Recent reviews by Spiral

The art and animation are great but unfortunately everything else is a letdown.

The load times are obnoxiously long for a 2d platformer. The game doesn't autosave on going to a different area, so if I died after fast travelling I would respawn in the first area and have to endure another 2 load screens to get back to where I was.

The combat is extremely repetitive, after around the 3rd area I had the terrible realization that I was going to be doing this for the entire game. The window for parries is extremely small, I couldn't consistently nail it on the first few enemies so I forgot about it for the rest of the game. Sometimes I would be trapped with a large amount of enemies in a room, it was impossible to see where my character was and I would quickly be overwhelmed.

Inexcusably buggy for a game that's been out for 5 months now. The screen will jitter unsettlingly when looking around with the right stick, this happens more often than not. Map markers for pickups sometimes don't disappear after collecting, leading to false positives. Many more minor bugs.

I've never been particularly interested in roguelikes or shmups, but this game just does everything right.
Extremely good, extremely addictive. Possibly the best value for money for any game on Steam.

Heavily focused around co-op and unsurprisingly the game is dead. The extremely high base price means even with a substantial discount it's expensive, and Spelunker has never been the most popular franchise.

Almost every level has co-op switches which need another player to activate. I read in the only guide here that there is a pet on the second world which can be used to activate these switches. I focused on the main levels in the first world to get it as soon as possible, but when I got to the second world map I saw that the pet in question wouldn't be available until the very end of the levels in the second world, why? Playing alone is a sin in Spelunker Party and you will be punished for it.

I unlocked quests at the end of the first world which are bonus objectives: kill 5 ghosts, blow up 3 destructible walls, etc. But only one can be activated at a time and not all levels have the enemies/ objects required to complete every quest, meaning a lot of wasted time. There's no way of knowing if a level has what you need unless you've played it before and have a good memory, and no you can't just start a level, do the objective and quit out. The level must be completed for it to count. Why can't I just activate them all at once?

I wish this was better, because the core gameplay is fun but it has too many negatives which bring it down.

The story just peters out with no proper conclusion. There's a large amount of story that was told through side missions that were easily missable and explained some of what was actually happening. Not that it matters because it didn't come up in the ending.

Most of the sub weapons are bad. The usual process was:
Final a new sub weapon> Is it better than the rocket launcher?> No> Keep using the rocket launcher.

Later on in the game when I got the double & wall jump abilities I was able to scale a large cliff to the right of the landing site. But there's nothing there, just multiple empty screens. You really couldn't put a place a few enemies to shoot?

It's impossible to buy all the weapons/ equipables from the shop without grinding. By the end of the game I needed at least 5000 currency to afford the last item (13000 if you include the overpriced luck seed.)
The merchant even makes a comment about how he shouldn't be charging and should just give the player the items he is selling. Of course the offer is immediately turned down by the protagonist.

Unnecessary padding which seems to only exist to add to the short game length. Whenever a ship part is found, fast travel is disabled. This could have been an interesting challenge, but in reality it seems to just exist to waste time. A few easy enemies are spawned on the way back to the ship, but it never escalates and never felt like it couldn't have been skipped without losing anything from the game as a whole.

I wish I liked this more. The first part of the game is great, solid platforming and challenging bosses. Then it all grinds to a halt. The metroidvania part of the game is half baked and unnecessary - and this is coming from someone whose favourite genre is metroidvanias.

There are four bosses in the metroidvania section and three of them are gimmick fights, unsatisfying and completely unlike the ones in the first part of the game.

The story follows a similar trend, the start is intriguing but it splutters out with the music box conclusion. Introducing a major new character that close to the end was perplexing. The very final boss was defeated with a button mashing QTE and the ending was disappointing, it didn't feel like I was ending the curse cycle at all.

The Cloudstep technique was different and enjoyable, but adding the glide move makes it much worse and harder to perform. Following the trend of starting with something good and then ruining it.

I quickly ran out of things to purchase from the ingame shop. There is a second merchant that then unlocks, but to unlock him it costs ALL of currently collected shards. I didn't know how to unlock it before I had thousands of shards collected, all of which were then wasted. Even if I had those shards back, the prices are so high that buying everything would take considerable grinding.

The DLC starts with a mandatory minigame and ends with one too! Why? Neither were particularly enjoyable and were radically different from the rest of the game.

