One of the most satisfying games I've ever played. The rush of fighting a huge group of enemies and perfectly weaving through them, parrying them and smacking them with the beautiful sound effects is amazing. It's a game that requires patience and a lot of repetition to be able to master every level. For that purpose, the (admittedly small amount) of levels are fantastic. On top of all being very fast paced levels that are fit for replaying with little to no breaks, they all look great and have neat set pieces; a big shout out to level 3 especially. A very minor thing, but there are a couple of empty areas that seem a bit pointless and on a first run are nothing more than 10 second breather, but on the 5th+ run make you wish you could just skip them.
Another issue I had at one point was when trying to get a good run, either for keeping your age down, or keeping the multiplier up so you can get the shrine skills that require the most points, the parts of the level you've perfected become a bit annoying to have to constantly run through until you can get to the part where you're struggling.
The age mechanic is a creative way to add a lives system into the game and tie it directly into the story. And the fact that death counters build up to make you skip more lives at once fits with the demand for avoiding mistakes.
There's a lot of skills to unlock, and this is one area I feel the game purposefully tried to drag out its small content. Skills themselves are easy to unlock once, but to permanently unlock them (so you can use them in any run), you need to purchase them an extra 5 times after the initial purchase - and if you've say, purchased them 4 extra times then start a new run, you'll need to do the initial purchase again before you can buy the final extra and unlock it for good. Doing this for all skills becomes a needless grind imo.
There also weren't enough context-sensitive skills, and as a result of the huge list of skills I probably only ended up using about 30% of them as they were the most effective against every enemy. That said, there are still plenty of skills that you can get which just make you feel that much stronger in the game.
Another issue I had at one point was when trying to get a good run, either for keeping your age down, or keeping the multiplier up so you can get the shrine skills that require the most points, the parts of the level you've perfected become a bit annoying to have to constantly run through until you can get to the part where you're struggling.
The age mechanic is a creative way to add a lives system into the game and tie it directly into the story. And the fact that death counters build up to make you skip more lives at once fits with the demand for avoiding mistakes.
There's a lot of skills to unlock, and this is one area I feel the game purposefully tried to drag out its small content. Skills themselves are easy to unlock once, but to permanently unlock them (so you can use them in any run), you need to purchase them an extra 5 times after the initial purchase - and if you've say, purchased them 4 extra times then start a new run, you'll need to do the initial purchase again before you can buy the final extra and unlock it for good. Doing this for all skills becomes a needless grind imo.
There also weren't enough context-sensitive skills, and as a result of the huge list of skills I probably only ended up using about 30% of them as they were the most effective against every enemy. That said, there are still plenty of skills that you can get which just make you feel that much stronger in the game.