Talvez o jogo mais sem personalidade que já joguei!

Quando falamos de metroidvânia, algumas coisas são bastante importantes, a movimentação (aqui o jogo acerta, na verdade a mecânica mais interessante do jogo está ao redor disso), os poderes (completamente genéricos) e o level design (atrapalhado, mal conectado, ruim mesmo).

Falta personalidade na história também, a arte é sem graça, a história parece inventada de última hora.

Pelo que vi, parei em 50% e me recuso a gastar mais algum tempo com ele.

This game lives and dies by its unique aesthetic and the swinging mechanic, because pretty much everything else is either disappointing or outright bad. Grappling hooking around and speeding through rooms as often as the game will let you is a time-honored gaming classic that is always amusing, and what could even really be said about the visuals that isn't said by just looking at it? The game looks like an original GameBoy if it also had red, but a few areas manage to look distinctly different without breaking the style, and I love it.

Combat isn't really worth writing much about. It's serviceable. You bop enemies on the head with your very fast but short-ranged katana, and later on you get dual SMGs and a rocket launcher. Decent stuff, even if most enemies are kind of dull with only latter enemies being interesting. Bosses are mostly whatever and I've already forgotten most of them. The best part of combat is that you can bounce back bullets with your katana, and the best part about that is that the game never tells you, which allows you a moment of gleeful eureka as you realize that not only can you bounce the bullets back, you can even use them to bounce upwards and do more advance acrobatics.

However, the world is kind of boring and very horizontal, which becomes painful when you realize that the game has no fast-travel system at all. It really doesn't help that the game employs ye olde "go back and talk to the quest giver for no reason even though you have remote comms" mechanic, though I believe that's actually mostly optional if you want to be told exactly what area to go to next. I do prefer knowing where I'm going, though, so I felt forced to head back for no reason several times and, while I didn't find the lack of fast travel to be as frustrating as others have, it certainly wasn't the height of entertainment to have to slog back every time and I did get frustrated and irritated when the game had one-way doors for really no reason. Why shouldn't I be able to open this shuriken door from both sides when the option is running around the entire area?

Let's not even talk about how the only thing you will find in secret areas, aside from money, is hats. Stupid, goofy, jokey hats like in every other game. Oh, a beer cap with drinking tubes. Stunner shades. A top hat with monocle. Mario's hat. Never seen these zany hats in any game before, so finding them was a total delight! No, wait, that was sarcasm.

Following the recent trend for me, this game also ends with an awful final boss that's an absurd difficulty spike out of nowhere and just isn't fun. That boss also highlights how broken the economy in this game is, because I reached him without most upgrades for both katana and the other equipment, since I simply hadn't earned enough to purchase them even though I took care to kill every enemy along the way, even when backtracking, and even though I had found most chests myself. When I realized that he has like a trillion HP and is a long, boring marathon of a boss, I went back with maps from the internet to find all the health upgrades and hope to get enough to buy every upgrade, but even with every chest opened and as many enemies as I could bother to kill, I ended up having the katana fully upgraded while I only had 9 out of 13 of the other upgrades. I think I picked the wrong ones too since the rocket launcher upgrades didn't help with the boss at all, so that was fun. For some baffling reason, they decided that most hidden chests should only have a pathetic 20 coins in it. The final katana upgrade is 2000. The economy in this game just absolutely does not work and is nonsense. The worst part is that there isn't even a suitable place to grind currency because of how enemies respawn!

In the game's defense, though, I will say that I don't at all understand why so many people claim that this isn't really a metroidvania. I suspect that those players only played the first couple of hours, during which I also assumed that this was a segmented game with a level-based structure, but it's not. It's a proper MV world where areas are blocked off by requiring skills you haven't found yet, and that all connects back to itself. It's just that there are also two segmented areas, airships, that you only visit once and can't go back to, and the first couple of hours of the game has you going from the lab you wake up in straight to an airship and then back to the world, but at the other end of it, and it takes a while to find the map chip, so you end up thinking that you're playing a level-based game. It's not that. It is a proper metroidvania that follows the basic rules of the genre.

Fun movement controls, awesome aesthetics, cool soundtrack, good enough combat that at least doesn't bore you, but a world, bosses and economy that absolutely would bore most players. With a bullshit final boss as the cherry dipped in cyanide on top. Didn't hate this game, but don't think I'll be recommending it to anyone either.

KUNAI flips weapon progression systems on their head. You start with nothing but a katana, which is already the most powerful weapon in the game (and you can make it stronger), letting you heal yourself by attacking with it. Then it gives you a RIGHT kunai (grappling hook), making you go "oooh so its like Twilight Princess with the double clawshots" and then not 5 seconds later you find the LEFT kunai and you go "ooohh...?". From there on, its pretty standard, but still some surprising twists: you get throwing stars, but they don't do damage! By the time you get the BIG EXPLODY GUN, you've probably mastered every other weapon and know when its best to use the weaker guys and when to pull out the big guns. The only things I don't like about the weapons is that their charged attack upgrades are too slow to use when you'd need them most, and the best one (the one for the katana) trades off with health, so you will probably quickly stop using it. Also, the katana upgrades cost a shit ton. I think that's because they are meant to be a last resort, but even then, where do you make that much money?

Shockingly this game has absolutely no transport/teleport/quick travel mechanic. It's like a perfect case example of how sorely needed quick travel is in action platformers (idk if you can truly call this a metroidvania), because you will FEEL IT when you need to backtrack, and it almost seems like this game wants you to backtrack. Sometimes it's almost ridiculous, with one dungeon requiring you to walk across its entire length to go through a door you just flipped open, and then do the same thing but in reverse. It sucks and also demotivated me from going back to previous areas to find all the hidden chests.

