chewy6982

This is a metroidvania type game that frankly does not deserve to be called that term. Metroid and castlvania were much more fun to play and way better designed. Those are fighting, RPG, and exploring games. This is a timed jump and running platform game more than a fighting game. So unless you like doing that teenage mutant ninja turtles electric death water scene over and over a billion times over then this game is not for you, becuase thats what doing those stupid jump timed puzzles felt like. Everything in this game is pretty great (including the fighting and rpg leveling) except for one thing that totally brings it down: the platforming. You can't ignore the platforming unfortunately, its required and even focused on. The controls for it feel so terrible, wall jumping and double jumping isn't made easy at all, and it is not satisfying like in metroid or castlevania, instead you just pray for luck and feel stress and frustration relief when its completed instead of satisfaction. Everything you do will require timed jumps, you have to do puzzles that are literally timed and jump all around avoiding the slightest hit or you have to do it all over again. 1 battle? next scene is timed jump platform that may take an hour to complete, just jumping. boss scene? another jump puzzle. Getting a special item? more jump timed puzzles. Backtracking? more jumped timed puzzles. Going to the village? more jump and running timed puzzles. You will spend 10 times more of your time just running and doing frustrating timed jumps than fighting, and fighting is the fun part of the game, platforming is boring, repetitive, and frustrating. Making it much worse is the fact that you can't avoid it, it makes it 10x more aggravating to backtrack since you do need to backtrack to find new items and discover new areas, and you won't know if you are failing because of your skill, the fact the controls ****, or that you don't have an item that will give you that one second of extra quickness to complete the timed jumping and running puzzle. I absolutely hated that portion of the game, and i realized 90% of the game is trying to hit a button, run and jump without getting hit by any enemies or obstacles, and reaching the end location before the time limit is up with an absurdly low tolerance of delay. That is most of the game and it kind of **** because it could easily have been a masterpiece if that part of the game was just eliminated and added just more game features to it, creatures and items. Metroid and castlevania did it much better, and focused on the items that gave clear abilities to clearly reach unaccessible areas before. Flying bat/cloud, double space jump, small sticky space ball.. so much more simple yet it totally worked and all cool, instead Valdis used timed jump puzzles and total crap spell upgrades to make these items accessible, so much more frustrating and less satisfying. When will you game designers learn timed quests and tasks never add to the fun?