Atromin
9 Years of Shadows 2023
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Platforms Played
A fun and mostly well made metroidvania with a few issues and some wasted potential.
The pixelart and artstyle in general is amazing, the music is pretty good and the story is also nice and simple.
The melee combat is ok, it's basic but it gets the job done. After getting the charged attack early in the game i was expecting to get more attacks for my moveset but that never happened unless you count the unreliable dive kick you unlock for movement later (and only need to use like twice).
You also get a projectile that costs you a part of the light bar to use (basically your shield) and while interesting it's an extremely unbalanced mechanic that can make the game a cakewalk if you're good at it.
Here's how it works, you have the light bar that works as a shield and you can spend it to use ranged attacks and solve some puzzles, it's also the only way to hurt "dark crystal" enemies. When you run out the next hit you take will be to your HP, by default you die in two hits (max upgrades is 4 hits) and there's no way to heal without entering a save room.
To recharge you can:
Once fully empty you can manually charge it back to 80% by holding a button, leaving you open to attacks a few seconds
Hitting and killing normal enemies
Hitting some red stuff i'm going to be calling meatballs
Timing correctly the QTE that activates automatically when it depletes. The more you use it in quick succession the harder it becomes and it recovers less shield.
That last one is completely overpowered and the reason the game becomes trivial if you have good reflexes and can land the qte consistently. You become almost immortal and you can also manually trigger the qte whenever you want to make the timing easier by wasting some bullets. I was able to beat most bosses in the game on my first try without taking HP damage because of this mechanic.
The manual charge is also very OP and makes the regular enemies completely harmless, you can heal whenever you want, the enemies are not very aggressive and don't have very good movility, if you screw up you can simple take a few steps back and heal uninterrupted.
The bosses are mostly fine, some of them are very basic, but there's a bunch with some cool patterns and gimmicks, even if they're not hard they're still fun to fight.
SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE GAME
The final upgrade SUUUUUUUUUUUCKS REEEALLLLYYY BAAAAAAAAD.
Your manual charge and qte gets replaced by a really fucking slow autoheal that takes 2 hours to begin AND refill, it completely changes the gameplay in the last minute. You also get a horrible AoE """attack""" that only hurts regular enemies and is used for puzzles and costs way more shield than it's worth. Oh, and you lose your ranged attacks.
Now, the two bosses you have to fight using this thing are not too bad, they're a big difficulty spike but the patterns are easy to learn so it's not bad at all honestly, you just can't fuck up too much or you'll get killed in like 5 seconds for not having shield.
I feel like after playing super aggro the whole game because of the qte making me immortal having an """"upgrade"""" that promotes stalling is horrible, that's not fun. It would have been waaay better if the bosses had more meatball attacks so you can protect yourself and attack at the same time while regenerating a bit of shield. Only having passive healing is lame. The optional boss has ONE meatball attack he does sometimes, but the final boss doesn't have any.
END OF SPOILERS
As for the castle and exploration, it's not a very backtrack heavy game, you can explore and find most of the upgrades in your first visit to a new area if you want. This may suck for those that love that sort of thing but i don't mind it.
The areas are well designed, none of them really stand out as amazing and memorable but there isn't any horrible sections either. It's solid. Movement with your upgrades feels nice and fluid, the mermaid one was my favorite.
Overall it's a very fun game with some weak points, my biggest issue was how dominating the qte recovery was, i would make it weaker/harder in exchange of giving every boss some meatball attacks to mantain the aggro style without becoming literally immortal, and it also would help those that can't do the qte at all.
The pixelart and artstyle in general is amazing, the music is pretty good and the story is also nice and simple.
The melee combat is ok, it's basic but it gets the job done. After getting the charged attack early in the game i was expecting to get more attacks for my moveset but that never happened unless you count the unreliable dive kick you unlock for movement later (and only need to use like twice).
You also get a projectile that costs you a part of the light bar to use (basically your shield) and while interesting it's an extremely unbalanced mechanic that can make the game a cakewalk if you're good at it.
Here's how it works, you have the light bar that works as a shield and you can spend it to use ranged attacks and solve some puzzles, it's also the only way to hurt "dark crystal" enemies. When you run out the next hit you take will be to your HP, by default you die in two hits (max upgrades is 4 hits) and there's no way to heal without entering a save room.
To recharge you can:
Once fully empty you can manually charge it back to 80% by holding a button, leaving you open to attacks a few seconds
Hitting and killing normal enemies
Hitting some red stuff i'm going to be calling meatballs
Timing correctly the QTE that activates automatically when it depletes. The more you use it in quick succession the harder it becomes and it recovers less shield.
That last one is completely overpowered and the reason the game becomes trivial if you have good reflexes and can land the qte consistently. You become almost immortal and you can also manually trigger the qte whenever you want to make the timing easier by wasting some bullets. I was able to beat most bosses in the game on my first try without taking HP damage because of this mechanic.
The manual charge is also very OP and makes the regular enemies completely harmless, you can heal whenever you want, the enemies are not very aggressive and don't have very good movility, if you screw up you can simple take a few steps back and heal uninterrupted.
The bosses are mostly fine, some of them are very basic, but there's a bunch with some cool patterns and gimmicks, even if they're not hard they're still fun to fight.
SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE GAME
The final upgrade SUUUUUUUUUUUCKS REEEALLLLYYY BAAAAAAAAD.
Your manual charge and qte gets replaced by a really fucking slow autoheal that takes 2 hours to begin AND refill, it completely changes the gameplay in the last minute. You also get a horrible AoE """attack""" that only hurts regular enemies and is used for puzzles and costs way more shield than it's worth. Oh, and you lose your ranged attacks.
Now, the two bosses you have to fight using this thing are not too bad, they're a big difficulty spike but the patterns are easy to learn so it's not bad at all honestly, you just can't fuck up too much or you'll get killed in like 5 seconds for not having shield.
I feel like after playing super aggro the whole game because of the qte making me immortal having an """"upgrade"""" that promotes stalling is horrible, that's not fun. It would have been waaay better if the bosses had more meatball attacks so you can protect yourself and attack at the same time while regenerating a bit of shield. Only having passive healing is lame. The optional boss has ONE meatball attack he does sometimes, but the final boss doesn't have any.
END OF SPOILERS
As for the castle and exploration, it's not a very backtrack heavy game, you can explore and find most of the upgrades in your first visit to a new area if you want. This may suck for those that love that sort of thing but i don't mind it.
The areas are well designed, none of them really stand out as amazing and memorable but there isn't any horrible sections either. It's solid. Movement with your upgrades feels nice and fluid, the mermaid one was my favorite.
Overall it's a very fun game with some weak points, my biggest issue was how dominating the qte recovery was, i would make it weaker/harder in exchange of giving every boss some meatball attacks to mantain the aggro style without becoming literally immortal, and it also would help those that can't do the qte at all.