Speaking of hidden chests... This game very much falls prey to the "invisible wall with a room behind it" torture that is a staple of metroidvanias now, I guess. Like collecting or finding hidden stuff? Settle in, because you are going to be rubbing against EVERY WALL to make sure you don't miss anything cool. Blegh, please no more.

The boss fights actually featured some great variety, which confirms this isn't a metroidvania. But... Zensei... Again, it's like a case study in why some bosses need checkpoints, or just like, a way to not have to redo the entire fight because the last section is inexplicably much harder than the rest. I was so fed up with Zensei by the time I beat him, it was not at all a "YES! I DID IT!" it was a "the pain is over, and now i can begin healing".

The music is sick, Quantum Forest made me just want to spend more time there. However, I was pretty surprised to find the Final Boss music was... the same as every other boss. And the credits music... was the boss music again. I think. Or maybe it was the main menu music? Anyways, the extremely sudden credits roll with the reused track made me feel like I was giving too long of a speech at the Oscars. Like, "ok ok you did it, nice job, hurry up and get outta here".

Mixed feelings across the board. Definitely a fun time, but very much having some sore spots of major frustration.

I really didn't enjoy this one as much as I wanted to.

For a metroidvania, there's very little incentive to actually explore. 90% of the items I found were just hats with purely cosmetic use. The different areas weren't too eye catching either, and having an almost monochrome pallette didn't help it.

The thing that drew me in was the kunai swinging. It's the most interesting mechanic, and when it worked, I had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the level design rarely takes advantage of it. More often than not you'll find yourself in Hollow Knight-esque tight subterranean corridors, unable to freely swing around and gain momentum. That said, the devs did put effort into designing paths to swing through even in these tight levels, but the lack of focus makes me think there's a lot of missed potential. Imo, this game would have been way better as a linear action platformer. The slower metroidvania pace doesn't do it much good.

Combat's rather mediocre. You have your main meele katana and gain some ranged sub weapons as you go on. The problem here mostly lies with the enemy design, it's rather uninteresting save a few exceptions. Your katana swings resemble Hollow Knight again, but they don't feel nearly as tight. I also gotta mention that enemy placement is very cheap, I would end up tanking many hits because I landed onto an enemy that I couldn't see was there.

Lastly, many people may not care, but this game has some really lackluster world building. I didn't really expect a good story, but the opening cinematic made me think maybe there would be something interesting, and the rest of the game simply destroyed that notion. I know it probably isn't a priority, but in my case it almost made me want to drop the game.
I gotta say tho, the game's ending sequence is pretty cool. It deffinitely was the only part of the whole game's narrative that managed to engage me, even if it doesn't really make much more sense than the rest.

I really wanted to like this one. The kunai swinging is a really fun mechanic and it's done well. It's just that the rest of the game is not very interesting. The color palette is very simple which isn't a problem in and of itself, but combined with the fact that the environmental elements are also not all that varied means that most areas look pretty much the same.
Additionally, I found the enemies to be either trivial or obnoxious to deal with. You get knocked back every time you hit someone so you have to walk forward in between every hit (I know Hollow Knight did this too but it's much more dramatic in kunai) or you kill the enemy in one hit and there's no point. I got to the third or fourth area and didn't find any of the enemies to be engaging and the metroidvania style exploration to be boring.

I have very few complaints. Movement is fun with the titular kunai grappling hooks, the stylized look suits the game well. I did encounter one glitch that left me unable to progress in a late game area, but quitting and reloading fixed it, and the checkpointing was really generous at that point in the game. On that note, the checkpoints feel somewhat arbitrary in their placement at times. They appear very frequently, but oftentimes you'll encounter a platforming segment over instant-death hazards, and the nearest checkpoint is several twisting (but themselves unchallenging) corridors away, so any time you miss a jump on that particular gauntlet, you have to make a sort of tedious trek back to it. This isn't frequent, and the platforming challenges in question aren't really insurmountable, but it happened often enough to nearly discourage me from continuing.
Also, the dialogue and visual gags include a lot of dated (or very soon to be dated) meme humor, more worthy of an eyeroll than a laugh.
Other than those, all around decent.

Pretty fun action platformer with a lot of additional combat and movement options, many of which not afraid of being kinda busted which honestly? good. Lots of love clearly paid to the feeling of each and every one of your tools. I can't stand the katana though, getting knocked back whenever you hit something is criminal (might be alleviated by upgrading the katana? I discovered that way too late lol.)
Ultimately let down by pretty uninteresting level design that doesn't meaningfully build upon itself as your kit grows, with pretty much only the grappling hook being a mainstay. The last level has a dreadful extended combat survival test in a series of abstract nothing spaces.
Overall had a good time with it, not too long, pretty full of novelty to make up for its shortcomings, and full of the joy of movement.

While it may look like one, this game sells itself as an action-platformer, NOT a Metroidvania, and I feel like the former definitely describes the game more accurately. You can explore off the beaten path, but most of your rewards will be purely cosmetic hats, or money for the game's fairly small selection of upgrades. It doesn't track you on completion percentage or anything either.

The game's got a really nice style to it. All the people/NPCs are robots made of old technology, the monochromatic pixel art is really cool, and the music gives off a sick ancient Japan/electronic vibe. The dialogue and area names mostly consist of technology/geek jokes, and put quite a few smirks on my face.

The game controls pretty damn well. I wish you had more control over where you shot your kunai out, but it's still fairly intuitive, and really fun to just swing around. Enemy variety is pretty good, but some are a bit obnoxious. I particularly feel like the bosses ought to have a checkpoint halfway through. Dying during a few of them often sets you back quite a bit.

Still, despite the gripes I have, I still really enjoyed this title. Solid action-platformer that's worth your time and money.