When I read that this game was made by (part of) the same team that made the Metroid Prime games, I wanted to play it, but what I didn’t realize was that this is probably the most literal interpretation of a “sandbox” by any AAA game.

This is a third-person shooter, although the shooting function has been pushed aside to the shoulder buttons (right trigger for rapid fire and right bumper for charge shots). Room was needed on the face buttons for jumping (A), dashing (B), calling your robot partner back to you (X), and ordering your robot partner to attack the enemy (Y). I rarely used the “call robot partner back to you” function, and when I did, it was usually when trying to do something else like open a chest, but I digress. After you get a second robot partner, you can switch between them with the left bumper, and doing this triggers its own instant attack, although there’s a cool-down before you can switch again. You can also only have two robot partners with you at once, and you need their powers to get past certain points, so if you don’t have the right one, you have to go back to a fast travel location to switch them out, then go back to where you were, which I found to be annoying, but I digress. Holding down the left trigger locks you onto a nearby enemy, and this is what drew me to the game: I’ve never been a big fan of manually aiming my shots in 3D space (I always found it to be annoying and awkward), and that’s part of why I like the Metroid Prime games and why I wanted to play this one: the lock-on removes that aspect from the game-play and lets the player focus on dodging the enemies’ attacks.

This game also has a unique feature for its combat: when you get an enemy’s health below a certain point (marked by a white icon), you can push the button below the right stick to go into core-capture mode. While in this mode, you hold the right stick down to pull; if the warning icon flashes, you let go of the right stick for a bit and pull again when it goes away. If you’re successful, you pull out the enemy’s core, killing it instantly and adding the core energy to your crafting materials. If unsuccessful, whether by the rope snapping or another enemy attacking you mid-pull, you can just try again right afterward. This little mini-game is simplistic and short enough that it doesn’t become too repetitive despite the waves of enemies you’ll kill, and it’s also the most natural use of that right-stick button I’ve ever seen in a game (it only took 18 years).

Combat in this game is actually pretty fun at first, as most enemies have fairly complex AI, but there are some problems. A minor issue I had is that your gun has ammo; if you shoot too much too quickly, you run out and have to wait for the bar to fill back up (you can shoot again right after it starts filling back up, but not for long since it will stop refilling when you start shooting). I don’t understand why this mechanic was added since it hampers the pacing of the game; I’d rather have to tap the button for each shot than deal with this ammo limitation. However, what really kills combat for me is hit-stun: if you get hit by any attack, your character recoils for a solid second, at which point you can get hurt by more attacks without being able to dodge them. Considering you frequently have to fight multiple enemies at once which can and will circle out of your field of view, attacking you before you can react, this sucks all the fun right out of combat. Plus, enemies frequently deal more than half of your health in damage (presumably to try to make the game challenging despite giving you regenerating health), so if you get hit once, you’re pretty much dead.

Another problem comes in with the level design: you fight enemies almost exclusively in flat, empty arenas, and since there’s only a small variety of enemies, it gets repetitive after a while (most, if not all, of the bosses are just larger versions of the main enemy models). In fact, the different enemies don’t even have unique attacks: you might think the wolves are the only ones who have the dash attack until you see the spiders use that exact same move, and sometimes, they’ll even spawn corebytes (tiny suicide-drones), making the Master Corebyte Spawner redundant since that’s all it can do. I’ve heard people say that sequels for AAA games are just the same thing over and over, and if they’re anything like this game, I finally understand that criticism: it literally is the same thing over and over; no difficulty curve, enemy variation, or anything.

Being a sandbox title, there’s a vast, open desert for you to walk across while you go from level to level. There’s a unique feature where enemies can pop out of the sand (seemingly) randomly, like in an RPG, although it’s the same enemies over and over, just like in the levels. The only difference between fighting enemies here instead of in a level is: if you’re on a cliff, the enemies can moon-jump up to where you are before resuming their attack pattern.

There are also some platforming segments, but just like other modern “platformers”, the platforming is entirely divorced from the rest of the game-play, so it usually ends up just being a series of stationary platforms that are just far enough apart that you have to use your dash and double jump each time. Needless to say, this, too, becomes repetitive. The only hazards that are added to the platforming segments with any regularity are electrified spheres that roll back and forth; sure, it’s more than something like Valdis Story had, but it still isn’t much. Plus, if you miss a jump in the overworld, you have to backtrack, and it isn’t always clear where you can get back on the main path from (it was after wandering around an optional area of the map for a while that I found out you can activate fast travel from the map by pressing Y). Heck, the platforming in the levels is more forgiving since, even though it “kills” you, it immediately sets you back at the last checkpoint so you can try again.

The game also has collectibles (Prismatic Cores), á la collectathon platformers. You can usually find a couple in the main levels, including the ones you need to backtrack with a later ability for, but you’ll encounter some doors that require more cores than you currently have, so you’ll have to wander around the map looking for stray ones or optional levels. What makes this particularly egregious is that there are only four main levels, the last two being blocked by increasingly larger core requirements (15 for level 3 and 30 for level 4). For reference, you usually only get a couple Prismatic Cores in a main level, and optional levels only have one each. This means that even more of your time in the game will be spent wandering around the overworld, sometimes going to parts on your map that are empty in case there are cores there that haven’t been triggered yet (Prismatic Cores show up as icons on your map, but only if you get close enough to them). It comes across as padding, especially since the door to level 4 is right after level 3, so you’ve only spent a few minutes back on the main path when the game says “no, you have to go back out there and wander around some more.”

