Oh man, all of you who pay money for games are getting ripped off. My PC backlog has more than doubled from promotional giveaways alone, and quite a few of them are high profile releases, too (though I can’t say too much since I bought Axiom Verge a few months before that game became free).

This is a hack ‘n’ slash. For attacks, you start off with a standard 3-hit combo (which just requires hitting the left face button) and a gun, whose ammunition is refilled by performing melee hits on enemies and scenery (hold L2 to aim and push R2 to shoot, but you can’t move and shoot at the same time). Be careful not to hit L1 when trying to shoot, though, because that uses one of your finite health-refilling items; then again, there are a bunch scattered throughout the game, so even if you do make that mistake, you’ll probably pass up a third of them due to having full health and max refills stocked (you can hold three at once). You can also push the bottom face button to dash in the direction you’re facing, which sends you forward the same amount each time. Hollow Knight had that same type of dash mechanic, and I don’t get it. Personally, I prefer Mega-Man-X-style dashing where you have to hold the button, but you can let go whenever you want to stop so you’re not forced to go the entire distance each time.

Firstly, I should state that, rather than being linear like other hack ‘n’ slash games, this game has four main areas (one for each cardinal direction), each with their own unique enemies, difficulty curve, and boss. Each area begins with just enough empty rooms to make you think you might be playing a walking simulator before slowly introducing enemies and getting more complex. While each area is mostly linear, there are branches that lead to their own linear segments, and reaching the end of one of these segments gets you a purple triangle. You need four triangles from each area combined with the pillar you activate shortly after beating the area’s boss in order to access the final area, which cuts out all those unnecessary combat parts and focuses exclusively on the empty rooms until you reach the final boss. If you end up short on triangles, there’s an NPC near the end of each of the four main areas who will mark their locations on your map. Aside from all the empty rooms, I think all of this was executed well, though there are some optional doors that require 8 triangles from an area to unlock, but you never get all 8 locations marked on your map (EDIT: this is an issue because the game sometimes hides split paths behind scenery that would otherwise be solid tiles). Also, whenever you get your fourth triangle from an area, the game plays the exact same cut-scene all four times; we get it, you saw the box art for Akira, now let me play the game.

As for level design, credit where it’s due: this is a hack ‘n’ slash with ACTUAL LEVEL DESIGN! I was beginning to think it couldn’t be done, but the madmen actually pulled it off. Sure, the core game-play still revolves around defeating enemies in a room to progress, but now the rooms have, like, holes you can fall in (but you can’t walk off; only dashing gets you over a ledge), or little barricades you can walk behind to avoid enemy projectiles. Sometimes, there are even invulnerable turrets that come out of the ground and shoot at you until either you’re out of range or you unlock the way forward. Is it used to its full potential? Far from it. Are there times where the arenas are basically just fields with seemingly-randomly placed barricades? Yes; quite a few, in fact. Are the pitfalls often shunted to the edges, essentially making them glorified arena boundaries instead of proper stage hazards? Also yes. BUT, does the addition of these elements make a positive impact on the overall experience, resulting in scenarios that simply don’t exist in most other hack ‘n’ slash games? Absolutely. My favorite part is a vertical hall in the north area where you have to dash upward across small platforms while enemies are shooting at you from the sides and flying enemies can swoop down at you; it really is a perfect example of what the game could’ve been like if these elements were expanded upon more, but it also made me wish I could control the character with the D-pad since trying to dash upward or downward with the stick would sometimes result in me dashing slightly to the side of the platform and falling down, but no, the game apparently NEEDED a button to make the protagonist sit down without any other effect or purpose. No, don’t bother using those extra four buttons for quality-of-life features that could also pave the way for more complex level design; what this game really needs is to polish the surface level details like atmosphere!

Speaking of the atmosphere, the game tries to get its story across without any text, which is fine enough, but when the game is perfectly comfortable using text to tell me how basic controls work and how to use the warp pads, why won’t the game tell me what the difference is between the sword I already have and the new sword I just got? Or what about the difference between the dash attack in the sword shop and the dash attack in the dash shop? The worst example of this is probably the charge attack: the preview only shows the larger-ranged slash, not the fact that you have to use a normal slash first, then hold the button to charge it, so the only clue you have pre-purchase that this power-up is actually completely useless in this fast-paced game is the tiny little button icon below the preview that fills with a pink bar. Pro tip: if you play this game, the first power-up you’ll want to buy is the one that lets you absorb projectiles while dashing (but sometimes it doesn’t work because maybe it only absorbs certain types of projectiles; who knows, the game never tells you). Then, buy the one that lets you dash again if you hit the dash button right after finishing your previous dash, not because of its potential uses in battle, but so you can get past the empty parts of the game quicker (if you dash too many times in a row, your character will slide forward a bit after stopping, sometimes right into a pit). After that, buy one of the dash attacks, then ignore the northern shops and focus on capacity upgrades like more gun ammo or more health-refill-pack slots.

With that said, my biggest issue with the game is with the combat. On one hand, the combat is fast paced: actions happen the moment you push the button, and enemies don’t have invincibility frames, so there’s no waiting to do more damage in that regard. However, aside from walking, everything you do results in a quarter-to-half-second delay before you can do anything else, and in a game all about reacting to attack tells as soon as possible, this can often result in times where you react in time, but your character doesn’t. Example: the moment you fire a shot or swing your sword, you see the enemy wind up for an attack, so you push the dash button, but your character doesn’t move, so you push it again, but still nothing and now you’ve taken a hit. This is especially annoying for the boss fights since they’re the type of bosses you can damage at any point in the fight (as opposed to the ones where you just avoid the boss’s attacks until it stops and shows its weak point); moments that could have been an opportunity for skilled players to get another melee hit in instead just become another pause in the pattern as you wait for when you can actually attack it (looking at you, west boss). Also, you don’t have invincibility frames, either, so if you get hit with a powerful attack that knocks you on the ground, you can easily be attacked again before you can do anything about it. Luckily, attacks that stun you aren’t too common.

Overall, while I do have issues with mechanics and game-to-player communication, this is easily the best hack ‘n’ slash game I’ve ever played. If you’re a fan of hack ‘n’ slash games, or even a fan of dungeon design form the Legend of Zelda games, I recommend checking this game out.

P.S. The west area has trees, and since the game has a top-down view, enemies can be behind the trees, meaning you may not even know they’re there until after you get hit.