hypernewbie

WORST BOSS EVER Game was ok, but whoever did the Alias boss: please resign and take another job. WORST. BOSS. EVER. Visual design is off, telegraphing is off, the fight is set in the wrong location, there's not enough information regarding what to do, chasing him at the start is so snoringly boring, heads move WAY too much, down time is WAY WAY WAY WAY too low such that when you have to reposition to hit the guy hes already back up. This fight is extremely slow paced and excruciatingly tedious. Delete that boss fight from the game and you have a 10/10 game.

Whoever designed this game: you need to take game design classes. I don't think it's anything big or major that is wrong, but one billion small things aren't adjusted quite right. I think you're trying to make a soulslike game except you don't understand it. Small things like the rules for using an item is SUPER inconsistent. Sometimes it just completely ignores your request to do so and sometimes I can't even believe you can use items in such a situation. Small things like enemy lock-on lunge when they attack. They have some sort of homing thing when they attack, as if you couldn't design the attack themselves to work properly you had to home it in. Problem with that is that it's not position dodgable, it's only dodge-button dodge-able. That literally reduces the complexity of not getting hit to a single button press. Small things like switching hollows not being instant, so you can't chain them in cool ways. I was excited to chain things together then found that you can't because it just doesn't work. Small things like enemies that just keep kiting you, as if they're designed for Halo 5. You're not master chief, don't design enemies for Master Chief's weapons and abilities, design enemies for Fury's weapons and abilities because Fury is what you are playing in Darksiders III and not Master Chief. Small things like every attack is literally the same just keep pressing X. Poor reward for landing big charge attacks, do why bother? The whip is SUPER inconsistent. I think someone should make a pop quiz who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire game on every scenario where the contestant tries to guess whether the whip will hit YES / NO in a number of situations. It will be a super fun game because whether the whip will connect at any given situation is COMPLETE NONSENSE. Other small things like ledge grab being WAY too slow for a game like this, and worst of all, enemies can attack you while you ledge grab, and you ledge grab pull up SOOO LOWWWW that enemies can attack twice to 3 times while you're grabbing up, so that you actually try NOT to ledge grab by using fire charge upwards to workaround it. More small things like HORRIBLY inconsistent crowd combat. Dark Souls with always works a consistent way every weapon in crowd combat. This game forces you to just-frame dodge, but every just-frame counter only hits 1 enemy, leaving you open to the surrounding crowd. Why isn't there a HORIZONTAL whip just counter move???? I could go on and on and on and on and on. I think game design is all the small things. I would recommend taking classes. Yes you, whoever designed the game. Go and learn.

lol I think they got too carried away with the new engine that they forgot to make the actual game. Calm down guys.

toad gets stuck on ice level. actually toad in general is just buggy as hell.

Waste of time. Just play Dark Souls for 8 more hours. Tip to indie action developers: reward better but less dodges. Reward skilled risk play rather than safer play. Reward fast fingers not exploitable tricks. Enemies and bosses are wayyyy to fast compared to player. I want to heal while shooting while healing while mending I want to do everything at the same time. I can't you can only do 1 action at a time and it takes blooody years. I mean by the time the player drinks a potion I might as well have read a shakespeare play. Bosses have the same problem a lot of indie bosses have: they're dodge DDR bosses. Dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge dodge 1 single attack wheel another 50 hours of dodging until it's safe to attack again. No don't do this, because then you literally BORE the player to death. Make bosses pacing slower and reward good dodges not reward more dodges by allowing consistent in-between attack strategies. If boss does X and my only option is to press the dodge button, remove X from the game and redesign go back to the drawing board. Many indie actions have this problem, so shouldn't be too hard to HSD alone. Fix it and improve this is not good enough.

Too many things that explode for no reason. Stop making things that explode. No explode bad game designer bad naughty naughty naughty. SERIOUSLY STOP MAKING RANDOM EVERYTHING EVER THAT EXPLODES ALL THE TIME EXPLODE BOOM EXPLODE EVERYTHING EXPLODE it makes for a horrifying bland gaming experience

It's OK. Biggest problem is controls. Entire control scheme completely ****, to a level of unacceptable professionalism. I see even seasoned players accidentally dashing when they didn't mean to all the time.

