2D Platformers / Metroidvanias

I thought this was quite an interesting story:

www.gamespot.com/articles/meet-the-team-behind-hollow-knights-bewilderingly-ambitious-voice-mod/1100-6515606/

A trailer for the mod:

Picked up Gunlord X on PlayStation as it was currently on sale for $3. I’d heard of it before but mostly ignored games by NGDEV. Really having fun with it, though! I’d have preferred to get it on Switch, but it was full price there, which to be fair is only $10, but $3 is less than a third so, went with that.

Never played the Turrican games that inspired it, but reminds me a bit of a faster paced Super Metroid.

Liked it so much, I picked up Fast Striker by NGDEV at full price. Expected to like this one more as I’m more of a fan of shoot em ups, but the controls feel stiff and tanky, whether you’re using the analog stick or the d-pad. Bit disappointing after the quick and responsive controls of Gunlord X, but ehh, it was only about $7. I’ll give it more of a chance at some point.

oh and the music slaps as the kids used to day but which is probably outdated now

Didn't even know it was out. More of the same?

I think it's out on the 24th, a week today.

The consensus seems to be, "Basically more of the same, but bigger and better."

Can't help you with Silksong, I'm afraid! Well... not yet

Abandoned a few games over the last few months.

Aggelos

Wonder Boy-like retro platformer that promises an oldschool style game with modern feel, but sadly I see little of the latter. It gets the style right, but the action feels decidedly old-school, and not in a good way. Remember how in less refined 8-bit games enemies seem to have completely random patterns and placement, with little regard for interesting fights that are balanced in any way? Aggelos is like that.

What makes it worse is that you have all sorts of penalties in fights, like movement momentum and immobility while striking, all the while your attacks don't even knock back enemies. Resulting in fights that are mostly a nervous loop of strike'n'retreat that feels clunky and unfinished.

A fair bit into the game I think it gets away with it, as long as its undeniable retro charm outweighs the haphazard gameplay. But the game keeps increasing the difficulty and placing save points more horribly until there's nothing but frustration and it feels like self-punishment to carry on. About 70% through I reached that point where I just couldn't be arsed anymore.

It's also one of those games that say "partial controller support" on the Steam page. Can't navigate the main menu, can't reassign buttons in the button reassignment menu, etc., but hey if you press A you jump (unless you tried to reassign that button), partial controller support wahey! I tried using Steam's controller-to-keyboard mapping thing, but for some bizarre reason it doesn't support face buttons.

So it's another case where "partial controller support" is just code for "requires Joytokey". The partial controller tag on Steam is such a farce they should drop it entirely. Either games have controller support or they don't, and if third-party software is required, they don't.

Well, at least Aggelos works fine using Joytokey.


Lone Fungus

A metroidvania that's clearly inspired by Hollow Knight, but with much less focus on action. Difficulty is WAY down, the rare enemies and even bosses are little more than moving obstacles, and movement is more about getting from A to B than about providing platforming challenges. I don't like how low your base jump is, weirdly about a third as high as the double jump.

The game tries to make up for the lack of challenge through sheer size, God it's huge and full of large, mostly empty rooms. Lack of challenges or anything else of interest going on in them makes everything feel the same and I just kept getting lost without anything entertaining to do on the way, and I believe I was only 20% in or so. Using the same short soundtrack everywhere you go in a huge area doesn't help either.

It's just... nah thanks. For a HK clone with lower difficulty, I'd definitely recommend Haiku the Robot instead. I wasn't a huge fan of it, but it's way better than this.


Environmental Station Alpha

Another game with "partial controller support", and again that means "Joytokey required". Sigh.

The pixel style is fine, as is the music, and in terms of map design and exploration it seems fine too. Sadly I can't say the same about the action, which is just bad. Like, Metroid 2 bad. I don't like the crappy short-range gun with the questionable hit detection in the first place, but the biggest problem is how laggy the controls are. It's really sluggish and unsatisfying, I'd love to try turning off vsync, but sadly there's no such option. Joytokey isn't the issue, as the problem remains when playing with keyboard, and other games I play with Joytokey (like Aggelos) have no lag issues whatsoever.

If I could go back in time, in the case of this game I'd probably tell myself to play it on easy instead, as there's no fun in the combat, it just gets in the way without any payoff. I recently died against the third phase of some boss at about 30% completion, and I can't be bothered anymore to retry a boss even once. The game already got more annoying the longer I played it, and once more I want to yell at a developer to get basic movement and action working properly before making elaborate multi-phase boss battles!

