Waiter! One Metroidvania, hold the "-vania" please!
I should really like this game. I think I just had the misfortune of playing the worst possible version of it.
First, the good: the visuals and spritework are amazing overall, and the soundtrack is absolutely killer. If you weren't looking that closely, you could easily mistake this for a Metroid game on GBA, which is pretty cool! And the fact that most collectibles are completely unique weapon types or in-game lore drops is a great change - no more "bomb inventory +5" bullshit here, instead you get rewards like LIGHTNING GUN. And with the password system and secret areas, there seems to be a lot here for people who connect with this game. Cool ideas in a cool world with some cool atmosphere.
Second, the bad: a modern Metroidvania without any kind of fast travel is just poor design, sorry. I never had fun while backtracking to try and find the next objective since that often required me to trek back across the entire map. Combat is also hampered by the lock button not allowing you to move while aiming, making shooting diagonally while evading nigh impossible. And just like in Metroid, vertical platforming through combat areas just sucks, as does pixel hunting for destroyable blocks that have no visual indication that they should be investigated. I know it wouldn't really be a Metroid successor without that, but that's the kind of thing that kills the completionist in me.
And third, the PS Vita: four gameplay actions (two of them major functions) are relegated to pseudo-buttons on the touch screen that require you to take your fingers off of the movement or combat controls in order to use them. I should not have to tell you that this is awful, but the fake buttons are also visible on screen at all times - and yet, the area of input for each is so small and precise that you will never press that bomb button under duress without stopping to focus on doing so. In addition, for some reason, the game would just completely freeze up for almost a whole second fairly frequently, with the most freezes happening in Edin. This game will also lag and drop frames on Vita, if you can believe it. Several times, I thought the game was about to crash on me, especially when a freeze happened after a lag spike when the music stopped looping but failed to start back up again. And for whatever reason, the PS Vita's thumb stick liked to accidentally activate the "double tap a direction to evade" ability, which is truly a heinous input mapping for a game like this.
I dunno fam, I really wanted to like this one. Kind of bummed out that I didn't care much for it by the end.
I should really like this game. I think I just had the misfortune of playing the worst possible version of it.
First, the good: the visuals and spritework are amazing overall, and the soundtrack is absolutely killer. If you weren't looking that closely, you could easily mistake this for a Metroid game on GBA, which is pretty cool! And the fact that most collectibles are completely unique weapon types or in-game lore drops is a great change - no more "bomb inventory +5" bullshit here, instead you get rewards like LIGHTNING GUN. And with the password system and secret areas, there seems to be a lot here for people who connect with this game. Cool ideas in a cool world with some cool atmosphere.
Second, the bad: a modern Metroidvania without any kind of fast travel is just poor design, sorry. I never had fun while backtracking to try and find the next objective since that often required me to trek back across the entire map. Combat is also hampered by the lock button not allowing you to move while aiming, making shooting diagonally while evading nigh impossible. And just like in Metroid, vertical platforming through combat areas just sucks, as does pixel hunting for destroyable blocks that have no visual indication that they should be investigated. I know it wouldn't really be a Metroid successor without that, but that's the kind of thing that kills the completionist in me.
And third, the PS Vita: four gameplay actions (two of them major functions) are relegated to pseudo-buttons on the touch screen that require you to take your fingers off of the movement or combat controls in order to use them. I should not have to tell you that this is awful, but the fake buttons are also visible on screen at all times - and yet, the area of input for each is so small and precise that you will never press that bomb button under duress without stopping to focus on doing so. In addition, for some reason, the game would just completely freeze up for almost a whole second fairly frequently, with the most freezes happening in Edin. This game will also lag and drop frames on Vita, if you can believe it. Several times, I thought the game was about to crash on me, especially when a freeze happened after a lag spike when the music stopped looping but failed to start back up again. And for whatever reason, the PS Vita's thumb stick liked to accidentally activate the "double tap a direction to evade" ability, which is truly a heinous input mapping for a game like this.
I dunno fam, I really wanted to like this one. Kind of bummed out that I didn't care much for it by the end.