Just play more devil may cry for the 8 hours you would've spent playing this game. Thank me later. You're welcome. It really tries hard to be an action hack and slash game in the style of capcom, but the designers don't actually understand what makes the Capcom hash and slashes actually good. They added the part where you need skill to play, but forgot to include the part where you actually WANT to play. The controls are floaty as **** and don't feel good. Enemy animations are really stupidly unclear. For example, look at DMC3 Cerebus. Cerebus paws draw back for horizontal swipe, raise vertically before vertical smash. Cerebus dog head shakes and sits back before launching forward, and roars before ice comes down. This makes visual sense. For a player that hasn't seem something before, the animations here have so few keyframes that the only way to know what to do is if you've seen that attack before. In which case the animation and art is LITERALLY not doing its job. Another key problem with this game is the fundamental misunderstanding of design here with regards to flow. A lot of the time there's choice for how to deal with every attack. Eg. in DMC3 there's a safe approach, a less safe action, and super just-frame action using some bit of some move that lets you do more damage, for EVERY single move. Here what the designers did is like a scissors paper rock approach. Boss does thing, the ONLY thing you can do is this. Boss does this, here's my exact counter. Boss does this, the ONLY thing I can do is this. There's very very little choice. This is like an open world game where the open world is just one linear tunnel, like a narrative choice game with only 1 choice, like an RPG game with only 1 linear skill tree. The whole POINT of these games is so you have a whole kit of choices to deal with each attack. If the designer is reading this review, run this algorithm over your entire game: For i = every boss in this game: For j = every attack the boss can possibly do: For k = every button on the gamepad If you can't use button K to effectively deal with action j of boss i: Add a possibility for button K to effectively deal with action j of boss i to the game You will find that for every J there's pretty much just one corresponding K that's actually effective. This is your problem. This is why Dark Souls is making hundreds of millions and you are still indie. Please fix this and I hope you make hundreds of millions.

Just play more devil may cry for the 8 hours you would've spent playing this game. Thank me later. You're welcome. It really tries hard to be an action hack and slash game in the style of capcom, but the designers don't actually understand what makes the Capcom hash and slashes actually good. They added the part where you need skill to play, but forgot to include the part where you actually WANT to play. The controls are floaty as **** and don't feel good. Enemy animations are really stupidly unclear. For example, look at DMC3 Cerebus. Cerebus paws draw back for horizontal swipe, raise vertically before vertical smash. Cerebus dog head shakes and sits back before launching forward, and roars before ice comes down. This makes visual sense. For a player that hasn't seem something before, the animations here have so few keyframes that the only way to know what to do is if you've seen that attack before. In which case the animation and art is LITERALLY not doing its job. Another key problem with this game is the fundamental misunderstanding of design here with regards to flow. A lot of the time there's choice for how to deal with every attack. Eg. in DMC3 there's a safe approach, a less safe action, and super just-frame action using some bit of some move that lets you do more damage, for EVERY single move. Here what the designers did is like a scissors paper rock approach. Boss does thing, the ONLY thing you can do is this. Boss does this, here's my exact counter. Boss does this, the ONLY thing I can do is this. There's very very little choice. This is like an open world game where the open world is just one linear tunnel, like a narrative choice game with only 1 choice, like an RPG game with only 1 linear skill tree. The whole POINT of these games is so you have a whole kit of choices to deal with each attack. If the designer is reading this review, run this algorithm over your entire game: For i = every boss in this game: For j = every attack the boss can possibly do: For k = every button on the gamepad If you can't use button K to effectively deal with action j of boss i: Add a possibility for button K to effectively deal with action j of boss i to the game

Don't play hard mode. I image the game is OK on normal. On hard mode, everything has WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much HP. TOO. MUCH. HP. It's not difficult, but very very tedious. By the time I grind down a boss, I would have grandchildren.

Game could be much better adapted for this platform. This port was made in haste without thinking too much about how it will actually work. The controls are way too momentum based and slidey. This might have been ok on PC where you can rapidly tap left / right, but on the switch stick it's like mario ice level for every level. I aim to A+ most dark levels (and have almost every dark level A+-ed) so I use the run button a lot. The problem is the run button on switch is in an awkward place to hold; especially in handheld mode. A toggle option for run will save a lot of people a lot of RSI. By far the worst mechanics in the game are: 1. Fans - finnicky 2. Falling off ledges vertically - you sort of run off a ledge and 1 of 3 things can happen randomly, and you just pray it's the right one. 3. Sticky wall grab. The wall grab is WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too sticky. Holding the opposite direction while wallgrabbing should let go way faster than it currently does. Most light levels are a pleasure to play. This is probably where all the positive reviews come from. I find that many dark levels are horribly designed. I have no problem with hard levels, especially if they're fun. I have many dark level top 10s scores on Switch. I do have a problem with hard levels that just aren't fun. Hard for the sake of being hard is freaking stupid. A good number of dark levels are hard in a very finicky way and just don't feel good to play. The port has also been kind of buggy for me. I had one time where the game just won't save my progress no matter what, after an update. A few system restarts fixed the issue. There's also one of the worm dark levels that can have a worm appear on the floor, rendering your run impossible. Audio hitches. A lot of wierd 0.02 second scoreboard scores. I think some attention could also be paid to the colors; some dark world levels are just too dark for a Nintendo Switch handheld screen, esp outdoors, even at max brightness.

