As modern retro-styled 2D platformers go, Steel Assault unfortunately doesn’t offer many compelling reasons to really sink your teeth into it. You can aim your Castlevania electro whip in eight directions, do non-committal double jumps and perform low-profile slides with cooldowns in-between to squeeze through attacks/gaps and close short distances. There aren’t any more intricate enemy interactions outside of just dealing damage to them, like bouncing off of heads in Shovel Knight for example, and power-ups (a shield and a buff to your whip) present linear improvements to your character that you don’t have to meaningfully change your strategy around, like you would in Castlevania. It feels odd how your character will often ignore those cooldowns I mentioned earlier and do consecutive slides in cutscenes, highlighting just how little fun there is to be had with the mechanics outside of what the game strictly intends for you to do.

Steel Assault dedicates its third action button to this zip-line you can launch at any time and hook between adjacent surfaces. You can probably imagine that that makes it a mostly situational gimmick: if you run into applicable geometry, the game will either specifically expect you to use the zip-line to progress, or it’s a random corner in the level design where it serves no purpose. Again, it feels odd how many obvious-seeming opportunities weren’t taken: you can’t hook into basic enemies, and there’s at least one boss where you’d expect to be able to position it between its gigantic hands, only to be disappointed. Its one universal function is to buy yourself extra air-time when not aiming at a surface, but a majority of the enemy patterns are timed with this in mind as well, so it doesn’t exactly lead to more spontaneous gameplay either. It honestly wasn’t until the final boss that Steel Assault started to scratch the surface of its rigid barebones mechanics, where the ground suddenly becomes inaccessible and you have to shift the position of your zip-line at a moment’s notice to dodge attacks.

If you subscribe to the idea that visuals on their own give a game value, Steel Assault’s eye-watering excess of chunky pixel art will please to some extent, but even that raw spectacle was diminished in my experience with how poorly the developers chose to present it. The game’s default “CRT filter” comes not in the form of horizontal consumer television or PVM scanlines, but a strange LCD grid with wide gaps between vertical lines. It’s nonsensical when the in-game pixels are all square, and it’s misaligned with the art enough that it creates a messy impression in motion. It’s even stranger with the added bilinear filtering on top, which obviously isn’t what games look like on an LCD, but also doesn’t match Steel Assault’s art style, since it mostly doesn’t rely on dithering (which would be used to create the impression of smoother blending and shades on a CRT.) It’s preferable to turn all that stuff off, but even then the final output is treated strangely (my guess is there’s some artificial over-sharpening and saturation going on that makes the whole image look grainy.)

As nitpicky as that last paragraph was, I’m sure the developers had their heart in the right place, but I ultimately can’t help but think of the following Matthewmatosis quote as I unpack Steel Asssault: the amount of effort put into something doesn’t necessarily determine its quality.