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• gamedeal user

  Aug 20, 2021

  Ever since Metroid: Prime 3 failed to set the world on fire despite releasing on one of the world's most popular consoles, we haven't exactly been spoiled when it comes to 3D Metroid-style games. Usually games that traditionally would've been considered a Metroidvania fall into soulslike trappings, forgoing the thrills of exploration and instead opting to make users partake in difficult and punishing combat. Not Recompile, though. There's not an ounce of soulslikeness found in this game. But it's also not as much of a Metroidvania as you might expect or wish for. After an underwhelming first 20 minutes you find yourself in a hub area that leads to 4 different biomes as well as a final area that you unlock once you finish the 4 respective bosses. Now, you can tackle these biomes in mostly any order you see fit, but to progress you will need certain abilities (i.e. you can't reach the yellow area without double jump, and you can't get very far at all in the blue area without a certain ability I don't want to spoil.) You can sometimes make headway in some areas even if you play them out of the correct order, but if you forgo certain abilities it will be punishingly hard. This game puts a heavy focus on exploration and platforming, which is about what makes up 80% of my time played. The combat, when it does happen, is generally enjoyable. You get a fairly standard assortment of guns (just with topical names, such as the rocket launcher, which this game cheekily calls the BSoD), that all feel really good and are satisfying to use, making enemies set off a barrage of particle effects upon their death. My main complaints about the game have to do with the level design: you travel between biomes with teleporters, making the world feel more like a series of levels rather than an intricate and interconnected web. Also once you're actually in one of these levels, it can be hard to tell where to go, as some of the areas the game asks you to traverse would barely register as a path in other games. There are quite sudden difficulty spikes once you get to the bosses, requiring multiple tries and adjusting your strategy to defeat them. They never feel quite unfair but some one hit kills can be frustrating. Audio-visually, the game is a total stunner. The art style has been masterfully realized and the soundtrack is the best one I've heard in ages. It moves between evoking Breath of the Wild, Kraftwerk and Akira Yamaoka's works in places. Let me be clear: the presentation alone makes this game worth the price of admission. The story, which is centered around a rogue Hypervisor-AI of a space station that made everyone mad is not uninteresting but I doubt it'll be the driving force of anyone playing this game. Performance leaves a lot to be desired, on my very modern rig sporting an RTX 3070 I can barely scratch 100 fps at 1440p. Obviously it's still very playable but I do feel like I should be hitting 144 easily as the graphics in this game are quite simple when you're out of combat. I think for fans of the genre, this game is a no-brainer. It won't quite as satisfyingly scratch that itch as you would hope, but at this point most of us will take just anything for another hit of the formula.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 21, 2021

  I really wanted to like this game. Starting out, it felt super promising. Awesome style, great music, and a wonderful environment. But slowly... the cracks in the concept start showing up. The game seems to be really confused about its identity. The first bit of exploring is super interesting, but slowly, jumping from oversized, unclear, gray pentagon to oversized, unclear, gray pentagon gets old. There's nothing really interesting going on. I can't even tell what type of game this is supposed to be. There are mini logic puzzles involving gates, except that there's an ability that lets you instantly skip any of these. There's over-the-shoulder fighting against bosses/enemies, but there are abilities that make these a cake walk. There's 3D platforming, but there's an ability that lets you skip it all. Every interesting part of the game seems to not be fleshed out, and instead you get an ability that lets you just skip all future parts of it. Additionally, the abilities you unlock, some of which are effectively mandatory for progression, are occasionally hidden and it's unclear you missed them. For example, I played through a majority of the game without unlocking the map/tab menu, which is both essential to multiple other parts of the game and is how you can access the in game collectibles later. I didn't have access to this menu for a large portion of my game, making it really awkward for me. This game had some good ideas and concepts, it just feels like none of them are fleshed out. And with me completing the game (with having to backtrack through multiple areas repeatedly to find the essential ability I missed) in only 6 hours, there's just not enough to justify this purchase.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 10, 2022