I think I know why I have such a problem with the game's controls. The game's concept is fine, but the actual control scheme is terrible. There's some sort of constraint system here where it auto tries to place the snake head in a valid state, but the problem is that the input is only a "suggestion" of sorts. For example, if you do some stuff and then suddenly let go of all controls, depending on what the environment is the snake head can go forwards, backwards, down, down and swing around, down and not swing around, up and swing clockwise, up and swing counter clockwise. Basically ANYTHING can happen depending on context. This means 95% of the game is about learning how the auto-constraint system will solve for the snake's animation at any given environment state and relative camera position, rather than actually learning how the snake moves. This is a boring thing to learn, very un-fun. Learning how to move a snake is fun, learning how to work around a COMPLETELY broken and buggy mess of a rope constraint animation system is not. This game is 5% former, 95% latter.

The fact that this is actually game of the year reflects the sad, sad, sad state of the games industry, its a bloody joke. I agree that this should be game of the year, but the game of the year scores 0. The combat is **** complete nonsense. Swords don't work that way. 1v1 or 1v3 is pretty fun, and it looks like the entire kit is built around dispatching 3-4 groups of enemies. When do you EVER fight 3-4 groups of enemies in the game? 1% of the time. Almost never. It takes bloody ages to pick up your powerup in power struggles, and you have to do it or else 5000000000000000 other captains just happen to drive by. I've started a power struggle that went for 50 minutes straight because enemy captains just kept pouring in endlessly and endlessly and endlessly surrounded by more guys than dynasty warriors. I JUST WANT TO PICK UP MY DAMN LOOT FROM THE COUNTLESS I KILLED, GOD DAMN STOP SENDING IN ENEMIES. It's a set of finely combat mechanics that doesn't bloody work with each other. It's like someone made a very good car chassis and a very good engine but the engine has no hope of ever fitting in the chassis, so they just glued the two together. This is bad game design.

Worst checkpoints in gaming history. Get whoever did the checkpoint saves for this game, and get rid of them to save the company, and make sure they don't work in the games industry ever again.

Combat is a bit incoherent, and perf is crappy without mods. With some mods to fix performance it runs beautifully. The weakest point is how the game balances combat. Really, really badly. Not enough AP points, AP is weak as hell, and shooting ****, too bullet spongey to be a real action game yet resource management is tedious as hell. I gave up, gave myself 50000 bullets, set difficulty to very easy, plowed through the game at record speed and just imagined I was playing call of duty.

Pretty good retro. The start was REALLY REALLY rocky and almost put me off. I would rework the beginning part. Start would score 0 / 10. Rest of the actual game is great, metroidvia game feel to it.

Pretty good. Graphically I expected more for 30FPS, and some aspects aren't actually as good as the original was, but still pretty good. Would hope for some PS3 ratchet and clank remasters of this level of quality. Either that or a real PS4 ratchet and clank.

Gameplay is not that good but nothing actually offensive. Every time I felt the game was being stupid with difficulty spikes, its always been my own fault for not noticing something. Remaster is pretty good and writing is top notch. Graphics **** for PS4 but is good enough, and it does run 60.

