Thank goodness the new SG thread for Amazon Prime freebies popped up when it did; I almost missed their giveaway for this game!

2D Metroidvania Platformer with twinstick aiming. It’s awkward to have to switch on the fly between aiming with right-stick and jumping with the A button, but in fairness, the game does use every other button: RT shoots, RB dashes, B switches between your primary and secondary gun, LT uses your character’s special attack, LB uses your character’s traversal power (e.g. grappling hook), Y switches between unlocked characters, and holding X uses your healing items that replenish at each save point.

First impressions weren’t that great between the twinstick jumping, the hold-to-heal pet peeve that makes you unable to do anything else, and the limited-ammo-clips pet peeve that forces you to stop shooting every five seconds so you can “reload,” but the game makes up for it as you progress by having challenging level design and generally fair attack patterns. That said, some bosses have attacks that’ll catch you off guard and kinda do require some memorization to get past, and the increasing damage of purchasable guns results in bosses having more and more HP, effectively meaning you have to keep buying the new guns to get a decent difficulty curve (and some of the guns you can buy are so short-range that it doesn’t feel like they were built for this game), but everything surrounding those issues is done well enough that the overall product is enjoyable.

The metroidvania design is also done well. Sure, it has the usual “late-game power needed to get secret in early-game area, so you’re never sure if it’s worth going down this optional path yet,” but even in the rare instances where you do hit a dead-end like that, there’s usually some other item or upgrade you can get in that area with what you have. Unfortunately, the game has so many different….let’s say “currencies” that you aren’t always able to use what you find. For example, you can find equip-able power-ups, and you need a battery for each extra powerup you want to equip. Fine so far, but each powerup also has an assigned “tier,” and no matter how many batteries you have, you can only equip one power-up per tier. In other words, if you go left at the bottom of the forest in early-game and hit the dead-end that requires wall-jumping, you do get a power-up for your efforts of going down that side path, but if it isn’t better than all three of the other tier-one powerups you’ve gotten, you’re never gonna use it anyway. Between stuff like that and the fact that there’s often only one fast-travel point per zone, it all combines to discourage exploration more and more, even though you can tell the devs tried to avoid that.

Overall, despite some hiccups every now and then, I do think the game is worth getting when it’s on sale.