Aggelos is a very good Wonder Boy like. Not too long, not too easy and not too much backtracking. The level design is well done and so are the pixel art and the soundtrack. Furthermore, those last two fits perfectly the Wonder Boy spirit and brings us back to the 8bits/16bits era. It has a smooth gameplay ; just a bit modern for not to be unpleasant to play nowaday. The story is rather simple but the adventure is fresh, interesting and has some challenges ; and the little RPG elements are welcome. I feel that this game was made with love, love for those old adventure games. With Aggelos, Wonderboy Bobi had delivered them a lovely tribute.

Seriously considering dropping this because of the Woodpecker Trial, specifically the one where you have to bounce on all the enemies in the room

Literally one of the most frustrating and impossible things I’ve ever done in any video game I’ve ever played, the hardware/controls were not designed for movement like this

I have no jokes and am feeling so defeated I don’t even have a score in mind

Full review over at: https://www.nepikigaming.com/reviews/aggelos/

''Aggelos is a title inspired by the good ol’ Wonder Boy games, and it succeeds exceedingly well at capturing the feel of this era in gaming. This world is a joy to explore, with secrets to find around every corner and it being generally easy to navigate even without fast travelling. Everything regarding combat is pretty simple to understand, but that’s how it should be for games like these. The collectable elements also add a nice variety to the combat, specifically for the fun and challenging boss battles. In general, I can say that the game is fairly challenging, but some of it is also artificial due to the purchase of new gear which turns it all around. I would say that the light RPG elements also help turn around the difficulty, but I honestly couldn’t tell because this game has some issues when it comes to the UI. There is no status screen indicating what levelling actually does beyond guessing that my stats increase, and the map is good looking but not even functional in the slightest. The Steam port makes it even worse as accessing the menu feels scary to do with it constantly feeling like it’s going to crash. All of these are definitely valid issues, but fortunately didn’t hamper the overall enjoyment too much.''

The best thing I can say about Aggelos is that it's extremely solid. It pretty much nails almost all that it aimed to do. That said, it's not a game that particularly excels at anything specific.

The game is a bit of an odd one genre-wise. It has a metroidvania interconnected world, but it lacks a proper map (which mostly works to its own detriment) and it mostly plays like an action platformer full of enemies that respawn all the time. It also takes heavy inspiration from the NES Zelda games and other adventure games from the era.

Aggelos packs super snappy combat. More and more moves are progressively unlocked as you explore. What's great is that, save for a few moves, all combat abilities also enhance your movement and aid you in exploration. All moves feel like their own thing too, so it's not just another of the countless Hollow Knight ripoffs. Now, great movement means nothing without something to use it on. Thankfuly, Aggelos has some excellently designed enemies and bosses. Level design is rather inconsistent, but it features a handful of Zelda II-esque dungeons that offer quite a variety of puzzles and intricate design. They can get a little confusing, but They're the highlights of the game alongside the bosses hidden inside each one.

Its presentation may be its most off-putting aspect. It certainly isn't near the peak of 8-bit aesthetics like Cyber Shadow or Shovel Knight, but Aggelos has more than enough personality in its character design. Its biggest strength is probably its palette selection. It leans heavily on color to give life to most of its areas.
Music on the other hand is nothing special. The dungeon theme in particular is great and would get stuck in my head, but its soundtrack is otherwise a pretty generic NES affair.

In regards to its story, it's completely unimportant. I'm thankful that it takes itself seriously and has a rather effective ending for a game of its kind, but it's totally just an excuse for gameplay. If there is one particular aspect that Aggelos succeeds in stellarly, it's deffinitely its pacing. I had an 8hr playthrough with no down times at all. You constantly visit new areas and unlock new power ups, and they're all useful. It also makes the effort to not make the critical path too obvious as for it to get boring, and it gets creative in the stuff you gotta do to get to your next destination.

In conclusion, I wanna be clear that Aggelos is really fun and really well crafted, but it's probably most suited to hardcore genre fans (whether that is metroidvanias or action platformers). Its short length and great pacing make it work more as a sort of resting stop game between two other bigger releases.

