Recent reviews by ppowersteef

On my first impressions, I've loved the game.
It's music, character design and artstyle is incredible and that was my selling point.

However, after playing it once, it took a while for me to get back to it, and that confused myself too.
So I went writing down some other impressions that I had while playing:

- The game has a huge focus on combat, though most enemies don't do contact damage, so they're not much of an obstacle to just roll past them. You might as well just skip combat for the necessary parts.
- despite the complex combat abilities, fighting the enemies themselves is rather straightforward, there's rarely an enemy that forces you to use a different attack once, and after that, you can stunlock it to it's defeat.
So like: You have 3 weapons, with each having 4 different ways to do a special attack, consuming a part of the special meter. but you can also just stick to the default combo and save those special attacks for "when you really need it", but pretty much every enemy can be defeated with the default combo, so there's little need on those.
- The game also has a huge focus on collecting crimson gems, you see gems everywhere, destroying crystals gives you gems, defeating enemies gives you gems, losing gems is the motivation to not die, so you can probably do a lot with them, right?
Well, there is a combat tech tree, which looks awesome, but that's the only thing where you can spend all your gems on, and despite the many options, the combat upgrades aren't that necessary to have either.
- There is little to no reason to go for collectables, as those only offer more gems, which you can already earn in any level.
- The story is straightforward and kinda generic, and that lowered the expectations a bit.
- The level are strictly linear, even the "multiple paths" only lead to either optional combat areas, or visited later for story progression.
- The level design and puzzles are all basic stuff you've seen before, maybe I could've expected that some crimson powers blend with the level design, other than 'equip the axe to destroy one specific wall'.
There's also past obstacles that still require you to solve the puzzle even though you have equipment obtained later that should break through.
For example: There is a breakable ice wall, and you have an axe that can destroy crystal walls, or even a fire spell that deals extra damage to ice enemies, both are obtained after all ice levels, so it would've been useful if these could break down ice walls to lessen backtracking and improve possibilities, but they don't. Both weapons are strictly limited to one certain interaction.
There were elemental ranged attacks that blend well with the combat and level design, I think it would've been cool if these elemental attacks blended with the melee weapons too.

Eventually I went playing it until the end and I do have enjoyed it.
As said, the music, artstyle and character design caught my interest, the boss fights were great too, and I loved the fights against Rozia, that was enough for me to keep going until the end.
But...should I recommend it even though with all other thoughts in mind?
It's on an shuffling edge, really, but I've said more about the parts that can be improved than the game itself.

But for now, I'll give it a negative one.
The game is okay for a simple adventure, but with such an arsenal of abilities, I was also expecting you'll be able to do more.
I see that this game's still getting updates, and 1.1 was a decent update, so I'm having good hopes for it to be improved further.
EDIT: "still getting updates", lol. Game has never been updated since.

I used to be afraid of big spiders, but this game managed to make me appeal them much more.

As you can tell from the screenshots alone, the game is super cute!
and it's mechanics and physics are very well exectuted.
And it has a lot of fun stuff like eye lasers, skateboards, persistent web strings. With all things combined you can cling on loose parts and shoot on it to fly like crazy! Along with that, there's a lot of collectibles to obtain.
This game has a lot of potential.

The game has a pretty straightforward story, and it can be finished quite quickly too (3-4 hours for me)
But it's phygics, creative freedom and collectables really makes this game a gem to play.

A short, but solid metroidvania game.

It has a bit of everything you'd expect in a classic metroid game, but it adds a few twists and gimmicks to keep it looking fresh.

It may cause some rendering problems on old graphics cards though, my usual laptop couldn't render the map, suit and dialogue in the game. But it works fine on a modern PC.

Certainely would recommend to get that metroid itch off.

The game is basically a boss rush, where neither you nor the boss has a health bar.

So once you've figured out the pattern and hit it's weak spot, you've already defeated the boss, this makes figuring out how to defeat them pretty fun.

However...this game has some glaring flaws that refrains me from completing it:
- Each time you die, you have to backtrack and walk back to the boss, and because you die in one hit, this gets old fast.
- There are no upgrades nor items, and the only progression you get by defeating bosses is more bosses.
- It has a big and empty hub world, and while it has some safe points, the backtracking each time is still annoying.
- This game has no mouse support, and you're forced to play with a controller for 360 aiming, I'm really not gonna recommend a keyboard with only 8 directions for this.

It's a odd one though, the worst part is not the bosses themselves, but everything that's designed around the bosses.
They may have gone for some immersion, but it didn't fit for me, unfortunate.