  Man it's sad giving this game a negative review. If you love 3D platformers and you can put up with some crap then play it. It's got a lot of awesome things going for it. But this game has some serious problems, I highly doubt more than 1 or 2 people actually play tested it. I'm just gonna list all the issues in an arbitrary order. -[b]No Dead Zone[/b]: - I play with controller and this game has no deadzone setting for the analogue stick. This is a must imho. -[b]No Variable height Jump[/b]: - Pushing Jump always gives you the same jump arch. Devs figured this out in the 80s... or maybe before even. That one is really baffling. -[b]Mesh Colliders Everywhere[/b]: - Pretty much all geometry in this game shamelessly uses mesh colliders, which is ridiculous. It wastes performance and makes it frustrating to platform. Little details on the floor forcing you to jump over with that ridiculous jump arch. Makes it feel like platforming was an afterthought entirely. The amount of gaps in the ground you can fall through... you wait for the elevators and fall down the shaft trying to walk onto the platform. Colliders are supposed to be slightly bigger than the mesh they're attached to to reduce these issues. Especially the thin pipes to platform on are a complete disaster. -[b]No Landmarks[/b]: - This game has biomes which are connected with gates which do feel different enough which is nice. But you need points of interest to get people invested into the levels. Things you see in the distance that you naturally want to check out. But hardly anything in the distance looks worth to check out. Things look so samey I often times forget what direction I even came from. -[b]Combat vs Platforming[/b]: - There's nothing wrong making 2 games in 1. You can totally pull off a 3rd person shooter that turns into a 3D platformer at times (or vice versa). But the shooter part is strange, you can't really run while aiming, and there's often times no cover to abuse vs enemies. So if you want to aim you kinda have to tank shots. Why can't you just shoot without aiming? It's strange and I don't see how this is meant to be played. I pretty much just run from enemies and hope for the best. If they are far enough away I snipe them. -[b]Text Box Disaster[/b]: - They only sometimes allow you to skip forward. If you're a fast reader this will drive you crazy. Especially if you're in the middle of a fight and about to die and you get a text box you have to get through before that last shot kills you. Some text boxes even trigger multiple times if you revisit an area for some reason and you have to get through them again. -[b]Back Tracking[/b]: - You gotta keep in mind that this game is a metroidvaniaish game. But there are some rather unforgiving moments where you manage to reach an area only to find out you can't proceed further without an upgrade or something. Then you have to backtrack the whole thing carefully. This would be fine if the platforming was better. But it is what it is and it just feels bad, like getting punished for exploring. But this game has many [b]positives[/b] too. It's creative, it's artsy, the glitch effects are awesome, the sfx are snappy and feel great, destruction physics is cool, the enemies are well designed (tho the combat is disastrous), the universe is interesting tho the way it's presented makes it hard to engage with. I really wish this game was better.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 1, 2022

  I love the aesthetic and concept. But.... I've often wondered why developers put so much effort into creating a game, only to screw it by messing up on what is arguably the EASIEST things to fix or adjust. So for example, you could have spent 2+ years building assets, graphical effects, Level environments, manually crafting behaviour, continuity, coding, whatever... then at the end you simply decide NOT to play through it and patch out stupid things that could be fixed in a fraction of the time it took to build them. Like terrible gunplay in a game that requires you to shoot things. Like level areas that make no sense in a game that requires exploration. Like infuriating camera handling delays in a 3rd person game. Like falling arbitrarily killing you in a game that requires you to fall a lot. (why let me in an area if the only way out is to fall and die because that area is "illegal" to land from?) Like the ability to miss an area with an essential upgrade. Can't recommend in current state. Its pretty, but needs a QoL update. Happy to change recommendation if levels are fixed and combat vs 4+hostiles is no longer suicidal due to bad controls.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 4, 2023

