I just finished the game and unfortunately I have a lot of criticism.
First, I’ll say that the game does well on style. Its pixel art is very nice, the backgrounds and effects are quality, and the sound, while not outstanding, is certainly serviceable. It also appears that the game was entirely made by one person. This is kind of the end of the high points, though. It isn’t terrible, but it has some major fundamental weaknesses. I’ll break these up into “bugs and annoyances” and “systemic problems”.
The annoyances are many:
-The translation is very awkward, though mostly decipherable. The app name and title screen remain in Chinese, so good luck finding the store page again.
-The main attack button and the action button are the same, so if you go through a door and are immediately attacked, there is a high chance you’ll send yourself back through the door.
-The “slither” ability is worse than useless: you can run off the edge of the screen and fall off the world.
-There is a minor switch puzzle where you can trap yourself with no way out other than to reload your save.
-There is no real form of mobile health pack, making late game progress difficult (where you have to travel a significant distance from the closest save point). The mobile game-saving item is expensive and doesn’t refill your health.
-Your horizontal movement stops if you get hit, making it easy to get overwhelmed in a fight.
-Some enemies infinitely respawn while others stay dead until you leave the screen. Only trial and error will show you which are which.
-The respawn timer is also very quick, meaning that it can be difficult to clear a path before it closes on you.
-If you load a mobile save point or go through a door and are immediately attacked, the enemy can start its windup while the screen is still black, meaning it’s impossible to dodge.
-The controls are sluggish, making it impossible to precisely time jump attacks, for example. Switching abilities is very slow.
-The game has some hidden ability power-ups, but not many, they are just hidden in random spots, and they don’t have a very big effect on the abilities.
- There are a couple glitches where re-entering a mini-boss room right after you kill it will produce a duplicate dropped item that you can’t do anything with.
Systemic issues:
-There is terrible balance in the fighting mechanics. Your main weapon is almost completely useless as you have to get hazardously close to enemies to hit them. You’ll end up using ability attacks most of the time, which are mostly slow to recharge. Of those, only two attacks (and one passive) are useful and the others you’ll rarely or never use.
-Sometimes you’ll get into a situation where you can’t avoid getting hit, but more often it’s the other way around, with fights you can totally cheese with liberal use of a single ability from an unreachable location. This makes the fights slow and boring.
-The world is pretty boring. There is a bare shell of a story about getting revenge against the monster king who killed your parents, lots of fetch quests, characters who only say a single line of dialogue, and an absolute lack of anything memorable about any of it. The enemies themselves only come in three flavors: those that slowly move toward you, those that are stationary, and those that move constantly in a simple pattern.
-There is no real challenge, only difficulty. This is due mainly to the annoyances above and the fact that enemies either die in one hit or take many, many hits.
I really wanted to like this, which is why I waited to finish it before reviewing. It feels more like a game prototype than an actual game, so I can’t recommend purchasing it.
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