I have to be honest and say that I'm a bit underwhelmed overall. Sure, the game is almost 30 years old now, but some of the design flaws sucked even back then :D
Well, I definitely liked the atmosphere, the great background music, the sound design in general and the graphics - I've rarely seen anything so beautiful on the SNES. Unfortunately, I found the controls so clunky and imprecise that I was quite frustrated by the end of the game. It often requires you to make precise jumps, which were an absolute pain with these controls. It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to do these god damn wall jumps. And even after I got the hang of it, I couldn't pull it of consistently. I don't seem to be the only one struggling with this. I see people on Twitch and YouTube all the time, failing to perform theses jumps :D
The level design itself was good, but unfortunately I felt like I had to traverse every level 5000 times because the game forced me to do a lot of backtracking in order to find as many items and upgrades as possible. That's part of a Metroidvania, but at least the option of teleportation would have been nice. I really couldn't stand to see the same level sections over and over again towards the end.
Then there are the boss battles, which mostly just require you to spend resources to defeat them - if you have enough Super Rockets you win, otherwise you're out of luck. It rarely had anything to do with tactics and felt more like a war of attrition.
I really liked the ending and the overall presentation, I also thought what they were trying to do with the story was cool. I did have a lot of fun with the game in general - the UI/UX design is really good, which wasn't that common back then. Shooting is fun and I love how you gradually improve via upgrades, which feels really great. All in all, a positive experience, but after hearing what a masterpiece this game was time and time again, I had hoped for a bit more. Maybe that's an unfair expectation to have.
Well, I definitely liked the atmosphere, the great background music, the sound design in general and the graphics - I've rarely seen anything so beautiful on the SNES. Unfortunately, I found the controls so clunky and imprecise that I was quite frustrated by the end of the game. It often requires you to make precise jumps, which were an absolute pain with these controls. It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to do these god damn wall jumps. And even after I got the hang of it, I couldn't pull it of consistently. I don't seem to be the only one struggling with this. I see people on Twitch and YouTube all the time, failing to perform theses jumps :D
The level design itself was good, but unfortunately I felt like I had to traverse every level 5000 times because the game forced me to do a lot of backtracking in order to find as many items and upgrades as possible. That's part of a Metroidvania, but at least the option of teleportation would have been nice. I really couldn't stand to see the same level sections over and over again towards the end.
Then there are the boss battles, which mostly just require you to spend resources to defeat them - if you have enough Super Rockets you win, otherwise you're out of luck. It rarely had anything to do with tactics and felt more like a war of attrition.
I really liked the ending and the overall presentation, I also thought what they were trying to do with the story was cool. I did have a lot of fun with the game in general - the UI/UX design is really good, which wasn't that common back then. Shooting is fun and I love how you gradually improve via upgrades, which feels really great. All in all, a positive experience, but after hearing what a masterpiece this game was time and time again, I had hoped for a bit more. Maybe that's an unfair expectation to have.