A game with a wonderful soundtrack, good visuals, and an absurdly high skill ceiling for lots of momentum-based platforming. It's awesome, but I think its problems show a bit too heavily on the front end to really consider it truly amazing.

Up until the point that you actually do put in a bunch of time and effort to learn advanced techniques and movement, the game is unfortunately really clunky. This is made a bit worse by how bad the controller support is: if you're not interested in running m+kb, you have to sacrifice a bit of functionality like being able to open the menu and the controls end up feeling a little awkward unless you map stuff to shoulder buttons.

On top of all of that, from my run I seemed to notice there was no fast traveling between doors. This means that if you wanted to take a break from a tougher one in the campaign to practice on an easier one or just try something else, you're gonna have to commit to redoing whatever platforming challenges and backtracking the game requires you to do to get to said tough doors before even trying again at all.

Beyond that, though, Dustforce is absolutely sick to play when you get into the groove with it and I wish I'd looked more into community maps because of how pretty and unique they can get (though the official ones are still great). It's a game clearly crafted with love and made for people who want to put a lot of time into truly mastering a game without it having to be a fighting/racing/rhythm game or a speedrun of a different genre. It's valuable in that sense and is a shining example of how to make a platformer with a heavy focus on momentum physics. There's nothing to really bog the game down in terms of story or world structure, and that openness helps a ton. If I ever feel like I wanna grind at a game to get really good at it, this'll almost certainly be my go-to.

Reviewed on Feb 21, 2022


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