  Terrible experience. The aesthetics and story are good, but the platforming and gunplay are intolerable. The platforming is really unpleasant and relies on you getting upgrades to compensate for the bad platforming, and then you enter OKT and have to do a bunch of precision platforming on random floating platforms to the point where I'm not kidding when I say it felt like playing Bubsy 3D. The gunplay is terrible because most of your weapons are weak. The only one that does respectable damage is the BSoD weapon you get for killing the TET boss, which does splash damage to you if you fire it point blank because it's a grenade launcher. All the other weapons are completely useless. Enemies also have a bad habit of flying directly over your head, which is bad because in FPSes and games where you are in 3D and are locked to two rotational axes, the mouse controls yaw (X) and pitch (Y), so what do you think happens when you look at the camera's "north pole" and try to look left? If you guessed that you just spin in place because you'd need to turn on the roll axis, then you're absolutely right. Aiming while looking up is impossible. So why the hell are enemies floating directly above you where you can't shoot them? Stupid design. I was able to tolerate all of this until I got softlocked. I have been playing the game like a normal person, exploring everything I see and beating the boss and getting to the end before returning to the hub, and I got everything I could find. However, this wasn't enough, as I am stuck in the bottom of ICO near where that portal door is. I do not have a jetpack. The game wouldn't give it to me at the end of OKT. I don't have any hacking abilities. I can't modify logic gates despite the game giving me a hacking mode at the BEGINNING OF THE GAME. A mode I haven't been able to use once. I have over 3700 bits that I can't use, and now I'm stuck in an area that to my understanding is almost impossible to get out of if you don't have the jetpack. WHO DESIGNED THIS? Technically it's not a true softlock as I could theoretically get out if I put a tremendous amount of effort doing extremely difficult and tricky platforming, according to one person in the thread who barely managed to escape the cave, but like hell I'm going to put that much effort into getting out when I don't even know how to progress. Let's imagine that I actually do it. What then? ICO was the last area and my last lead. I was supposed to finish this area and then finish the game. I still don't have any of the hacking abilities like this elusive ability to change logic gates that I've somehow gone the whole game without finding (recall that the game gave me recompile mode at the very beginning and I have had no ability to actually use said mode for the entire game). The ability that I need in order to get the jetpack and open the gate that I'm currently stuck at. If I can somehow get to the gate way out in the boonies that leads to the final boss, I might be able to finish the game, but I already saw someone doing it in a speedrun and just don't care enough to do it myself given that I've just gotten softlocked. To make matters worse, in the thread where other people were complaining about getting stuck in ICO, the devs said they would look into fixing it. This was two years ago. Fuck this game. I quit.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 21, 2021

  The visuals are amazing, the story is amazing, the writing is amazing, the gameplay is... very tedious. I was disappointed with the label Metroidvania, as most of the game is very linear with the exception of a gated boss fight and a few late-game levels. There is combat, but it's infrequent and annoying (can't aim above you, but many enemies fly). So what genre is it? To me it's somewhere between: - Zaktronics-like: the puzzles are about tracing logic gates -- think AND/OR/XOR/etc -- which I actually found fun, but I there's no in-game tutorial if you don't already understand digital logic. - Kaizo Mario-lite: At least 75% of the game is about precision platforming, often to blocks which often aren't fully revealed until you're close to landing. The platforming is particularly bad in OKC: many platforms are only 2x as wide as your hitbox and require double-jump-dashes from very specific spots to reach, which are only somewhat helped by an optional upgrade. If you miss a platform, you watch the character fall for 10 seconds and are sent back several platforms, and sent back even further after 10 deaths. I wondered if it was just me, but you can already find videos of people dying for 10min on a jump. And at the time of writing, the movement controls cut out every few seconds (I've tried two mice, two keyboards, and a controller and they all have this problem), which made the precise platforming of OKC unplayable and I had to edit the save file to progress. If you like precise 3D platformers this is your game! If you're really into games I think it's still worth playing to see how good the writing/music/graphics are. But otherwise the gameplay was disappointing.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 23, 2021

