Style is amazing as hell from the cutscenes to the pixel art, plus there's a thumping OST in there. Full eyes, full ears, mid game.
I was pretty pumped for this one but can't help other than feel utterly let down by the actual gameplay itself. It's decent enough but over the 5-6 hour runtime, despite some pretty cool platforming ideas, it doesn't ever truly break out of the box in a way that is exciting or satisfying, nor does it scratch the metroidvania itch very well, as everything is pretty much discoverable on your first time through.
There are also some...interesting...design/balance choices. You have a health/energy bar which refills by hitting enemies, or when you hit zero you can regen some. You also have to use this bar to damage certain enemies, which honestly, I think is a pretty cool idea. However, the rate at which you lose/gain back energy/health is weirdly disproportionate.
In one boss fight, you can only trigger a damage phase on the boss by hitting him with a special attack that drains your energy. However, the rate at which you regen this energy from hitting the boss, as well as his projectiles, is not enough for what you actually need for the fight. The solution is in a damage phase to pause actually doing damage in order to dump all of your energy/health to zero and then use the regen ability to get enough back. This is incredibly backwards and weird and feels much more like an oversight in encounter balancing than a purposeful strategy.
9 Years of Shadow has the outline of a fantastic game but unfortunately it comes off like a term paper written at the eleventh hour - the introduction and main ideas are fantastic but...shit, it's due at midnight so let's throw this conclusion on there, a few block quotes, make those periods into 16-pt font, and pray that 9 and 2/3rds pages will count for 10. Have we tried bolding the title?
I was pretty pumped for this one but can't help other than feel utterly let down by the actual gameplay itself. It's decent enough but over the 5-6 hour runtime, despite some pretty cool platforming ideas, it doesn't ever truly break out of the box in a way that is exciting or satisfying, nor does it scratch the metroidvania itch very well, as everything is pretty much discoverable on your first time through.
There are also some...interesting...design/balance choices. You have a health/energy bar which refills by hitting enemies, or when you hit zero you can regen some. You also have to use this bar to damage certain enemies, which honestly, I think is a pretty cool idea. However, the rate at which you lose/gain back energy/health is weirdly disproportionate.
In one boss fight, you can only trigger a damage phase on the boss by hitting him with a special attack that drains your energy. However, the rate at which you regen this energy from hitting the boss, as well as his projectiles, is not enough for what you actually need for the fight. The solution is in a damage phase to pause actually doing damage in order to dump all of your energy/health to zero and then use the regen ability to get enough back. This is incredibly backwards and weird and feels much more like an oversight in encounter balancing than a purposeful strategy.
9 Years of Shadow has the outline of a fantastic game but unfortunately it comes off like a term paper written at the eleventh hour - the introduction and main ideas are fantastic but...shit, it's due at midnight so let's throw this conclusion on there, a few block quotes, make those periods into 16-pt font, and pray that 9 and 2/3rds pages will count for 10. Have we tried bolding the title?
2 Comments
@ViolentSneeze
I definitely think it is worth playing - it is absolutely gorgeous and some of the movement can be pretty fun, but yeah I would wait for a sale.
I definitely think it is worth playing - it is absolutely gorgeous and some of the movement can be pretty fun, but yeah I would wait for a sale.
ViolentSneeze
1 year ago