Joguin bacanin
Scrathing my metroidvania itch. Its strong sides are the great artstyle and fun little storyline & characters. Fluid movement, very fun to run/jump around. Combat is nothing special but still feels good. I'd say the game a bit too easy but that's the niche it fills maybe (e.g. no corpse runs).
For bonus points, and I care a lot about this, overall great QOL stuff (responsive movement and interactions, no wait times, instant teleports, no loadscreens, etc.)
It does lack in enemy and upgrade variety but I think that's fine because it's kind of a short little game. I also don't super love the momentum-based movement. Even though it is fun running around levels, I still would rather have more snappy controls in boss fights for example. It's not the end of the world though, more of a nitpick.
For bonus points, and I care a lot about this, overall great QOL stuff (responsive movement and interactions, no wait times, instant teleports, no loadscreens, etc.)
It does lack in enemy and upgrade variety but I think that's fine because it's kind of a short little game. I also don't super love the momentum-based movement. Even though it is fun running around levels, I still would rather have more snappy controls in boss fights for example. It's not the end of the world though, more of a nitpick.
pretty good metroidvania. i like the way the upgrades are implemented, with a choice between 3 upgrades from a big pool of them that are still horizontal boosts with new things that you can do as opposed to solely numerical increases.
the art style is very nice, but the world doesn't really feel like a world as much as it feels like a collection of areas with willy-nilly branching paths. also, some of the new abilities that let you access new areas get so little usage and basically end up feeling like just a pseudo-key to access the next area as opposed to a pseudo-key that you can use everywhere with benefit. the way that the map interconnects more over time is neat, but it still doesn't make the level design reflect the world as much as i'd like. more unique landmarks and rooms would go a long way towards making the map even more enjoyable to traverse.
the game controls well, and i really enjoy how fast you can cruise around the map. it's a very nice trait to have in a metroidvania so you can backtrack even more efficiently with your new upgrades and improved skill. the combat is simple, but the boss patterns are cool. i played on the hardest difficulty, which increases damage taken and boss health while also changing up some boss attacks (more projectiles, etc) and it was a good experience throughout. that being said, even on hard mode, it is very easy to become incredibly overpowered very quickly if you are getting all of the upgrades and purchasing better equipment. there were definitely a couple of bosses near the end of the game that i killed so fast that i didn't even have the opportunity to see all of their attacks.
got 100% game completion, 100% map completion, and 100% steam achievements. boss rush was fun.
overall, a cute game. nothing too crazy, but i had a great time overall.
the art style is very nice, but the world doesn't really feel like a world as much as it feels like a collection of areas with willy-nilly branching paths. also, some of the new abilities that let you access new areas get so little usage and basically end up feeling like just a pseudo-key to access the next area as opposed to a pseudo-key that you can use everywhere with benefit. the way that the map interconnects more over time is neat, but it still doesn't make the level design reflect the world as much as i'd like. more unique landmarks and rooms would go a long way towards making the map even more enjoyable to traverse.
the game controls well, and i really enjoy how fast you can cruise around the map. it's a very nice trait to have in a metroidvania so you can backtrack even more efficiently with your new upgrades and improved skill. the combat is simple, but the boss patterns are cool. i played on the hardest difficulty, which increases damage taken and boss health while also changing up some boss attacks (more projectiles, etc) and it was a good experience throughout. that being said, even on hard mode, it is very easy to become incredibly overpowered very quickly if you are getting all of the upgrades and purchasing better equipment. there were definitely a couple of bosses near the end of the game that i killed so fast that i didn't even have the opportunity to see all of their attacks.
got 100% game completion, 100% map completion, and 100% steam achievements. boss rush was fun.
overall, a cute game. nothing too crazy, but i had a great time overall.
A continuation of the gameplay and aesthetics established in Sheepo - fast, pretty metroidvania with bullet hell boss fights. Smartly designed, but offers nothing revolutionary, with the main gimmick of bringing disparate parts of the map (the titular islets) together not really adding anything to the tried and tested core loop.
What a great Metroidvania.
For starters, Iko moves fast, but there's still room for precise movements. Most bosses and enemies incorporate some bullet-hell style attacks, so the fact that Iko's movement is so reliable is incredibly useful. The fast paced gameplay also helps when returning to old areas to find collectables and story progression. Iko's moveset stays small, gravitating around the sword and bow. That said, a number of unique abilities can be unlocked that helps add diversity to the game. On top of abilities, the player can find bonus items across the map. These offer the player a choice between three useful upgrades that are permanent. This makes each choice extra meaningful, and I can imagine future playthroughs are slightly more distinct thanks to this inclusion.
