I saw couple of clips in this game and said to myself. Damn I have to play it, dashing around, flying everywhere, cool weapons, now this is my kind of game!

Then I started playing... Realized this "speedy" game uses tanks controls. I said whatever let's push on. Then realized camera doesn't turn left to right, you can only do it with turning your character, camera only goes up or down and it's INVERTED, with no option to change. I get little bit anxious. Again I said let's push on, first mission was about finding a weapon and returning back, it was simple so I didn't mind it. Then the second mission came, it was about exterminating all the monsters, I said okay let's do it, then opened the map and saw trillions of red dots, also everywhere filled with enemy spawners, I also met with flying bug creatures that forces you to look up or down with the shitty camera, I get even more anxious, finishes the level finally with all sweat and tears. Looks up the timer, it says 30minutes. Seeing that, I said to myself: let me shelve this until someone makes a improved controls mod for this game(probably never gonna happen)

Edit: But then, I did the best desicion. I readed a game guide to learn more tricks. Learned to fast turn, invinsibility 25 combo and meteor attack. (funny that game doesn't explain in the game itself)

Then I opened on emulator and rebind my buttons. There is a program called ds4windows and with that, I bind l3(analog left) to r1, r3(analog right) to l1. I did this because pressing analog sticks make me frustrated after a while. Also you need to press both of them for the meteor attack and it does make things easier.

It still wasn't easy but after getting the ultimate meteor attack at the half point of the game. Game get better for me, I started to finally do some cool shit, dodge enemies, fly to the air unlimitedly, destroy enemies with super fast etc. Even with that, last two missions still kind of hard for me. Mission that before last is about a heavy enemy gauntlet that keeps spawning to protect a core and final one is the of course final boss itself. But final boss fight taught me how to use invinsibilty reliably(or forced me to learn) and the moment I learned, I kicked his head to the infinitium!

I finally learned how to enjoy at gunvalkyrie!

But still... I can't give 5/5... Why? Because...
1-even with fast turn, I still wished a free camera, especially for turning left and right. Because you have to keep using fast turn just because an enemy is a bit too left or right to lock on and it gets bad in frantic situations
2-some bad enemies. Some enemies are both super fast and small so you can get needless damage from out of the camera's side. Also there is an enemy that can go invisible, it's such an annoying enemy to fight. Because you have to wait for himself to show up again and again. Also rest of the enemies are boring ants. They are boring tbh. I would rather get enemies that are well designed and challenging to fight over quantity for the quantity sake
3-Bad map. More than half of the game's objectives are, destroy all the enemies or all the enemy spawners. It wouldn't be bad but map is 2d. But there is a lot of both vertical and horizontal maps in the game. So you know what happens most of the time? You are searching for that one damn enemy that you lost and waste your damn time
4-there is no remapping settings. I know first xbox controller have some weird quirks okay, so it would be important to give to the player an option to remap buttons also invert the camera options. But there is none. If I couldn't remap the keys with the emulator, I wouldn't continue this game. I am not kidding
5-also a locking camera to the enemy option would be nice, especially for the bosses. Because I can't count how many times I get damaged from an attack I couldn't see. For example the "A" button is unused. Why not use it for locking on to the nearest enemy? I don't understand? It still wouldn't take away from the challenge after all you need to continue dodging enemies yourself.

So yeah that's my thoughts on the game. I wish there would be a sequel with a better settings option, more varied arenas to fight and focuses on less numbered but more clever designed enemies. If this happens one day, It would make me happy with finally realizing true potential of this game.
Thanks for reading everyone!

Reviewed on Jan 27, 2023


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