Graphics, perf, story, execution is all pretty good. Audio ...etc also very good. 10/10 each. -100/10 for gameplay. Guerilla games always has this problem. They have no **** idea how to actually create gameplay that actually plays like a game. All the mechanics just don't work. Please for god's sake, hire a real senior game designer. Whoever designed the gun and mechanics balancing, fire them, hire a 13 year old who will design better gameplay and balance. The gunplay just doesn't acyually work. Reload is too slow, all the actions are too slow. Hacking is too slow Echo marking is too slow even commanding your bot is too slow. Throwing a grenade is too slow. Climbing ladders is too slow jumping over a ledge animation is too slow melee animation is too slow stealth kills are too slow ADS is too slow reviving using adrenaline is too slow jumping is too slow landing is too slow dealing with soldier enemies is too slow killing enemies is too slow replacing your gun is too slow picking up adrenaline is too slow. Get every single player action, literally QUADRIPLE the animation speed, then we'll talk. For reference of good gunplay, look at Vanquish, Call of Duty, Battlefield ...etc. That is good gunplay. You are not good gunplay. Aspire to be good gunplay. You can't prone, and all the cover designed in this game so that it's actually better *NOT* to use the cover, because all the cover in the game is too low. Again you can't prone, you can't actually COVER yourself from being shot because your crouch height is so high and cover is so low. In other words the cover doesn't actually COVER anything. Stealth mechanics are nonfunctional.

Graphics, sound, all ok. Setting and story isn't that bad, writing is ok. I have a good PC so no perf problems (though a bit slow admittedly). My problem is that I feel this stealth has been designed to punish stealth gameplay. It tells you to stealth, then gives you no f*cking tools to actually do it. I guess this is as much of a stealth game as like, call of duty. In fact forget it, call of duty actually has more stealth mechanics than this. Robots, enemy positioning, patrol routes, skills, upgrades, runes ....etc are all specifically made to make stealth not actually work. The gun ho approach is more fun and better, except there's better gun ho games out there. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Tries to be action game and is designed specifically to tell you to stealth. Tries to be a stealth game except everything is designed to make stealth not actually work with no gameplay or tools at your disposal to actually stealth. One glaring example is the robots. On a stealth playthrough, what do you do to robots? Avoid them? Patrol routes designed specifically make them specifically unavoidable. Stealth kill them? Mechanics make that specifically impossible to do or take way too many resources. Kill them? That will raise alarms and ruin the usefulness of your stealth style upgrade investments, so in fact they're not that easy to kill with no upgrades. The last game suffered from the same problem, but it's MUCH MUCH more glaringly worse this time. They need to fire their entire gameplay design team and hire one that can actually design a stealth action game. The old design team can come help us make more call of duty titles.

When a boss is fine for an entire fight, then 1HKO combos your entire team from complete full HP, that's when you know your RPG has done **** it up. Give up, go home, lose job, go homeless, get on the dole, you're done. It's over. Life is over. Please go out of business, RPG Factory. Oh wait, you are. Cool, everything is fine all is normal.

Graphics, audio, storyline, setting, writing, dialogue are all 10/10 across the board. Combat is complete trash and scores -100 points. I can't give a negative score on metacritic so 0 it is. The game is breathtakingly awesome until you actually try to PLAY the game. Bullet sponge enemies. Insanely **** camera. The camera is your enemy. I would say the final boss of the game can just be changed to the camera. You just fight the camera for 5 hours straight and if you win over the camera you win the game and credits roll. All of Aloy's actions are just too f*cking SLOW. Shooting is slow reloading is slow loading extra arrows is slow running is slow dodging is slow stop running is slow walking is slow sprinting is slow swimming is slow switching weapons is slow crafting ammo is slow taking aim is slow drinking health potions is slow fighting camera to see your opponent is slow switching into focus is slow switching out of focus is slow using focus is slow moving while in focus is slow finding stuff to highlight using focus is slow sneaking is slow sliding is slow coming out of slide is slow jumping is slow landing is slow light attack is too slow heavy attack is too slow tripcasting is slow ropecasting is too slow. I think you get the point. Rocksmashers can literally dig themselves out of the ground, attack and go back down in the same time you take to drink 1 potion. That says something about how ridiculously slow Aloy is in this game. I would argue this could classify as a turn based strategy game or maybe turn based card game like heartstone. For good camera and combat please refer to Vanguard or Devil May Cry. That is good combat. This is not good combat. Aspire to be good combat.

It's like an action game except it is terrible at being one. It's also a turn based game except it's terrible at being one. It's an atmospheric game except it's terrible at being one. This game manages to be consistent levels of terrible at everything it tries to do at the same time, and that takes some real talent and effort to achieve.

Fighting is pretty good. The jumping puzzle completely make this game unplayable. These timed jumping puzzle sequences are like trying to thread sow while blind, you just poke your fingers with the needle over and over again. I feel like this should be renamed to Plague of the **** Jumping Puzzles Because Why The **** Not. Especially bad is the starting burst ability, that needs to just get deleted from the game. Even time it goes off you might as well be playing pinball.