Just completed Guacamelee 2, 100 per cent plus gold on all Proving Grounds. I think it was overall easier than G1 but probably because G1 taught so much on the mechanics. However the 4 Special Key levels were absolutely cunts, very tough.

Anyone had a crack at Blasphemous 2 yet?

The tone of that is really weird and off putting

What's with the constant panty shots with the main character

I don't think it's for me

Finished Skelattack (Steam) - 6.5/10

The gameplay trailer probably says more than I can describe in a thousand words--in short, it's an action platformer with a focus on navigating environmental hazards, like insta-death spikes, moving sawblades, arrow turrets etc. but mostly the spikes. You traverse through using your double jump, wall jump and so on, you know the drill. There's also some hitting enemies with swords, but they're not many and they're almost all stationary or very slow. It's also pretty linear with minimal exploration, so no metroidvania or anything of the sort.

It gets the basics right, movement feels very tight and responsive, so just moving and jumping around feels fun and leaves a good first impression. However it's dragged down by a multitude of problems.

First, it has unusual wall jump controls: instead of pressing the jump button, you walljump by pushing d-pad/stick away from the wall. I didn't find it that bad, I quickly got used to it and it added a little element of skill which I actually like. However, problems arise when you just want to fall away from a wall, since pushing away from the wall results in an unintended wall jump. This can be pretty annoying sometimes, and maybe they shouldn't have tried to reinvent the wheel here after all.

The levels and battles are nothing special, there's nothing that feels like you haven't done the same in several other games already, perhaps a little too basic overall. It tries to change up things a little with an occasional flying section with your bat companion, but sadly those are horrible and just make the game worse. Later there is a prison escape/stealth section--and yeah, it's one of those where you're being sent back to your prison cell to start over again each time you're hit. On the upside, at least you need to be actually hit by an enemy, not just spotted, but still it's a terrible mechanic that should rot in hell and I have no idea why devs keep doing that. It's not even that hard, but still it makes the game worse.

Another shit mechanic taken from other games is that you lose money on death and have to return to that location to get it back. That's one thing if you're killed by enemies, but another when killed by insta-death spikes, which is by far the most common cause of death in this game. You need to get really close to those spikes, which isn't helped by lousy hit detection where your hitbox seems so large that you're constantly hit by things that didn't look like they actually hit you. Checkpoints are ridiculously generous though so frustration is kept fairly low.

I have a suspicion that a lot of getting hits and dying could be avoided by a high frame rate with low input lag--as is common in this type of game--but bizarrely, it runs at 35 fps. Playing it actually doesn't feel as bad as that sounds, but scrolling is noticeably not very smooth and again, I suspect it increases the amount of you getting hit.

Another bizarre technical issue was that it wouldn't play any sound if I set sound output to my TV, an issue I'd never had before with anything. But using headphones directly from the PC worked, so it wasn't a big problem. Still shouldn't be happening.

And what is it with the single-profile save? There's only one savegame which will be overwritten if you decide to start from the beginning. How are there still developers who don't know this is bullshit?

But probably the biggest issue is that this game is way overpriced at €20, it's a €10 game at the very most. It's short, I needed 3.4 hours to finish, and that was taking it slow and trying to explore everything. Not necessarily an issue with this type of game as they often focus on replayability. But this game offers nothing in the way of replayability, it doesn't give you any incentive to play again--not even a difficulty setting--and a lot of unskippable dialogue doesn't help either. It's very much a one-and-done game, so €20 is extremely bad value. It was on sale though for €3.59, and for that price I'd say it's worth it despite the issues. At least it was fun enough for me to finish it, unlike quite a few games I've played recently.

I have!

It is better in terms of gameplay than Blasphemous 1. But it's not as weird and grotesque in terms of the lore and enemy design. Given that weirdness was a big appeal of the first game for me, I'm not sure whether I'd rate 2 above it or not.

I found Blasphemous 1 super clunky. Think I'm too adjusted to Hollow Knight levels of control fluidity for these retro throwbacks. Similar issue with Metroid Dread and that anime one where you start on a galleon, the name of I forget.

Finished: Shantae and the Seven Sirens (50% off on Steam until 16/10)

I tried both the original Shantae and Risky's Revenge but couldn't get into either of them, but this one I enjoyed quite a bit. Great graphics, cute comic boobs characters, music and all. Controls/physics are excellent, and combat is fast-paced and fun even if a little on the simple and easy side.

It's a pretty typical, streamlined metroidvania compared to those other two games which were more of their own thing--if that's a positive or negative depends on perspective I guess. Someone who loved those older games exactly for what they were might not be happy about the changes, while someone else (like me) who wasn't a fan might approve.

