Without going into spoilers, I'll say that this game has very okayish combat, but it goes hard on exploration and the boss fights are largely a delight.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.