High school game designer finds a unity programmer and a very good artist. Game design is extremely poor. Too much unnecessary resource management that doesn't really add much, mechanics are not that coherent, and I swear the entire game's AI uses the following one line of code: vec3 findNextMovementPos(vec3 player) { return rotate2D(normalize(this->pos - player) * randrange(10, 20)), randrange(-0.3, 0.3)); } I serious cannot find a non-stationary enemy that doesn't use that movement. Stanford AI course. Behaviour trees. Learn it. AI blandness aside, the biggest problem here is very incoherent game mechanics, which is very bad game design. Examples: 1. Why does blaster have a cooldown? What purpose does it possibly serve other than just slow down gameplay? 2. Why does player have to actually go pick up energy crystals? Why does energy crystals disappear so fast? If the player has to go pick up energy crystals, then why design literally EVERY enemy in the game to not facilitate that in a interesting way? The only way to reliably go pick up crystals fast is energy shield and probably dash out. That is a one trick move, one and only option players can take, which is bland and boring. 3. If dash and mobility is a core mechanic, then why do they not work on environment hazards or bullets? If you're going to make dashing not work on bullets, then there needs to be a good way to play around that limitation. Examples of adding mechanics so players can play around that limitation is telegraphing of shots (nope, not in the game), clear visual distinction of shots (nope, not in the game) and/or directly affecting the shots (only possible with energy shield). I would telegraph shooting enemies + make bullets more visible + make laser weapon also kill bullets. 4. If left / right horizontal shooting is a main mechanic, then why does LITERALLY every single enemy in the game move in a zigzag line towards you? This creates no interesting interactions whatsoever. I would add enemies that do vertical things (shoot lazers but only up/ down), enemies that only do left/right **** to make interesting use of the left/right horizontal only shooting mechanic. 5. If the game mechanics revolve around not getting hit even once, then why are missiles so freaking unreliable??? I fire missiles in general direction of stuff and hope 1 (one) (ONE) of the enemies doesn't seep through or I have to mash the energy shield button ASAP and hope things work out. Not very coherent mechanic. And many many more examples of completely incoherent mechanics. Art and music are amazing. Give whoever worked on that a thumbs up. Could go into detail about how I think art and music are amazing, but going to eave the negative details here instead in the hopes of being constructive. Please imagine I wrote 2000 more words about the good points of this game, ie. presentation art and music. Too bad as a player I'm playing the gameplay, im not playing the sound or visual assets.

I think it's a bit overrated. Game has some flows. The physics puzzles are nothing special, sometimes clever. I feel like they did run out of ideas pretty quickly, and some ideas were never developed.

Sort of okay-ish walking simulator. Story is okay, don't dig the horror nor the characters. None of the characters are that likable. Worst part is the house bit near the end.

Overall fantastic game. Simplified Splinter Cell in 2D. 2 main issues: too many context sensitive buttons, sometimes gets it wrong. and sometimes fuzzy mechanics fuzzy mechanics in a game demanding precision = random trial and error gameplay.

