I kind of have mixed feelings about this one. The control scheme is really clever and opens up the game to some unique situations you normally wouldn’t see in a run ‘n’ gun. The weapons are mostly good, although the starter laser weapon gets outclassed by the enemies fairly quickly. I also enjoyed the powerups, especially the jetpack (the speed bonus was good too but hard to use effectively).
I do agree that the level design, specifically the battle setups, is where the game loses me. At first the game is pretty fair but quickly devolves into spamming as many enemies as possible at you. Some of their projectiles really tear through you quickly and are not reasonably dodge-able. I feel like I had to get lucky or know what’s coming ahead of time to win some encounters, which I’m not a big fan of. One lesson I had to learn was that it’s not always worth trying to kill everything, sometimes the best thing you can do is just run.
While some encounters left me thinking “What do they expect me to do?”, the frequency of save points was enough for me to save scum my way through almost all of the game on Normal difficulty. I’ll admit to some transgressions: on the second to last level I had to lower the difficulty to get through the last part, and I hacked the game to give me more flamethrower (?) ammo for the final boss.
Overall, I’m glad I played it but will probably not recommend it for most people unless you’re a big fan of the run ‘n’ gun genre.