The game takes place on a number of separated floating islands. The player has a simple ship that can be used to reach these islands, and these parts offer a fun diversion from the normal platforming. The player's goal is to combine the islands together into a super island. Not only does this make using teleporters easier, but it also helps the player avoid getting lost. When combined, new pathways open between the islands, meaning there's always something new to investigate. Each Island has a number of unique biomes, and each one has its own story, characters, and encounters. The platforming challenges are great, but the highlight are the bosses. These can be quite challenging at first, but with enough practice, weaving through attacks is satisfying.
My gripes lie in some of the monotony. Despite the fast walking speed, backtracking can be a chore, especially if you need to travel to another island. This requires traveling to the ship, flying across the sky, landing on an island, and hoping you didn't make the wrong choice. I also never encountered a reliable way to heal. It's disheartening to survive with 1 HP for a long period of time only to die to something silly. I was still able to beat the game, so this is more of a nitpick.
For starters, Iko moves fast, but there's still room for precise movements. Most bosses and enemies incorporate some bullet-hell style attacks, so the fact that Iko's movement is so reliable is incredibly useful. The fast paced gameplay also helps when returning to old areas to find collectables and story progression. Iko's moveset stays small, gravitating around the sword and bow. That said, a number of unique abilities can be unlocked that helps add diversity to the game. On top of abilities, the player can find bonus items across the map. These offer the player a choice between three useful upgrades that are permanent. This makes each choice extra meaningful, and I can imagine future playthroughs are slightly more distinct thanks to this inclusion.
The game takes place on a number of separated floating islands. The player has a simple ship that can be used to reach these islands, and these parts offer a fun diversion from the normal platforming. The player's goal is to combine the islands together into a super island. Not only does this make using teleporters easier, but it also helps the player avoid getting lost. When combined, new pathways open between the islands, meaning there's always something new to investigate. Each Island has a number of unique biomes, and each one has its own story, characters, and encounters. The platforming challenges are great, but the highlight are the bosses. These can be quite challenging at first, but with enough practice, weaving through attacks is satisfying.
My gripes lie in some of the monotony. Despite the fast walking speed, backtracking can be a chore, especially if you need to travel to another island. This requires traveling to the ship, flying across the sky, landing on an island, and hoping you didn't make the wrong choice. I also never encountered a reliable way to heal. It's disheartening to survive with 1 HP for a long period of time only to die to something silly. I was still able to beat the game, so this is more of a nitpick.
Just like sheepo the momentum and core controls makes the world incredibly fun to traverse.
This was a very enjoyable Metroidvania. I liked the different locations as well as the character interactions. It was very cute.
Perfectly serviceable Hollow Knight clone with good art and a well designed map. Combat was whatever but the characters and world were a highlight.
idk, pretty cool
This is a great and short metroidvania!
Graphics is amazing, it has this hand draw aspect to it that really stands out.
Gameplay is absolutely as basic as possible for metroidvania, but works really well. Movement is fluid and snappy!
What really bothered me was how linear it was but in the end, it didn't really detract from the good experience I had while playing.
Highly recommend for a quick and well done metroidvania!
Graphics is amazing, it has this hand draw aspect to it that really stands out.
Gameplay is absolutely as basic as possible for metroidvania, but works really well. Movement is fluid and snappy!
What really bothered me was how linear it was but in the end, it didn't really detract from the good experience I had while playing.
Highly recommend for a quick and well done metroidvania!
Un metroidvania decente, no innova mucho en comparación a otras gemas del pasado
What a fantastic game. Such a nice fluid metroidvania that isn’t hard as hell. Also nice accessibility options. I challenge anyone that likes this genre to play this and not blast through it to 100%. Just solid all around hard to think of any faults
Overall not bad, but nothing special either. My main criticism is that it lacks depth in combat, story, and level design.
I did quite like the bullet-hell bosses and the way re-attaching the islands opened access to new paths. But simultaneously I was disappointed because I had gotten the impression that the islands could be combined in multiple different ways, opening some routes and closing others.
