guy who played Nuclear Throne once) which I appreciate as well, and this game had the potential to be a new favorite, but it was never exciting and just became more and more annoying until I was outright angry and decided to uninstall.
The first problem is that game talks way the hell too much with uninteresting, high school-level dialogue and, on that subject, I'm not wild about the flying magical girls anime thing either. Second, your character flies too slowly and they for some reason tease a dodge move in the prologue that they then take away for a solid 30% of the game, but even when you get the dodge back, it doesn't help with movement speed as your character completely halts for a frame or two after dodging, which is another design choice I just hate. Why can't we be allowed to be fast? There already is a cooldown so you can't dodge spam bosses, so why is the pause there? I hate it.
The world design is one of those segmented metroidvanias where each area is at least somewhat MV, but each area is entirely cut off from other areas and the overall experience feels pretty linear, which is another big drawback for me. It doesn't help that most rooms are just big rectangles with a few enemies in them, secrets seem very scarce and boring, and the armor upgrades, which should be exciting, are made entirely unexciting by the fact that they're temporary and that you have to buy them with the currency otherwise used to upgrade cards and level up your character, meaning buying armor is just stupid and you should save up for leveling instead. Great.
My patience was already wearing thin with the card system, the uninteresting exploration and the lack of basic combat upgrades when I hit the infamously terrible submarine area where you have to keep jumping in and out of a sub to go back and forth between flooded areas and that uses a different control scheme where the game changes from a dualstick 360-degree shooter to a horizontal shmup. Not only does this commit the to me cardinal sin of taking your gear away and making you play a different game, it does it for a very long time as it doesn't do it for a room or two, but the entire full-sized area that lasts for a few hours. I hated it so much. Oh, you thought bought Metroid with a flying witch? Too bad, you're playing In The Hunt for three hours instead! Devs, honestly now, have you ever bought a game that forces you to play another game for hours and thought that was awesome? No game has ever pulled that off aside from maybe minigames in open world RPGs and you're generally not forced to play those for three straight hours.
Worst of all, this dreadfully dull flooded area ends with a surprise boss that's an insane difficulty spike out of nowhere and is what made me rage quit the game. Not only is this a sadistically enormous spike with no warning, the bitch is covering the exit so you can't leave and upgrade some cards and try again. And not only that, PlayStation is apparently the only platform where tropy progress is locked if you use any of the in-game cheats. Xbox even gives you an achievement for using the cheat system, but it is entirely verboten in the PS version? Yeah, okay, fuck you too.
So, what's this about cards, though? Why, it's the worst part of the game and an absolutely flabbergasting design decision! You see, this game is not only a metroidvania, but it wants to be a deckbuilder too, where you have a little "deck" of maybe 10 cards, and you find new cards from defeating bosses, very rarely in hidden rooms and you can also buy duplicates from a character. With this, you are forced to fill up a deck with cards and whenever you use a special ability, that card is temporarily "spent" and you "draw" a new one from your deck. Not only does this system suck because they, of course, thought it made sense to start you off with a bunch of trash cards, because that's how proper deckbuilders work, except starting you off with trash in a game like this only makes you hate the whole system. Above all, though, this deckbuilding system only manages to achieve controller confusion in that you never have any idea which attack is mapped to which button. Is triangle my heavy attack now or is it circle? Do I even have the bullet-clearing spell right now or do I only have three copies of the worst one? The game never stops being confusing and this is bafflingly stupid in a danmaku-style game where the screen is covered with bullets. Not only do you have to dodge the most awkward hitbox of all time (because, apparently, these devs somehow managed to be shmup fans who never noticed that japanese shmups use tiny hitboxes that don't cover your entire character) through a web of bullets, you constantly have to glance over at a corner to see what your spells are and what button to press. This so very obviously does not work at all and ruins the entire game and it is mindblowingly confusing that they made a whole-ass game with this so clearly stupid and broken mechanic as a core feature.
I don't know. I might not have despised this game, and I was thinking more a 2.5-3/5 score up until the underwater area, had they not disallowed ONLY my version from cheating my way past the insanely bullshit spike boss and maybe finding my way back to enjoying the game, but since I'm not allowed to do that, I'll say fuck this game and uninstall it.
I do love the idea of a dualstick shooter metroidvania, and this game is made with an obvious inspiration from proper shmups (as in Touhou, Cave, etc; the designer of this game not just some guy who played Nuclear Throne once) which I appreciate as well, and this game had the potential to be a new favorite, but it was never exciting and just became more and more annoying until I was outright angry and decided to uninstall.
The first problem is that game talks way the hell too much with uninteresting, high school-level dialogue and, on that subject, I'm not wild about the flying magical girls anime thing either. Second, your character flies too slowly and they for some reason tease a dodge move in the prologue that they then take away for a solid 30% of the game, but even when you get the dodge back, it doesn't help with movement speed as your character completely halts for a frame or two after dodging, which is another design choice I just hate. Why can't we be allowed to be fast? There already is a cooldown so you can't dodge spam bosses, so why is the pause there? I hate it.
