Dustforce is a platformer with incredibly solid mechanics, so why don't people talk about this more? There's two things that I'd say really get in the way of people's enjoyment of Dustforce; the hub world design, and enemies.

Rather than a linear track like in some other platformers, in Dustforce, you get to new levels through an explorable hub world, and some levels might require mastery of movement tricks to get to. Exploring the hub world is fun, but navigating to these levels through the hub world ends up killing the pacing. The hub world is pretty large and is split up into four subsections, levels are split into discrete difficulties so all of the golden key levels are usually harder than the silver key levels but this means there's no good difficulty ramp so you'll be trying to clamber over walls, there are a lot more easy levels than you'll probably not have the stomach to bother playing through so you'll have a ton of unfinished bronze and silver key levels that won't be fun by the time you get to them. It ends up being a nonsense mess that doesn't really add to Dustforce's design goals.

There are also enemies. They do what they sound like; they move around, some of them can attack you, that'll interrupt your combo. They range from being a fairly standard platforming element to having several levels take place in a small box full of enemies and you have to dust all of the enemies and it's just not fun. Some people seem to like it, I don't like it, I hate it. These levels are insufferable. If you have less patience than I do, these will be an automatic, massive impediment to your enjoyment.

I can't justify giving it any more than 3 stars (although it's my favorite platformer so far) because games are more than their mechanics. A rhythm game with bad charts is a bad rhythm game even if the mechanics could add up to a fun experience, and Dustforce as an experience simply isn't there. Sometimes, I try to load it up and clean up a few more of the levels, either to do the easier ones or to push through the harder ones, but I just don't want to play it. And for a game that I actively don't want to play, three stars seems like a pretty good score.

A game with a wonderful soundtrack, good visuals, and an absurdly high skill ceiling for lots of momentum-based platforming. It's awesome, but I think its problems show a bit too heavily on the front end to really consider it truly amazing.

Up until the point that you actually do put in a bunch of time and effort to learn advanced techniques and movement, the game is unfortunately really clunky. This is made a bit worse by how bad the controller support is: if you're not interested in running m+kb, you have to sacrifice a bit of functionality like being able to open the menu and the controls end up feeling a little awkward unless you map stuff to shoulder buttons.

On top of all of that, from my run I seemed to notice there was no fast traveling between doors. This means that if you wanted to take a break from a tougher one in the campaign to practice on an easier one or just try something else, you're gonna have to commit to redoing whatever platforming challenges and backtracking the game requires you to do to get to said tough doors before even trying again at all.

Beyond that, though, Dustforce is absolutely sick to play when you get into the groove with it and I wish I'd looked more into community maps because of how pretty and unique they can get (though the official ones are still great). It's a game clearly crafted with love and made for people who want to put a lot of time into truly mastering a game without it having to be a fighting/racing/rhythm game or a speedrun of a different genre. It's valuable in that sense and is a shining example of how to make a platformer with a heavy focus on momentum physics. There's nothing to really bog the game down in terms of story or world structure, and that openness helps a ton. If I ever feel like I wanna grind at a game to get really good at it, this'll almost certainly be my go-to.