It's a good reminder that despite a few callbacks to the metroidvania genre, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy and similar sidescroller roguelites are basically becoming a genre of its own at its point, although most still use the term "roguevania" to describe themselves.
Yeah, i wasn't trying to be pedantic but some people really swear that dead cells is a metroidvania and it's done permanent harm to the word. If one likes MVs they can probably like these. I like Dungreed for 2d roguevania too.
Retro Metroidvania with gunplay, Zexion:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pg1V-UDYzv0
This released some time ago and i played but didn't finish cause i got a lot of conflicted feelings.
On one hand, this is an impressive one man endeavor. It has a unique gameplay of pseudo-twinstick where you shoot at the directions of the face buttons like it's binding of isaac. It looks and sounds decent but it's biggest strenght is how every "cutscene" happens in game.
For example, early in the game you see two bosses (tiny armor and big armor) and some soldiers try to open a door and both are using their boss attacks on it, failing and then pointing at directions, making for great foreshadowing of their fights.
When you fight one of those bosses (tiny armor), you beat him then a monster interrupts, breaks that boss armor and drops his upgrade that you take, then you must run from that boy as it destroy the stage and then fight it later (you can see the tiny boss escape).
In another you beat a boss enough to break a piece of his arm and grab a sword that shreds him. In another you see that big armor boss fight a rival and he looks nearly unbeatable until the rival kamikazes at him and weakens him and we fight him.
It's all pretty hype and unexpected, making these fights memorable, on top of the fights being very complex with bosses having a ton of moves, especially the big armor guy who has dive kicks, grabs, punches shotguns, homing missiles, shower bullets and an instakill nuke.
But the problem is that the game kinda hates you and has some absurdly frustrating design. First of all, you start with a garbage map that only shows the rooms around you which is useless, and the real map is somewhat hidden and not so early. Another is how this game has no fast travel at all and it's not a small game. In a vaacum it wouldn't be so bad, but this game has no chill and is a pain to navigate, where i'd die multiple times just exploring or backtracking.
Some rooms have more hazards than floor, lava keeps jumping, spikes keeps dropping, it all does so much damage. A lot of enemies are hyper cancer, with some invincible bees that are passive but if you hit one then all of them home at you and it's basically game over. Another is an enemy that reverses your inputs, areas that are dark, etc.
You mostly get missiles by beating space pirates and they're completely schizo fights where they run and jump like crackspiders seemingly at random while shooting you and later they can simlpy shoot through walls. I played this game for 10+ hours and it never felt like i learned how to fight them, i just kinda spammed missiles and hoped they'd die first. This was one of the main reasons i quit, as i can't move, aimd and mash the missile button on keyboard well.
It's just such a stressful game to play, i took a break after being stuck on a boss fight that is ltierally "this guys runs away nonstop and shoots through walls from offscreen" and didn't return.
(i agree with these)
Curiously, the dev saw my criticisms once and he said "well you can just use the acessbility options and give yourself infinite health" and ya know what, maybe you could've balanced this shit so i wouldn't need to. I beat 9 sols without assists, something has to be wrong. I enabled the accesbility option that gives me a function map and apparently that alone "tarnishes" your save file so the ending file says you used cheated lol.
If someone cares more about fun than pride, just enable the acessbility sliders as you see fit and you'll probably enjoy it as it's still a well made game with unique combat style.