Minor complaints: I didn't like the lack of healing. It seemed like your three options when you got an upgrade were random? Not a fan. Teleport arrow felt underutilized. Some of the late-game platforming challenges seemed to forget cloud arrow was a thing.
Also, fuck Snoot.
I did quite like the bullet-hell bosses and the way re-attaching the islands opened access to new paths. But simultaneously I was disappointed because I had gotten the impression that the islands could be combined in multiple different ways, opening some routes and closing others.
Minor complaints: I didn't like the lack of healing. It seemed like your three options when you got an upgrade were random? Not a fan. Teleport arrow felt underutilized. Some of the late-game platforming challenges seemed to forget cloud arrow was a thing.
Also, fuck Snoot.
A short, but fun, Metroidvania experience with bullet hell mechanics. Great atmosphere, so the game being a little slight isn't the worst thing ever.
O jogo é bonito, mas não me apeteceu tanto. O combate é ok mas não muda muita coisa e as flechas você não usa muito. As mecânicas adicionadas não são tão uteis o tempo inteiro, parece que são feitas só para mudar de uma área para outra, tive que largar um capitulo antes por quê não aguentava mais, a história também sei la eu o que era.
Without going into spoilers, I'll say that this game has very okayish combat, but it goes hard on exploration and the boss fights are largely a delight.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.
There are five floating islands. They each have a core that needs to be activated. Unite them back together because harmony is swell. They are guarded by assholes. You have a sword. This is Islets.
I'm gonna keep this short and not-so-sweet because I really just want to move on and forget Islets. For a while it's perfectly serviceable, but it probably should have only been four islands because it just starts to drag. If you absolutely NEED to play every Metroidvania you come across, I'll say you'll find worse games than this (Ghost Song comes to mind), but otherwise this should not be played. It's very derivative; the best comparison I think I can make is that it's like Hollow Knight without the soul.
Just check the screenshots on Steam and you'll see you've probably already played this game in everything but name. It's a middling Metroidvania with some bullet hell segments. It'll take you about seven hours to 100% (on Normal), and for its final half-hour stretch, you'll pray you have a stroke. It won't be showing you anything you haven't seen before, and on Normal every boss will take you one or two tries. I really should have been reading “Dune” instead.
I think I could drop down to one and a half stars, easily, but I'm going with two only because I think this was made almost entirely by one guy (and the music by his brother). I thought it was competently made (never ran into bugs, game looked okay, etc.) and I think my man Kyle Thompson is pretty good at the behind the scenes work. He's working on another game that I've added to my Steam Wishlist because I'm curious, now; I feel like Islets showed he has potential but just wasn't there yet with this one. Maybe Crypt Custodian will be better? I genuinely hope so.
I really do applaud the effort, I'm sure getting this made was no easy task, but just by reducing the scope a bit I think this would have landed so much better for me. But, then again, I'm seemingly in a tiny minority: 96% of reviews are positive. Congrats, Kyle.
I don't recommend Islets.
I'm gonna keep this short and not-so-sweet because I really just want to move on and forget Islets. For a while it's perfectly serviceable, but it probably should have only been four islands because it just starts to drag. If you absolutely NEED to play every Metroidvania you come across, I'll say you'll find worse games than this (Ghost Song comes to mind), but otherwise this should not be played. It's very derivative; the best comparison I think I can make is that it's like Hollow Knight without the soul.
Just check the screenshots on Steam and you'll see you've probably already played this game in everything but name. It's a middling Metroidvania with some bullet hell segments. It'll take you about seven hours to 100% (on Normal), and for its final half-hour stretch, you'll pray you have a stroke. It won't be showing you anything you haven't seen before, and on Normal every boss will take you one or two tries. I really should have been reading “Dune” instead.
I think I could drop down to one and a half stars, easily, but I'm going with two only because I think this was made almost entirely by one guy (and the music by his brother). I thought it was competently made (never ran into bugs, game looked okay, etc.) and I think my man Kyle Thompson is pretty good at the behind the scenes work. He's working on another game that I've added to my Steam Wishlist because I'm curious, now; I feel like Islets showed he has potential but just wasn't there yet with this one. Maybe Crypt Custodian will be better? I genuinely hope so.
I really do applaud the effort, I'm sure getting this made was no easy task, but just by reducing the scope a bit I think this would have landed so much better for me. But, then again, I'm seemingly in a tiny minority: 96% of reviews are positive. Congrats, Kyle.
I don't recommend Islets.