The good 👍
- Good level design and map
- Fluid combat with combo system, and good enemy design
- Weapons (fist / whip / drill) are used for traversing the map as well, which makes it feel more coherent. Than just getting piles of shiny toys used to open one specific type of door
- Gorgeous graphic

The bad 👎
- There is a big difficulty spike right at the end. I had to drop difficulty to beat the game
- Characters are not fleshed out and lack backstory
- Story is average
- Parrying mechanic during combat is meh and hard to execute

Conclusion:

It is a solid Metroidvania, but still tier below Ori or Hollow Knight. Platforming and combat are smooth, albeit on the easy side. The visuals are good. The story is barebone. There is a lot of backtracking. If it's cheap (or free like I get on Epic) it's worth playing. The game has a demo on Steam, so it can be tested before buying.

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Details

📘 Story ☐ Bare-bone ☑ Average ☐ Good

This is not a strong part of the game. Ray lives his unhappy life as a veteran of an old world. The world where furtizens were free. Now they are under control of dog-machines, that invaded and countered the land. Ray doesn't care much, until his friend is kidnapped. Now it's serious, so he takes a piece of his old power armor (the fist, which must weigh a ton, and he easily carries it on the back). And off he goes, to punch some enemies, flirt with a mysterious cat, and save the world. There is a good idea there, that lands flat. We mostly run around the map, punching bad guys, getting pieces of story here and there.

🔄 Gameplay loop ☐ Boring ☐ Average ☑ Good	Run from point A to B, and kill encountered enemies. Get an upgrade or new ability along the way, which unlocks additional parts of the map. Nothing ground-breaking that would expand the Metroidvania genre. It is solid though, not much to complain about. Later on, it is easy to avoid the non-boss enemies (they do respawn) so backtracking is a tiny bit less annoying as well.
🪄 Abilities ☐ Basics (walk, jump etc.) ☐ Magic / powers ☑ Advanced combat	We can jump, wall grab, dash, float in air vents (with helicopter-drill), swing (with lasso), swim. A quite standard list for a Metroidvania. Combat upgrades are unlocked at the checkpoint stations, which also work as healing places. The game has single-use healing potions, but they are in limited quantity, don't restore, and need to be found in containers (or drop from the enemies). New abilities are unlocked in a linear way as we progress with the story. HP, special ability, and healing potion meters are upgraded by picking permanent power-ups.
🎮 Controls ☐ Clunky and stiff ☐ Adequate ☑ Fluid and enjoyable	Controls are smooth. Each weapon has many combos (feels a bit like Tekken lite with combinations), but in the end, I was using the easy-to-remember basic combinations. There are no problems with object collisions. The only problem I encouraged was that the parry mechanic didn't feel right. I could barely make it work, which made me not use it at all.
📇 Inventory and menus ☑ Basic ☐ Detailed ☐ Over complicated	There is no inventory. We can swap between the weapons on the fly. The menu button brings up a fallout-like screen where we can swap between the discovered map, found posters, items list, and options.
🥊 Combat 🏹 ☐ Boring and generic ☐ Average ☑ Good ☐ Great	Combat is flashy and fluid. General enemies are dumb and pose a threat only if present in large packs. Mini-bosses have more unpredictable movies and require more planning than spamming the same attack a few times. Bosses are a bit challenging but not more than to repeat the same fight 3 or 4 times to see the boss patterns. Nothing like the difficulty of the mantis fight in Hollow Knight.

💸 Microtransactions ☑ None ☐ Skins ☐ "Time-savers" ☐ Direct purchase ☐ Custom currency (gems etc.)	🏆 Achievements ☐ None ☐ Story progression ☐ Few collectibles / easy to get ☑ Grindy collectibles / hard to get ☐ Require multiple playthroughs	💾 Save system ☐ No saves ☐ No saves, progress carries over ☐ One checkpoint, too rare ☑ One checkpoint, frequent ☐ Manual saves
📊 Performance ☐ Can run on potato ☑ Medium requirements ☐ High requirements ☐ Too low for what is visible on screen ☐ Optimization disaster	🌌 Graphic ☐ May look good 10 years ago, but not now ☐ Blurry textures / geometry problems ☐ Average ☑ Good ☐ Beautiful	🔊 Sound ☑ Nothing to remember ☐ Good voice acting ☐ Good weapons & effects ☐ Good OST ☐ Music flows well with the action
🦚 Customization options ☐ Resolution, volume only ☑ Basic graphic settings ☐ Advanced graphic settings ☐ Adjustable HUD ☐ Accessibility options	🧭 Map ☐ No map ☐ Basic ☑ Detailed ☐ Minimap ☐ Fast travel	Details: