aaand here’s the other game I used my Amazon Prime free trial for. Remember: if you use a free trial of Amazon Prime, you get another free trial within 12 months (and it never expires), even if you cancel your previous trial before getting charged.

Platformer. Standard left/right movement and jump, X punches, RT tosses your grappling hook in the direction you’re holding, RB uses your equipped special move, and holding LT makes you run. Similar to Super Beast Hunt, it’s easy to forget that you can run at all since it’s rarely necessary, and stuff like this is quickly becoming another of my pet peeves. However, the rest of the controls are very responsive, with special note going to the fact that the punches DON’T have beat-‘em-up combos, so you don’t have to worry about getting stuck in a way-too-long attack animation just for one hit, nor do you risk taking unfair damage because the game won’t let you move for an extended period of time. Plus, if that’s still too much, your grappling hook can also deal damage to enemies, and it reaches much further than your punches. However, you are forced to a standstill if you use it on the ground, and it takes a second to return to you, so it ends up having the very problem the punches avoided.

There’s a stage select after the first level, but unlike Mega Man, you don’t get any special powers for beating them. You do unlock equippable special moves that you can buy, but you can only have four of them equipped at once, and they don’t appear to have any advantage against the bosses, so there’s really no excuse for the game to make you re-fight the bosses at the end like it does. You think it’ll be different at first, just having a large crystal that cycles between the different boss powers, but then nope: you get teleported to a rematch against them anyway. So disappointing. Rokko Chan did something similar, and it was just as disappointing there, too–except that game actually gave you the boss powers…and is free.

Level design is pretty good, but the difficulty curve does seem to be reversed. The controls take a bit of getting-used-to, what with the grappling hook stopping you in place and the fact that you can only punch once or twice in midair (making certain parts take a bit longer than they really should). Then, the stage select bosses have your typical cheap hits that you can’t react to on your first go, such as the top-left boss’s giant laser (that you can only barely run away from) or the bottom-right’s highlighted squares that you’d think are about to be targeted by an attack until–all of the sudden–the entire REST of the screen gets filled with spikes instead! However, each stage has several optional areas that are indicated by cracked walls or the like, and once you’ve found two of the max-HP-increasing items and bought three passive upgrades (because you can only have three equipped at once anyway), you can usually just tank the bosses’ less-than-fair hits and beat most of them on your first try, at least on Normal mode. Even the final boss I beat on my second attempt.

Overall, not too bad. Get it on sale.