moshlyfe

This game was so important to me when I was a kid, so the mere fact that it was remade/remastered for modern consoles is deserving of high marks. The game itself after all these years is clearly outdated compared to modern platformers, but it’s a charming adventure, bright and colorful, and scratches the nostalgic itch that I had for this game. It doesn’t have to be perfect—I’m just happy that it exists.

As a big fan of both metal and coffee, this game speaks to me from a conceptual and stylistic standpoint. The soundtrack is badass and the visuals are incredibly charming, but the one thing that drives me nuts about this game is how unbalanced the combat can be from time to time. If you're playing 1P, good luck. The onslaught of enemies--seemingly every 5 seconds--leaves you scrambling to try and figure out a strategy to take out all these bad guys while somehow reserving enough health to keep moving. Your "special attack" deals damage to your health, so it's almost completely useless when fighting multiple enemies. This game has plenty of charm and I keep coming back to it because it's interesting and funny as hell, but I just wish I felt like I was being rewarded for taking down multiple enemies at once with more than just a 25 point power-up.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. I was intrigued by the concept, and I thought it would be worth a try for the $1.99 I paid for it on the Switch e-shop. This game is bogged down by errors from top to bottom. The very first problem with this game is the fact that the dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has little to no grasp of the English language. Even worse, the subtitles are riddled with spelling errors, which makes me think that the developers couldn't be bothered to revise their script before calling this a completed game. The movements in the game are clunky. Aside from the fact that the main character can only move at two speeds--slow and practically not moving at all--the enemies move in a way that feels inauthentic and phoned in. They make noises when they're behind you, but they never seem to attack from behind. When it comes to combat, the game makes little to no use of anything outside of a lazy FPS that has been done better by its contemporaries. The visuals are interesting enough, but they get tired once you've made your way around the ship for the 40th time looking for the next location in your mission. It seems like the devs spent more time developing realistic breasts on the female demon spawn that you spend most of your journey trying to kill than on the details that are actually important...like a map layout that isn't incredibly confusing and reductive. It all feels very hopeless--and not to the game's advantage. Ultimately, this game has a long way to go before it can be considered finished. The concept is half-baked, the story is just not engaging enough to keep my attention, and even the better ideas that this game presents are just not fleshed out in a way that feels fulfilling. Disappointed is an understatement, especially for a game that costs $2.