  I was super excited for this game when I started seeing posts on Reddit about a year back. I added it to my wishlist and immediately bought the game the day it came out. Unfortunately, Recompile didn't really live up to my expectations. PROS: - Atmosphere is awesome. - Story has that "Dark Souls"-like way of being told. You don't have to look at text files at all and just get straight to gameplay. - Metroid-like upgrade system is good when it comes to movement upgrades. CONS: - Platforming was frustrating at parts. Especially in the Yellow Room. - Combat is odd. You can only shoot when aiming down the sights and that slows you to a crawl when a majority of enemies either rush you or have rapid fire weapons. You do get a matrix-like slow down upgrade, but without that, combat would have been even more frustrating than it was. - If you skip story and just focus on gameplay, there isn't a whole lot. - No post-game content (as far as I know). I finished the game in under 7 hours and I would have been happy with a Survival Mode or something to keep me in the game. - Gun upgrades seem useless. Once you get the grenade launcher, you might as well forget the other guns exist. 2 of the 5 are machine guns and one is a laser that's so slow to use, you'd be dead before you got a shot off. - Hacking is almost useless. You can get through most of the game without it and I think there are only 3 instances where it was needed. Overall, it was a good distraction and I enjoyed it despite the frustrations, but I could not recommend this game to anyone. With that being said, it does look like the devs are gonna keep working on it and I'm excited for what they come up with.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 21, 2022

  I feel really bad about this. I REALLY wanted to like this game. I love the premise, and I love Metroidvania games, so when I saw this on Steam I was instantly sold. But after forcing myself through a couple of play sessions I realized that I just wasn't having fun. This game has so much potential to be truly great, but before that can happen, there are a lot of things that need to change: 1. it's hard to tell where the "intended" path is. Everything in this game has collision. EVERYTHING. Not only does this lead to really janky platforming, but it's hard to tell what parts of the environment are things I'm intended to walk on and which parts are decoration. This lead me to a lot of dead ends which I'm not really sure if I was supposed to come back to later or not. And speaking of decoration... 2. the glitchy polygons effect is just bad. The first time I played I actually thought my game was bugged. Only when you walk close to the object that the polygons make up do they return to normal. The problem is, sometimes these objects are platforms that you're required to walk on, meaning it's impossible to figure out where to go from a distance, or in some cases, even see where you're jumping to. Plus, it obstructs your view, and just generally looks ugly imo. I get what the creators were going for, making the inside of the computer look broken and decrepit, but there are much better ways of conveying that through art rather than slapping the effect on random objects. Personally I think this should be removed from the game altogether, although at the very least there should be an option in the settings to turn it off. 3. the map is stylish, but useless. I love the ascii art aesthetic, but representing a 3D environment on a 2D map really doesn't work well. I can't tell what's ground and what isn't, what direction I'm facing, how high an upgrade or gateway is relative to me, etc. Metroidvanias with bad map systems generally suffer for it (for example, Metroid and Metroid II), and unless there's a map upgrade later into the game that I don't know about, this game just isn't very intuitive or fun to navigate. 4. it isn't obvious which paths are opened by which upgrades. Sorry to keep going back to Metroid, but in that game, when you reach a dead end, the game makes it very obvious that you need something to go further, even if you don't know yet what that is. Then, when you get the upgrade, you immediately know that you can come back and keep going. I've gotten several upgrades for this game that, despite telling me what they're for, I don't know where in the game I'm supposed to be using them. That, combined with the fact that navigation is generally annoying, doesn't make it super fun to backtrack and figure out where you're now able to go, not to mention intended to go. 5. save points aren't easy to identify. They're specific floor shaped objects that often times are made to blend into the environment, and I usually didn't know I was stepping on one until the game told me it had saved. It also shows save points on the map but... well, that's not helpful either. Maybe something that makes save points more obvious would help. 6. the logic gate puzzles aren't a great idea. The early logic gate puzzles are cool and help people to learn how logic gates work. But as a computer engineer whose job is basically to work with logic gates all day, I can say that the later ones I've seen are ridiculously complicated. There's an upgrade that allows you to change a logic gate to another one, but doing that requires a currency/drop that you only get from enemies, which are few and far between. So your two options are: pull out a piece of paper and use your specialized college degree to decipher the logic gate puzzle, or grind enemies for points. Both of which seem to lead to about 30 minutes of anti-fun. Maybe for younger players, or players with different career paths, changing the logic gate puzzles to something easier for everyone to understand might be better. 7. enemies can hit you from REALLY far away. Most enemies in video games have an agro range, but not these, these enemies will snipe you from across the entire map. And since the firing sound drops off with distance, there's often absolutely no indication that you're being shot at until you've been hit. And good luck getting that health back, because the only way to recover health (other than at specific spots or getting an upgrade) is to kill an enemy and collect its drops. Since enemies can hit you from areas you can't access yet, that usually means if you get sniped, that damage is going to be somewhat permanent. Making these enemies only engage at a much closer range would help a lot with this. I know a lot of things about this game can't just be "fixed", but this is my honest review of my experience with this game so far. I hope this game can become something better in the future, and I really hope it does well, but for now I unfortunately can't recommend this game.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 21, 2021

