Kwylde

I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunately, it gets a LOT wrong. It seems to be a case of lots of great ideas, talented people, and very low quality control. Almost everything in the game feels underbaked. The pixel art is undeniably beautiful. And yet, some visual choices are strange or overlooked. The "alert!" symbol that tells you where an enemy will appear on screen is a layer under any flashing red translucent lights, meaning this visual is hard to see. It should be on one of the top layers to make it visually clear. It seems like a minor thing--and it is--but the game is full of a lack of attention to detail for these sorts of things. The hand-drawn graphics that occasionally appear have a very different resolution, and look like they've been blown up to 4-5x their original size, making them look muddy, pixelated, and out of place. The lack of tutorials is awful. Sure, there are some signs for a few things, but many mechanics are just not explained well and require experimentation, damage, and death before you figure it out. A lot of the moves feel like the team went "oh this is cool!" and just added it in without thinking about how it affects the whole. For example, if you jump towards a floor from below, at the arc of your jump, your character will automatically give a little kick up that gives you a boost. This is totally unnecessary and messes up your movement flow. Many of the moves are totally useless, and the main attack mechanic (dashing into an enemy and discharging electricity) often leads to you taking collision damage. Ugh. A few times in the game, you get teleported back to the hub, which is unnecessarily large and empty and boring, and you have to work your entire way through it killing easy enemies. It's entirely pointless. On the Switch version, after I got around 3/4 of the way through the game, the game would crash every time I completed a level and loaded a new level. That was extremely annoying. I wanted to like this game. The gameplay is decent enough, but can get repetitive. The music is great and the pixel art is beautiful. It's often compared to Mega Man, but it's nothing alike. It's closer to Mega Man Zero, but with more chaotic, random design, and less consideration, care, and deliberateness. Edit: I moved the score down to 4/10 because now the game crashes after every single level, and it takes a long time to load up the game, load levels, etc. And after collecting all medals, every time I try to load the true final stage, the game crashes. Bravo.

Poor game, feels like it was designed by a pixel artist who has no concept of game design. Foreground and background elements often blend together. It's often unclear when you can use your signature grappling hook ability because these all blend together. Enemy placement and level design seems mostly random and unconsidered. Mechanics aren't explained well, even with the tutorial. It's a crime this game scored *only* 2 pts lower than Vengeful Moon Guardian, which is in the same genre and a MUCH better, much more well-designed game, released at roughly the same time. I'm pretty forgiving of bad games, but I gave this one up. Edit: I went back and played this game and was able to finish it. The first two stages are unfortunately the worst in the game, as the game does a poor job of pacing and explaining mechanics. If you can suffer through some strange design choices, especially in the second stage, you can get a better feel for the game and get some enjoyment out of it. Raised score to 6 from 4.

It's a solid 6/10 game; no more, no less. The combat is pretty fun, but the rest of the game is a mess. NMH1 and NMH2 were fun and unique in the stages that you had to play through to get to the boss. Yeah, they were a bit Dynasty Warrior-esque with how easily you could mow through most of the enemies, but that was kind of the appeal. You felt a sense of progression as you moved through these custom-built levels towards the bosses. The hub world was empty, but at least this was at a time where hub worlds generally weren't THAT full of life. It was *somewhat* excusable as a sort of tongue-in-cheek joke at the time. NMH3 is what I would call a fan disservice. It's such a blatantly lazy game. There's no attention to detail whatsoever, and it's obvious from the very first time you get the "press A button to open the beam katana" prompt. There's no fluidity whatsoever. I was never able to get it to open in a fluid motion. There was always a slight pause between Travis drawing the katana, and then pressing A to open it, where Travis kind of just stands motionless and awkwardly because the creators couldn't even get this EXTREMELY basic game-feel down right! It would be SUCH a satisfying thing to draw the katana perfectly without that obnoxious pause. And yes, this is a minor thing, but the game is PLAGUED with these "minor things" -- these relics of bad game design that most games had weeded out in the 2010s: collectables that aren't tracked, ultra rare drops that require you complete the same boss dozens of times on the hardest instakill mode to get, the same, boring battles over and over again with mobs on the same overworld map rather than purpose-built stages, a 40 minute self-indulgent cutscene sequence at the start of the game that's an absolute chore to watch, with characters we've LONG stopped caring about (or even forgotten), with terrible writing, horrible CGI, more self-indulgent "Miike is so great he's my hero" obnoxious fanboyism between each set, things that were forced into the game just because they felt like they had to be, and were then handled in the absolute worst way possible (Henry Cooldown), and a STILL-EMPTY overworld map that performs like piss in 2021. There's no excuse for it. This would've been a decent Gamecube game back in the day, but now it's a dusty, shoddy relic of a time long-forgotten.

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. But it's just a mess. The disproportionate user/professional review score leads me to believe the devs called in some favors from personal friends because there's no way this game is an 8. And there's also no way many of the professional reviewers completed this game to the end. Here's the thing: the first few worlds in the game are actually pretty fun. Difficulty is a bit all over the place, there's some obnoxious bugs and lack of polish, annoying framerate issues and hiccups inexcusable in a 2D indie platformer, but all of this is manageable. Until world 6. World 6 is where I tapped out. I tried to complete the first level, but it was just impossible. Difficulty skyrockets out of nowhere. Your timing needs to be perfect as you move through section after section with a OHKO monster on your heels. And then you have to do the same thing again, but upside down. On top of this, bugs with dashing become utterly inexcusable as timing became tighter and tighter, and correct input would still inevitably and eventually lead to a bug that results in your death (the upside down section I mentioned was particularly buggy). This section made me wonder if anyone had even played it before shipping the game, let alone testing it thoroughly and adjusting its difficulty. The game is just very unpolished. It legitimately seems like the designer hadn't played any games since the Sega Genesis era, during which time he'd subsisted entirely on playing other similarly unfair, broken, and painful platformer games like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. This game had a lot of potential, and it was all squandered. From one old school platformer lover to another: avoid this game like the plague.