I loved the Genesis/Mega Drive art style and gave it a punt on sale. The music and graphics were great.
I also enjoyed the enemies and world it offered. The upgrades and new abilities were great to earn.
The dudgeons and puzzles has a good challenge and interesting to solve.
I did not like no check points near the boss after you die. The bosses were bullet sponges being too hard compared to the rest of the game.
I really did not like the map and fast travel coming after 1/2 through the game. Because of this, expect to get lost at times.

This, like Trash Quest, was a $2 game on sale on the Switch eShop that Prfsnl told us about a week or so ago. It looked like a really great little Wonder Boy-like, and I snapped it up as quick as I could. It took me a little under 5 hours to play through the English version of the game with a 94% or so item collection rate.

Aggelos is a pretty standard fantasy story. The land is under attack by dark fantasy forces, and you, the hero, must venture forth and collect the four elemental orbs to gain the power of light and seal it away again. It's very explicitly constructed as a love letter to old Wonder Boy games, but compared to another retro-inspired metroidvania like Alwa's Awakening, this game actually has quite a bit of dialogue in it, and quite charming dialogue at that. It does the job of getting the story going and telling you were to go nicely, and the combination of good character animations and well done dialogue make it a treat to go through despite it not ultimately being all that important.

Mechanically this game is certainly a Wonder Boy love letter, as it's a Metroidvania more based around moving across a flat world than one with much verticality. Now it isn't as flat and stage-based as something like Shantate often is, but it's a wide open world with a welcome teleport feature to help get around once you hit around the halfway point. You go around, fight monsters, collect money to buy new equipment, and go through dungeons to collect magical orbs and get more powers. You can learn new sword moves from secret scrolls and those combined with the magic powers you get from rings in dungeons help augment your movement and power to explore more and more. That aspect gives it almost a Zelda 2 kind of feeling just as much as it does a Wonder Boy one. The whole mechanic of regaining magic via landing melee hits on enemies is a really cool idea, and it allows them to do some very cool stuff with platforming and puzzle design. It also lets them make some pretty damn brutal (though almost always optional) platforming challenges for those daring enough to try. The game is definitely on the harder end of more modern metroidvanias I've played, but it's generous enough with healing items that it's not too too bad.

The presentation is also very nice. The music is very good, and the graphics are pretty and vibrant. It all gives a good retro feeling while still feeling very modern. It's not quite as high quality as something of a Shovel Knight, mind you, but that feeling of "this is what Wonder Boy would be if it were made today" really shines through, just like how Shovel Knight so often feels like a modern day 8-bit Capcom game.


Verdict: Highly Recommended. There is very little to complain about with Aggelos. Honestly the only complaint I can really come up with is that I wish it were longer so I could've kept playing it! XD. If you don't mind a bit of a difficult time with platforming, this is a real joy of a metroidvania to play, and it's an absolute steal at $2.

Aggelos is truly one of the best representations of a new game emulating the mega drive. I have to say I don't think Aggelos does anything truly great that many of it's peers do. It's a very simplistic game. It's pretty average in everything and that kind of holds it down.

I randomly picked this up on a PSN sale for 3 bucks and I can say I definitly got my money's worth. If your looking for a true throw back game warts and all this game might satisfy an itch. I found it to be a nice pallete cleanser game and had a good time with it but at the same time it doesn't do anything to stand out. Reminds me a lot of monster boy mixed with Zelda 2. I don't know I want to say more about it cause I put a decent amount of time into it but it's hard to say anything else than what I already said. The final boss was pretty decent. Ehh.

Platinum # 147

Definitely one of my new favorite indies. After a decade of retro throwbacks that either misunderstand their source material or try to 'be better 'as if their identity is something to be ashamed of, it was really refreshing to play something that is literally just a new Wonder Boy game with some Zelda II flair. Tight gameplay, great dungeon items and progression - it gets the exact kind of snappiness and brevity that defines this era of games.

The one knock against it is that the art looks kinda shovelware-ish at first glance, and the music is really underwhelming. I wouldn't say it 'lacks' an identity, but in its attempt to perfectly emulate the NES/SMS style, it doesn't try to do anything insanely different. It's an extremely 'safe' game - which isn't at all a bad thing in this case, luckily, but something that keeps it from having the same emotional weight as other games in the genre.