A great game that is seriously held back by what is genuinely one of the worst final levels and boss fights I've ever played in my nearly 21 years on this earth.
Starting with the positives, the ordinary platforming levels are great! It's like a full game's worth of "Break the Targets" stages from Super Smash Bros. paired with a Celeste airdash, what isn't to love? The controls are weird and take some getting used to, since they're based on Melee's controls (eugh), but unlike the last Willis Blackett game I played, the alpha for Recursor, he seems to have done a better job making the controls less shit.
Aesthetically the game is fine. It's pretty cool visually, taking the cool abstract look from Recursor and juicing it with some much needed color, and it has a weird, almost Kirby-esque vibe to the storytelling. I guess the music is my other main fault aside from the aforementioned endgame. It's not necessarily bad, some tracks are pretty solid like the Air and Mind themes, but most of it is either too generic or too short, particularly that last one. Several songs sound like they;'re only about a 15-20 second long loop, which gets incredibly distracting.
So, yeah. About that endgame.
I'll try to be at least a little concise. Once you beat all the worlds, you get a little penultimate world that ends in an very long, brutally punishing final level. It's long, it's got some horseshit platforming with the fire bumper mechanics which is cheap as hell, but it's manageable. But the final boss?
It's just a slog, 5 phases where you have to destroy 8 targets and platform like it's a Celeste C-Side, while he fills the screen with projectiles that you have little to no means of defending yourself against, and then in phase 5 they home in and you can't see them coming from off screen when you're trying to go in for the killing blow and then you have to start the phase all over again and again and again...long story short, don't bother with the final boss/level. From what I can tell they were added in an update, and it shows. The polish and funfactor of the main game just vanishes.
I still think it's overall a good game, and worth buying. Just know that you've been warned.
Starting with the positives, the ordinary platforming levels are great! It's like a full game's worth of "Break the Targets" stages from Super Smash Bros. paired with a Celeste airdash, what isn't to love? The controls are weird and take some getting used to, since they're based on Melee's controls (eugh), but unlike the last Willis Blackett game I played, the alpha for Recursor, he seems to have done a better job making the controls less shit.
Aesthetically the game is fine. It's pretty cool visually, taking the cool abstract look from Recursor and juicing it with some much needed color, and it has a weird, almost Kirby-esque vibe to the storytelling. I guess the music is my other main fault aside from the aforementioned endgame. It's not necessarily bad, some tracks are pretty solid like the Air and Mind themes, but most of it is either too generic or too short, particularly that last one. Several songs sound like they;'re only about a 15-20 second long loop, which gets incredibly distracting.
So, yeah. About that endgame.
I'll try to be at least a little concise. Once you beat all the worlds, you get a little penultimate world that ends in an very long, brutally punishing final level. It's long, it's got some horseshit platforming with the fire bumper mechanics which is cheap as hell, but it's manageable. But the final boss?
It's just a slog, 5 phases where you have to destroy 8 targets and platform like it's a Celeste C-Side, while he fills the screen with projectiles that you have little to no means of defending yourself against, and then in phase 5 they home in and you can't see them coming from off screen when you're trying to go in for the killing blow and then you have to start the phase all over again and again and again...long story short, don't bother with the final boss/level. From what I can tell they were added in an update, and it shows. The polish and funfactor of the main game just vanishes.
I still think it's overall a good game, and worth buying. Just know that you've been warned.