Overall I have mixed feelings. There was a lot to enjoy, but it was ultimately lacking. It really needed someone in development to course correct on the many bad ideas.

Gets boring and repetitive very fast.
There may be many mounts but there is very little difference between them. The longer a run goes the more tanky the enemies become, which encouraged me to end runs prematurely rather than suffer through absurdly bullet spongy enemies.

I almost quit playing a few times due to how stale it was becoming, but the possibility of interesting new mounts and biomes persuaded me to keep at it. It wasn't worth it. It's all the same over and over again. The first hour of Patch Quest is the same as the tenth.

There is certainly potential in Patch Quest but I don't see it being 'fixed' now that the game is fully released out of early access.

A good foundation, but could have really done with some major balancing.
The game is simply far too easy. I died on the first few bosses, and the last 2, but the middle of the game was a total cakewalk. I know Corrupt mode is an option, but it's an extreme overcorrection to just making the base game more challenging.

There are about 30 upgrades, but most of them are useless. The very first upgrade gives a 10% critical chance, and that's the best upgrade in the entire game! I just wanted my primary attack to be stronger.

There is too much currency given to the player, but not enough to spend it on. I cleaned out every vendor beyond the first as soon as I encountered them. This also makes the upgrades that increase drop rates and magnetize drops worthless.

When defeating one of the main three bosses they supposedly give Haiku an upgrade, but it's unclear what it does? They zap the sword, but it doesn't seem any stronger?

There is no major reward for getting all the collectables (power cells.) There's rewards along the way, but nothing for getting all of them. Why?

The story was practically non-existent. Uh, there's a virus and three core robots. But it turns out they infected a forth core with the virus? Because...?
Game devs please put a tiny amount of effort into your stories, it's getting embarrassing.

There are many balloon enemies in the garden area that just float in place and don't attack in any way. Not sure what the point was, it made that area even easier that the rest.

And finally there's a list of kickstarter backers but no support for non-english characters. So a few of the backers just show up as those squares with a cross through them. lmao.

Despite the many flaws I didn't totally hate Haiku and did enjoy my playthrough. The zipline was a cool movement ability and I appreciate the endgame map marker for collectables, something which is frequently overlooked in this genre.

What a shame, I really enjoyed the first 90% of Super Gear Quest. But for the last 10% the developer absolutely lost his mind with the difficulty, which soured the whole experience.
Multiple 3+ stage boss fights with no checkpoints are not good. Repetition is not fun. If I can ace the early stages, why am I forced to play them over and over again. I don't enjoy repeatedly banging my head into a wall .
Then the final area has highly damaging enemies, a shortage of health and save points and multiple blind leaps of faith filled with instant death spikes.

There is no way to detect missed collectables and no currently available maps/ lists. The hardest to find collectable are CDs, which only let you play the game soundtrack from the main menu. If I wanted to listen to the OST outside of the game I would purchase it separately. Hardly worth the effort.

There is one weapon with ammo that doesn't automatically regenerate and until the upgrade is found late in the game, it's slow to fire and does poor damage. Why?

and finally the cursor stays on the screen at all times in fullscreen and the credits are unskipable and scroll very slowly.

Neutral review. Enjoyable enough while it lasts but very repetitive.
Each area has new enemies and new equipment but you're forced to play these levels over and over to unlock enough bloodstones to unlock the boss and next area.

The upgrades are mostly trash, which was very disappointing. The first trinket I found increased all skills by 2. There were at least 10 trinkets and none were anywhere close to as good as this one. The weapon and armour perks had many upgrades which felt completely useless such as 'the first skull throw of the levels deals extra damage' or 'healing at full health gives gold.'

Most weapons and hats (throwing weapons) were bad. I used the hammer and horned helmet for almost all the game. Again, I received them relatively early and didn't find anything later in the game that superseded them.

A little more work could have made this game better than 'just ok.' Like most 10tons games I enjoyed it at the time but I'll soon forget it and will probably never play it again.

I have no idea how this game has a very positive overall rating.

It is so absurdly easy, there simply isn't any challenge here at all. Health upgrades give 100% of starting HP and there are many. I didn't come close to dying once.

The collectibles can be randomly hidden in destructible items and of course there isn't any way to locate them, meaning if for whatever reason I wanted to find them all I would have to use a walkthrough or scour every inch of the map. There isn't even a reward for collecting them other than an achievement, so why bother?

It only took me 7 hours to beat it and at the time of writing it rarely goes on sale.