Fairrune was an interesting experience.
The series are similair to a classic Zelda game, but with a very simplified combat.
I'm personally not a big fan of the casual combat system, though it's clear that the focus on this one is more on the exploration, style and unique design.
I think every game got me stuck figuring out the puzzle, and although a little annoying, I found it a refreshing experience.

The games overall are pretty short, but Fairrune 2 is quite the longest of them, and it was also the most fun.
It was great to see how this collection shows how much the series has improved, starting with Origin, building up in Fairrune 1, and expanding it on Fairrune 2.
All games together, they took around 10 hours to complete, without going hard on the archievements.

If I had to give a complaint, the games lacks some help or direction, so it is possible that you're stuck at a puzzle, or just don't know where to go next, I have been stuck for some hours due to that.

It was also great to see the Kamiko references and cast within the Fairrune Blast minigame. Kamiko is also a short game that's worth picking up if you're considering this one.

It's a cute little game.

It's feels pretty similair to Kero Blaster in a way.
Even though I found the artstyle and dialogue a little too simplelistic, I still think this is a well designed game with good progression in weapons and several secrets to explore.

It's the difficulity ramps up quite fast at the bosses, but it's manageable once you learn it's patterns.

A short, but interesting game.

Feels like playing a 2D Zelda Hack n' Slash game.
It's cute, fast-paced, the combo game is great, and the music and gameplay feels satisfying.

However, it's pretty short, it took only 1 hour to finish the game, and the game's combat is rather simple, with only a standard combo attack and a special move (that I only discovered late). It shouldn't have taken much longer though, else the repetitive pattern started to drag.

Usually short games makes up for it's replayabilty, but this is a bit of a mixed feeling:
At one side, there are multiple characters to choose from, a score and archievements that adds to it.
But the dungeons are the same each run, with the same puzzles each time again, which makes the game linear, along with the little combat options that it already has. That makes replaying them pretty stale.

Overall, it's a short, but satisfying game.
I wish there was some more variation between the levels, but from an indie game perspective, this is a job well done.

It's a bit more than just Ace Attorney with birds.

- Unlike Ace Attorney, the game is less linear, and if you mess up, the story continues with the consequences. Which means that there are branching paths you can take.
- It has a good, deep and humoristic story, which also tells you a bit about the history of france.
- Great artstyle in honor of J.J. Grandville, and classic music. both were classics, and thus never designed for a game like this, and yet it fits the characters and situation so perfectly well.

One main gripe is, like with other story-based games, the lack of replayability.
Sure, you can choose a different path and hope for a different result, but you already know a major part of the story by then, and going through all the dialogue again is a bit of a hassle, along with the constantly moving camera.
Other than that, it's a great game that I recommend picking up if you're a fan of Ace Attorney.

As a fan of Blaster Master Zero, I love the style, including the graphics and music. They've nailed the classic style really well!
But at the other side, the gameplay feels rather simple, and it get old and tedious fast.

They've an incredible complex weapon management system (You pick up different kinds of melee weapons that varies in durability, damage, speed, range, throw damage, 'break' effects) for weapons that all...just functions the same?
The most notable difference that the weapons has is their 'break' effect to unleash a spell. These break effects are pretty important. but other than that, it's quite a hassle to manage the many different weapons you have. And if you don't focus on the break effect, the combat looks very standard.
Remaining weapons can be used to upgrade the mech, but it only upgrades the health, so there's only little sense in progression.

You've the ability to switch from Mech to Pilot, this was a nice nod to Blaster Master. And it allows you to keep using the Pilot once the Mech broke down, I liked that idea!
However, in practise, this makes the game more difficult to progress, you cannot pick up weapons, you cannot checkpoint without your mech, and I havn't found a way to restore the mech once it breaks down, unless I end the level.

So the Mech moves slow, has a short range, needs to break weapons for one-use abilities, combat/movement is rather simple and doesn't seem to improve later on.

The game looked promising, but after playing through the first 2 levels, I feel the rest of the game plays the same way. I'd like to give the game a second chance some other day though, it's artstyle and music is so great that it has a missed potential.

I used Paint.net to make tiles beforehand, and for 48 different tile positions, there was a lot of unnecessary copy/paste work needed.
Tilesetter really helps with mirroring the tiles so you'll have a fitting platformer tileset with just 4-6 unique tiles.
There's also a function that it previews direct saved changes made to the sprite.

Cons:
There are little to none configuration options, you can't change the hotkeys and you have to work with tiles that aren't spaced out.

It's a new tool, so there will likely updates happening later on. But it's a timesaver once you're getting the hang of it.