The optional levels are scattered throughout the overworld, and unlike the main levels (which contain some mix of platforming and combat arenas), optional levels only focus on one: either being a series of platforming challenges or a single arena with waves of enemies. Another element that makes optional levels unique is that they have additional optional challenges within them: beat the level in a certain amount of time, shoot all the switches, and find a yellow orb. Making it to the end of the level usually gets you a Prismatic Core, but accomplishing the additional challenges unlocks other rewards (usually blueprints or crafting materials, but sometimes it can be another Prismatic Core) on top of one final reward for accomplishing all tasks in one run. It’s a decent idea, but there isn’t much variation between the levels.

The cores in the overworld have even less effort put toward them. For most of them, you’ll find a circular canister half-buried in the sand, and when you activate it, a force-field appears around you and you have to fight a single wave of enemies to get the core. Other times, there will be seemingly nothing around the area of the map where the icon is, but then a boss enemy will pop out of the ground, and if you get too far away from its spawn point, it will jump back in the ground and you have to start the fight over. What’s worse is that if your level is too low, you won’t be able to deal damage to certain enemies at all. Oh yeah, this game has a completely superfluous level system that only exists to make it seem like the game has a genuine difficulty curve, but it only serves to betray both skill-based play the “go anywhere, do anything” nature of sandbox games (the thing people play those games for in the first place). Plus, it forces grinding if you want 100% completion because nobody is going to get to level 36 naturally in this game.

The fourth and final main level contains both the best and worst parts of the game. It starts with a boss fight where it has its own pattern, but will cocoon itself and summon a wave of normal enemies when its health reaches certain points. Just before these points, it will shoot out a wave attack that, if you’re hit, won’t hurt you but will add a grey-scale filter over the screen so you can’t see enemies’ colors (and, by extension, their weaknesses), and no, the weakness system isn’t a result of variation; you’re literally just changing the color of your shots. However, this one battle has a number of bugs:

1. Sometimes, after being hit by the grey filter, you can still see the enemies’ health (and, by extension, their color and weakness), but other times, their health doesn’t show up at all. I don’t know which was intended.
2. Regardless, if you have the tank as your robot companion, you can mount it (otherwise used to drive across the very open world faster, and which you don’t get access to until right before the semi-final level, by the way) and instantly return the colors to normal. The filter doesn’t normally go away until after the enemy wave is dealt with.
3. Sometimes, the enemy waves that are spawned will jump outside the force-field, meaning you can’t shoot them (but they can still shoot you). Luckily, they can jump back in.
4. After around my second death from this battle, the boss got locked into a perpetual taunt animation until the points in its health where it would use the grey-scale attack; after the enemy waves were dealt with, it would go right back to the taunt animation. It did break the cycle and try to fight back right before I won, though.

After this, the level transitions into a series of five “floors” which each contain enemy arenas separated by platforming segments, removing all pretense that the two were ever meant to work together. It’s enemy arenas also have special walls that trigger hit-stun if you collide with them, making it much easier to get hit-stunned to death. Floor 1 is uneventful aside from the fact that you have to fight more waves of enemies in a row between checkpoints than previously, meaning that the game’s hit-stun and quick deaths will really test your patience (it seems like the only way to get through is to use the tank’s stun grenades, then hope the ones that don’t get stunned get distracted by and attack said tank). Floor 2 decides to get really mean with the enemy arenas by making them radioactive, meaning your health slowly drains as opposed to regenerates (and there’s nothing you can do about the radiation; I checked). Compound this with the aforementioned combat problems and this is the worst part of the game. After this, floor 3 finally decides to add some actual variety to the arenas, starting with a moving hazard, then branching into moving hazards between tiny walls that you can jump over. This arena is actually easier than before since not only is it not radioactive, but you can use the walls as cover, and the next floor has even easier arenas since the walls form a little maze, but the enemies are the ones that have to navigate it; you can just lock on and shoot enemies down, and if one gets near you, jump over a wall. Heck, you can even extract an enemy’s core through the walls! Really, this is how arenas should have been at the beginning, then progressed to more open arenas so the player has to deal with the enemies’ AI more, thus creating something resembling a difficulty curve. Regardless, the game finally adds some variety to its enemy arenas, making this the best part of the game. Even the platforming segments introduce some unique gimmicks like rotating and disappearing platforms. Also, each floor has a fast-travel point associated with it, which is nice.

The final boss fight isn’t too noteworthy since it barely does anything different, although it does have some tiny walls in the corners of the level (not enough to do the maze tactic, though), and it’s also a really dark room making it harder to see the drones. One noteworthy thing is that the final boss has a gimmick where the only way to defeat it is to have your robot helper attack it while you’re distracting it in core-extraction mode. Don’t worry, that isn’t a spoiler since the game provides a prompt telling you about it, but it took a few attempts for the prompt to show up for me, so I was just sitting there wondering why the game wouldn’t let me extract the core (EDIT: and being frustrated at how it would just keep healing itself after breaking away).

Overall, I would not recommend this game. It has a fun and even slightly unique combat system, but everything else about the game-play (low enemy variety, low platforming variety, low arena variety, out-of-place leveling system, etc.) only serve to cheapen the experience.

P.S. The ending is also abrupt and lacks closure, making it seem like the developers had to rush it to meet deadlines (although they did manage to cram some sequel-bait in there, disguised as potentially unlocking post-game content).