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.
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.