Version 0.3.0b
A metroidvania with a very cute artstyle and a simple premice easy to grasp. The blend between old-school pixel art and cartoonish handdrawn art is really well executed, and the story, while unoriginal, is a nice callback to the old metroid and megaman games (although it is strange pregnancy is not much shown here given the context of the X-scenes). The entire game is built as a love letter adressed towards those games, with all their gameplay mechanics, but also their weaknesses.
While the art, story and core gameplay are worthy of those 3 stars, the rest of the game is not. As I said, the game is heavily inspired from old-school metroid and megaman games, and strangely the devs have decided to also implemented the questionable design decisions of that time that have been left in the dust by their creators, and for good reason. The controls are simple but intentionally janky, with the default attack having stupidly short range and long wind-up animation before actually hitting the enemies, the wall-jump (necessary to progress through the level) doesn't work 95% of the time, and the string of inputs you have to do each time you receive a call on your radio to progress the storyline is excessive and annoying.
The pacing is really badly handled. At the start of the game you are bombared with radio calls to indicate you what to do and where to go, and while it is nice the devs tried to implement a tutorial level, going into the radio sub-menu and calling each member individually is tedious and a process repeated at each new room of the first level that completely breaks the pacing of the game. Later on it gets better, as the game lets you explore and figure out more stuff by yourself, but at the beginning it is overdone.
The level design is confusing. First off, although some tiles marked on the map are tagged to indicate you the most important ones, none of them are color-coded to indicate you in what region of the map you are or what type of room you are in. Unless you remember which way you come from, it is very easy to get lost and to forget which room has the important roadblock you have to come back to once you get the next upgrade. You either remember what tile is important, or you don't and you have to re-explore every key room, with a lowered healthbar, limited items, and enemies that respawn every time you load a room.
Speaking of the difficulty, I must admit that while the game isn't as terrible as other people might say (I've played way worse designed and more difficult porn games than this one, I've developed a ton of patience for that kind of game), I do have to admit many aspects of the game were badly thought out and were very obviously thrown into the game because "the old games did it so we have to do it too otherwise this isn't a faithful inspiration". All the enemies are much faster and more mobile than you, and their attacks are not telgraphed at all except for the bosses; it is very easy to receive a cheap shot even when you just want to travel the room and avoid as many obstacles as possible. Due to the controls being quite janky, it is extremely hard to avoid any kind of attack, even when you know their patterns and go out of your way to dodge as many as you can.
But the thing that prevents me from enjoying this game as much as I could, is that the game is deliberately unfair. It is not a complex game, or even a very difficult one if it wasn't for that unfair factor, and I know the most hardcore fans will call bullshit on my point, but there are way too many instances where even if you play perfectly, you will run into an enemy that is perfectly timed to hit you right as you try to do the very specific thing the level tells you to do at that moment. You want to climb up a ladder ? Bam, hit by a drone that just started its pattern. You want to kill that wyvern before it hits you ? If you're not fast enough, it will hit you before just right before your final hit, and you can't dodge its attack, because of course you can't. You want to traverse this series of platforms suspended over lava ? Too bad, there are fireballs flying in waves around you that are way too fast to dodge. You do gain an enormous healthbar are you progress through the game, but there are many cheap shots like that designed to chip away at your health as often as possible, which makes backtracking more often than not, not only a waste of time but also resources, as items are scarce and sometimes hard to find, as many of them are hidden in the level and you have to guess where they're hidden.
All in all, I really, really want to recommend this game, but I feel this game's entire point is to waste my time. The gameplay isn't engaging enough to make me go through tons of identical rooms and endless waves of enemies with poorly telegraphed attacks and confusing level layout. It really doesn't help that this game overuses the color yellow in every level, which not only makes your character hard to track, it's also a pain to look at after a few minutes. This game can become something great, if the devs decide to sit down for a moment and let go of the bad game design decisions the rest of the industry has abandoned decades ago for a very good reason.