It is a little bogged down by a few issues though. The difficulty curve makes no sense, notably boss fights get easier during the game instead of harder. The final boss is one of those multi-phase fights that take forever--thankfully it's not hard, just tedious as hell and not the greatest note to end the game on.

But by far the worst thing is a section with an ultra-tight time limit, where you get about 10 minutes to defeat endless hordes of enemies in 8 enemy rush rooms. I failed two times at it (which is super frustrating after spending 10 minutes per try) and the third time I tried so hard I kept just eating attacks because I didn't feel like I had any time to even dodge anything. I had actual pain in my thumb afterwards from almost 30 minutes of frantic button mashing. It's baffling why the developer would do this, it's as if they consciously tried to ruin the game.

Still a very enjoyable game for the most part and definitely worth the €12.50 I paid in the sale, but the flaws (especially the timed section) reduce the score a little. Playthrough time (completionist): 13 hours.

7.5/10


Finished: Xeodrifter (90% off on Steam until 18/10)

Minimalist mini-metroidvania in super-pixellated style reminiscent of Environmental Station Alpha, the unique mechanic here being the ability to jump back and forth between the foreground and the background layer. The controls are a little floaty and momentumy, enemies are simplistic, boss fights are ok even though it's always the same boss that just learned one new move every time you encounter it.

It's oldschool and simple and small and somewhat enjoyable for the short time that it lasts, and frankly I don't really know much more to say about it, there's simply not that much to it. Well, the checkpointing is needlessly punishing, which reduces the score by 0.5 points. On sale it's only €1, and I think it's absolutely worth that for two fairly entertaining hours. The regular price of €10 though is way too high in my opinion.

Oh, and it has "partial controller support", which as always means: no controller support, Joytokey required. Bizarrely, it gives you only XBox controller button prompts even though it only accepts keyboard inputs, so I had to try all the keys on the keyboard to even find out which ones I need to map to the controller. On the upside however, the controls are responsive, in contrast to Environmental Station Alpha which I abandoned mostly because of its terrible input lag.

6.5/10


Abandoned: Powernaut VANGARDT (50% off on Steam until 16/10)

Essentially a new Game Boy game, with low res, 4 shades of grey, slow gameplay and all. From the screenshots and videos I thought it looks nice, and it was only €0.50, so I gave it a shot.

Sadly, it's trash. It feels like the dev had a book "How to make your game not fun" and followed the advice in every single chapter. It even combines the bad parts of original GB games with the bad parts of modern games. For example, from GB games you get super slow gameplay, ultra-simplistic enemies, a pointless time limit, passwords instead of savegames, and no map (it's nonlinear and labyrinthian). But the developer also knew of bullshit elements in modern games and decided to include them as well, so for example you lose all (not some--all) money on death and have to return to where you died to get it back, which is even more annoying in a mapless labyrinth.

Your projectile have extremely short range (only a few pixels) and are super weak, so that even the most basic enemies take 8-10 hits, and you have to get so close that you constantly have to move back and forth to not get hit. Making you feel super weak, always a guarantee for fun in a game. But since that's not enough, the game also loves to debuff you, especially with spider webs that prevent you from jumping, and these spiders are hanging from above fucking everywhere. As far as I've played, half the game takes place on pillars between instadeath spike pits with spiders hanging above them, so while you're webbed you can't jump to hit the spider that's constantly shooting webs at you, and you can't dodge them by moving left or right either or you'll die. Yay. Water debuffs you too.

I don't know if this is meant to be a troll game, but I can't recall the last time I felt this much like a developer deliberately tried to make their game bad. I honestly struggle to think of another explanation. And for good measure, add a few technical issues like requiring you to use the keyboard instead of the controller in some menus.

You can upgrade your stats if you collect a lot of money and spend it at a checkpoint, which will probably make it a little more bearable, but what are the chances that a game that's horrendously bad in the first half hour becomes good later on? Way too slim for me to take them, that's for certain. This game is bad even by Game Boy standards, I feel a little ripped off even for the €0.50 I paid.

Just had half an hour with "Savage Halloween" (on Steam).

Seems quite fun at this early stage - a 2D platformer/shooter quite like Contra. It's also had a horizontal scrolling shooter section and a horizontal scrolling jumping holes and dodging barriers section (like Battletoads) so far. Looks nice with its Halloweeny 8/16 bit vibes, has a CRT filter for some old-school visuals without needing to use Reshade etc and local co-op is always welcome. Pocket money price too.

Anyone played owlboy? It's peanuts on the switch store so thinking about picking it up.