Singleplayer was sort of a mass effect wannabe. The Jackal missions are the worst **** ever, flying doesn't work that way whether on earth or on space please stop with this star wars X-wing bullcrap it makes for a good MOVIE it makes for a **** GAME. Last time I checked, this product is not a movie, so don't do the X-wing thing don't do it no no don't! Reasons for this include: 1. There's not a lot of play or counterplay, it whizzes by too fast to fly so when you lock on the game needs to autopilot. 2. This means that it always feels like the AI is letting you win. 3. Very slow gameplay to start with, as regen mechanic + already in space which is slow to start with + get chased by enemy means you have to boost out of there and escape. This makes the whole flying game way too slow. 4. Rockets --> flares??? I guess the non-ace enemies aren't trained to hit the flare button on their spaceship??? Again feels like AI is letting you win. 5. The whole Xwing spaceship thing is too fudgey and simple to have hold deep game on its own. Successful games with this arcade flying style usually introduce arcade-style mechanics like dashing, pickups, special **** to pile on the meaningful mechanics. Too bad powerups and whatnot would break the CoD semi-realistic setting. Gun sections are actually okay, especially the stealth sections. Non-linear stealth sections are far the best parts as they make you feel like spec ops, and the checkpoint isn't too far behind, and there was decent amount of variation. The space corridor shooting parts are the worst, there's just not much gameplay there, why not just delete them and let the player walk right through! On veteran the AI kills you way too fast for any movement skills to be useful. I would have liked for the AI to shoot a lot less accurately when you are moving, to actually allow for some action gameplay. The robot sections where you fire rockets at some walking bot thing and then jump on its head to quicktime are ridiculously bad. Whoever thought that was a remotely good game design idea? 1. Running around looking for rockets is boring as hell. 2. Running around waiting for rocket respawn is even more boring. 3. The robot's rockets randomly kill you randomly when you are running around according to pure RNG. 4. As you are jumping on its head, enemy AI can kill you and its other gun can still shoot you. On veteran+ difficulty levels the AI kills you way too fast to warrant risking the head jumping. 5. It's better to just wait for rocket respawn then kill the robot with a robot. 6. If you die for any random reason whatsoever you have to do the entire robot fight all over again. The space shooting sections are also ridiculously bad. 1. Movement is severely impaired, drastically slowing down the pacing of the game. 2. You can't find cover fast enough on Veteran difficulty from the enemy AI before they kill you with 2 shots. You have to play the cover game. 3. Enemies can't do anything about me shooting them either, not like they can find cover fast enough. It feels dumb just shooting at dumb floating bodies just being shot at, might as well replace them with crates to shoot at. Actually no, crates would probably be more interesting to shoot at in space. 4. Most grenades and close range things non-effective. 5. Q to grapple to any surface is usually a bad idea, because AI will literally kill you mid-grapple in singleplayer. 6. Q to grapple to an enemy is an even worse idea. Their friends kill you mid-animation as you are meleeing your victim. It's space so you can't run to cover fast enough. It's space so you don't have a shield to save yourself.

Return to form, as an indie. This is great for a metroidvania even without the whole nostalgia part. The save points are great, especially the quick "retry" option. For a game that's about trying to not ever taking a single point of damage ever, the quick "retry" really makes life a hell of a lot easier than walking up to push the NES reset button! The sound design is definitely the weakest part of this reboot. The NES Blaster Master had way better sound, weapons sounded powerful. The music is okay, just sound FX are terrible! Plays amazingly well with the switch, can't ask for more.

Anyone who reviews this game 10 should immediately go get an actual NES and play actual good oldschool games. The shovel knight just feels like **** to control, very clunkey, especially mid-air. The stairs just make no sense in this game, at all. You will die on nearly every staircase in the game. Level cycles are too random to be memorized. Enemies are RNG galore and always feel like they move faster than you giving you no time to react, UNLESS you wait for them. There aren't enough checkpoints. Should I mention the **** feel of the control again? Shovel knight controls like a rock. Just go outside, pick up a really big rock and move that around, and you will get the general feel of moving shovel knight through the levels. Game isn't bad, it's okay. The presentation is the best part of it, oldschool gfx are well done, especially the animations, they are amazing. Music is great too. They got so carried away with the presentation that they forgot to like, actually make the game.

Game is not designed well. Too many factors outside of your control, default control scheme is terrible, camera Fx are a little over the top, the boosting mechanic really reduces the game to a game of turbo management, and that is really boring. Cars are way too slidey, bumping into the edge is too bouncey, bumping into other cars mechanic is freaking dumb and also boring. Strafing is WAY too slidey and hard to control. By far the worst is the track design. There's just no way to know what's coming up; there is no reactionary play possible whatsoever. Doing any action at any stage without memorising the next stage of the level blindfolded is instant crash and/or lose. Boost at wrong time, make the wrong turn, not remembering where boost orbs are, forgetting where one single the coloured boosts is ...etc is instant lose / crash. The visuals go by way too fast with no telegraphing whatsoever + **** camera code = the only way to remotely get good at the game is to memorise the level completely (which I did, and it worked!). That is boring, that is not a good racing game. It's really hard to even find a good control config, with having to switch + accel. Why isn't accelerate "up" down "down" on the dpad / stick?? Why can't I *bind* it to up and down on dpad / stick? IF I can bind accelerate to up, then I can leave the thumb for boost / switch and LR for strafe. Too bad I can't do that! Why does motion control bind to TURN? That's freaking useless! I want motion control to *strafe* so I can *turn* with my stick without using shoulders! Visuals are good, runs smooth and sound / music is good. They should have actually playtested their game before shipping it.