  In my 7.2 hours I was able to get 100% of the achievements, so this review is my complete perspective on the game as I don't see myself replaying it. TLDR: The game has a lot of good and a lot of bad, so it's hard to fully support. Even still, I enjoyed my time with it. The Good: - The game is absolutely stunning to look at, easily one of the prettiest games I've played - The music is very good in a Hyper Light Drifter kind of way. Very understated, but always perfect for the mood - The logs are actually interesting to read. 99% of video game logs I collect without ever actually looking at, but I was engaged with the majority of them here. I especially enjoyed any of the logs involving Saffhi. - The three above points mean that this game is one of my absolute favorites for world building and atmosphere, laying alongside Metro 2033 - The game is short enough to fit in two dedicated sittings, but long enough that it doesn't feel like a waste of money - Once you have more upgrades, the exploration feels very good overall - This is the probably best map in any game I've ever played The Bad: - When you don't have all the upgrades, the platforming can feel extremely imprecise. This is common with 3D platformers, but it was especially annoying in the levels where you would fall for a good 30 seconds before being reset. - These resets frequently made absolutely no sense on where they placed you, often times feeling completely random - The combat is extremely poor. My biggest problem was that the mouse aiming almost felt like it was snapping on and off of the enemies, making minute movements impossible. It frequently felt like I couldn't aim at a target because it stuck on the left before jumping all the way across to the right without ever actually being over the enemy. - The boss fights were the worst part of the combat. The Cube boss and the Sphere boss are the main annoyances. 1 shot kills are rarely fun and that makes up the majority of both fights. However, the cube boss has a phase where it stops and shoots beam attacks out. The hit registry on these were completely random. There were times that I stood still and took zero damage and other times that I died in a split second. Having no idea how it worked, I simply spammed out as much damage as I could and was lucky that it died before that phase started. With the sphere boss, a similar story took place - laying out enough damage in a few seconds that I didn't have to learn the boss' mechanics. - There are certain parts that are just absolutely confusing. The big one was in the Yellow gated area, where an important pathway was locked off because I could not find the missing path. It legitimately took me an hour to figure out what to do, and I was very annoyed during that hour. Overall, I have so many problems with this game that make it highly unlikely that I will play it again in the future. Despite that, I really appreciate my time with it overall for this playthrough. It was gorgeous to look at and hear, the writing was stellar, and the gameplay had it's good moments. For the price, I'd say it is well worth experiencing this world.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 30, 2021

  This is a very, very boring game. In three hours of gameplay, I've "hacked" exactly one thing. It was a logic gate in needlessly complex "circuit" that was conveniently connected to all three outputs, and I "hacked" it by asking it nicely to invert its output! It took all of one minute, while the rest of three hours was spent: 1. Falling through random gaps in platforms, I mean name one other game that leaves a gap between an elevator and the floor around it 2. Missing my landings because the player character has no shadow to indicate where you're going to land 3. Sustaining fall damage, and often dying, because there are absolutely no depth queues in the levels 4. Watching boring unskippable ASCII animations 5. Jumping and jumping and jumping and jumping some more 6. Not hacking or recompiling anything and not engaging my brain in any way