The world design is one of those segmented metroidvanias where each area is at least somewhat MV, but each area is entirely cut off from other areas and the overall experience feels pretty linear, which is another big drawback for me. It doesn't help that most rooms are just big rectangles with a few enemies in them, secrets seem very scarce and boring, and the armor upgrades, which should be exciting, are made entirely unexciting by the fact that they're temporary and that you have to buy them with the currency otherwise used to upgrade cards and level up your character, meaning buying armor is just stupid and you should save up for leveling instead. Great.
My patience was already wearing thin with the card system, the uninteresting exploration and the lack of basic combat upgrades when I hit the infamously terrible submarine area where you have to keep jumping in and out of a sub to go back and forth between flooded areas and that uses a different control scheme where the game changes from a dualstick 360-degree shooter to a horizontal shmup. Not only does this commit the to me cardinal sin of taking your gear away and making you play a different game, it does it for a very long time as it doesn't do it for a room or two, but the entire full-sized area that lasts for a few hours. I hated it so much. Oh, you thought bought Metroid with a flying witch? Too bad, you're playing In The Hunt for three hours instead! Devs, honestly now, have you ever bought a game that forces you to play another game for hours and thought that was awesome? No game has ever pulled that off aside from maybe minigames in open world RPGs and you're generally not forced to play those for three straight hours.
Worst of all, this dreadfully dull flooded area ends with a surprise boss that's an insane difficulty spike out of nowhere and is what made me rage quit the game. Not only is this a sadistically enormous spike with no warning, the bitch is covering the exit so you can't leave and upgrade some cards and try again. And not only that, PlayStation is apparently the only platform where tropy progress is locked if you use any of the in-game cheats. Xbox even gives you an achievement for using the cheat system, but it is entirely verboten in the PS version? Yeah, okay, fuck you too.
So, what's this about cards, though? Why, it's the worst part of the game and an absolutely flabbergasting design decision! You see, this game is not only a metroidvania, but it wants to be a deckbuilder too, where you have a little "deck" of maybe 10 cards, and you find new cards from defeating bosses, very rarely in hidden rooms and you can also buy duplicates from a character. With this, you are forced to fill up a deck with cards and whenever you use a special ability, that card is temporarily "spent" and you "draw" a new one from your deck. Not only does this system suck because they, of course, thought it made sense to start you off with a bunch of trash cards, because that's how proper deckbuilders work, except starting you off with trash in a game like this only makes you hate the whole system. Above all, though, this deckbuilding system only manages to achieve controller confusion in that you never have any idea which attack is mapped to which button. Is triangle my heavy attack now or is it circle? Do I even have the bullet-clearing spell right now or do I only have three copies of the worst one? The game never stops being confusing and this is bafflingly stupid in a danmaku-style game where the screen is covered with bullets. Not only do you have to dodge the most awkward hitbox of all time (because, apparently, these devs somehow managed to be shmup fans who never noticed that japanese shmups use tiny hitboxes that don't cover your entire character) through a web of bullets, you constantly have to glance over at a corner to see what your spells are and what button to press. This so very obviously does not work at all and ruins the entire game and it is mindblowingly confusing that they made a whole-ass game with this so clearly stupid and broken mechanic as a core feature.
I don't know. I might not have despised this game, and I was thinking more a 2.5-3/5 score up until the underwater area, had they not disallowed ONLY my version from cheating my way past the insanely bullshit spike boss and maybe finding my way back to enjoying the game, but since I'm not allowed to do that, I'll say fuck this game and uninstall it.
Un bullet hell con algo de historia (muy suave) y la posibilidad de crearte (también de forma muy suave) un mazo para afrontar ciertos bosses es algo refrescante, pero creo que se queda cojo en algunas cosas.
Tengo problemas con el sistema de juego. El moverte y disparar está bien, aunque vueles extremadamente lento y si quieres moverte entre salas ponte un podcast o algo porque los enemigos además reaparecen. el tema viene con el gimmick de usar hechizos como cartas. Consigues una veintena de cartas a lo largo del juego y puedes cambiar tu mazo disponible. Estas no se gastan, una vez las usas vuelven al mazo y sale otra, teniendo siempre 3. Cada carta cuesta mana que sueltan los enemigos si les golpeas lo suficiente. Sobre el papel es curioso depender de la suerte para saber que habilidad vas a hacer. En la realidad implica que muchas veces te dedicas a gastar las que en ese momento no te vienen bien mientras huyes como un perro esperando a alguna que te sea realmente útil (la utilidad de la mayoría es cuestionable).
Eso es otra, la dificultad. Muchos de los bosses son interesantes, aunque algunos se repitan bastante, pero son las salas de oleadas las que te mataran más que cualquier malo malísimo. la dificultad es una montaña rusa, creciente, pero lo mismo tras un par de salas donde has muerto 15 veces, viene un boss que a lo sumo te quita 1 punto o 2de vida. Insisto, el juego es entretenido, pero creo que ahí ha faltado nivelar, sobre todo cuándo es (casi) imposible recuperar vida.
Ese casi tiene explicación. Normalmente hasta que no llegues a un punto de guardado, una tienda o alguna rara caja con un corazón, no hay forma de recuperar vida. Excepto si te pones trucos. Si, el juego tiene un sistema de trucos en el propio menú para que los enemigos te den vida, magia infinita, invulnerabilidad, para que te maten de 1 ostia, etc. A mi me parece genial que exista y ojalá decir que no los he usado, pero el boss final... en fin.
hasta ese momento me lo pasaba bien, explotando salas, muriendo en algunas muchísimas veces hasta que me tocaba la combinación de cartas adecuada, y por supuesto si una zona se queda sin explorar no vuelves si vas corto de tiempo. Hasta el boss final, con 4 o 5 fases todas iguales con la dif de que la pantalla se llena más de balas hasta un punto inaguantable. El pico ahí es absurdo y mira, me puse el de invulnerabilidad y aun así intenté esquivar a ver si podría sobrevivir. En algunos intentos (no hice muchos) porque el boss es de esos largos largos como JRPG viejo, me comía entre 40 y 50 golpes. Tienes 6-8 de vida. No tiene sentido ninguno. Hasta el propio logro te dice que no son trampas, pero no se siente bien ponérselo por encontrar justo justo al final un pico de dificultad tan absurdísimo.
Lo puedo recomendar a quien le gusten los bullet hell ya que no hay muchos decentes que no sean de navecitas, pero no se si a alguien más, la verdad.
Tengo problemas con el sistema de juego. El moverte y disparar está bien, aunque vueles extremadamente lento y si quieres moverte entre salas ponte un podcast o algo porque los enemigos además reaparecen. el tema viene con el gimmick de usar hechizos como cartas. Consigues una veintena de cartas a lo largo del juego y puedes cambiar tu mazo disponible. Estas no se gastan, una vez las usas vuelven al mazo y sale otra, teniendo siempre 3. Cada carta cuesta mana que sueltan los enemigos si les golpeas lo suficiente. Sobre el papel es curioso depender de la suerte para saber que habilidad vas a hacer. En la realidad implica que muchas veces te dedicas a gastar las que en ese momento no te vienen bien mientras huyes como un perro esperando a alguna que te sea realmente útil (la utilidad de la mayoría es cuestionable).
Eso es otra, la dificultad. Muchos de los bosses son interesantes, aunque algunos se repitan bastante, pero son las salas de oleadas las que te mataran más que cualquier malo malísimo. la dificultad es una montaña rusa, creciente, pero lo mismo tras un par de salas donde has muerto 15 veces, viene un boss que a lo sumo te quita 1 punto o 2de vida. Insisto, el juego es entretenido, pero creo que ahí ha faltado nivelar, sobre todo cuándo es (casi) imposible recuperar vida.
Ese casi tiene explicación. Normalmente hasta que no llegues a un punto de guardado, una tienda o alguna rara caja con un corazón, no hay forma de recuperar vida. Excepto si te pones trucos. Si, el juego tiene un sistema de trucos en el propio menú para que los enemigos te den vida, magia infinita, invulnerabilidad, para que te maten de 1 ostia, etc. A mi me parece genial que exista y ojalá decir que no los he usado, pero el boss final... en fin.
hasta ese momento me lo pasaba bien, explotando salas, muriendo en algunas muchísimas veces hasta que me tocaba la combinación de cartas adecuada, y por supuesto si una zona se queda sin explorar no vuelves si vas corto de tiempo. Hasta el boss final, con 4 o 5 fases todas iguales con la dif de que la pantalla se llena más de balas hasta un punto inaguantable. El pico ahí es absurdo y mira, me puse el de invulnerabilidad y aun así intenté esquivar a ver si podría sobrevivir. En algunos intentos (no hice muchos) porque el boss es de esos largos largos como JRPG viejo, me comía entre 40 y 50 golpes. Tienes 6-8 de vida. No tiene sentido ninguno. Hasta el propio logro te dice que no son trampas, pero no se siente bien ponérselo por encontrar justo justo al final un pico de dificultad tan absurdísimo.
Lo puedo recomendar a quien le gusten los bullet hell ya que no hay muchos decentes que no sean de navecitas, pero no se si a alguien más, la verdad.
The first 2 hours are pretty good, then it is simply a fall into the void without a parachute:
- Terrible story: After the first 2 hours you already know how everything is going to end, and they only have to stretch the gum
- Insufferable characters: The only good character is the cat, and It's because he doesn't open his mouth
- Very long journeys without mobility tools: 3 hours of your life going from side to side between rooms
- There are 3 good bosses: The rest are simply waves of meaningless enemies in which you will depend on luck depending on the attack they decide to make
- Senseless difficulty spike: At one point in the game you stop having tools to level up, but the enemies multiply and get stronger for no reason
- Terrible story: After the first 2 hours you already know how everything is going to end, and they only have to stretch the gum
- Insufferable characters: The only good character is the cat, and It's because he doesn't open his mouth
- Very long journeys without mobility tools: 3 hours of your life going from side to side between rooms
- There are 3 good bosses: The rest are simply waves of meaningless enemies in which you will depend on luck depending on the attack they decide to make
- Senseless difficulty spike: At one point in the game you stop having tools to level up, but the enemies multiply and get stronger for no reason