Bloodroots

Isometric Hotline MIami with platforming. Now that's the problem, because isometric games with platforming tend to not be very good because it's hard to tell where you are in relation to the camera. This is why some isometric platformers like to put a clear indicator under your feet so that you know exactly where you are jumping to, like a circle colored differently from the terrain. Bloodroots has a small black circular shadow. When the entire environment in general has a dark color palette, with the brightest being a dark greenish yellow. Have fun breaking your combo over and over because you hit the lip of the wagon or ledge you're trying to get up onto. (Double-checked to see if there was a setting in the accessibility options to make the shadow more clear. There was not.) To make things worse, neither the platforming nor the gameplay are precise. The final boss of Act 1 kinda encapsulates this: you are running up three lanes separated by water easily cleared by a jump. But oh wait: every single weapon there is a weapon that hurtles yourself forward. The chainsaw is fair enough: it seemed to have a consistent travel distance. However, the other two weapons are a hookshot and a rapier. And BOTH of these weapons have uninterruptible long travel distance post-attack. This means that if you even think about aiming sideways or diagonally, you will without fail hurtle yourself into the water, because the post-attack travel distance is uninterruptible unless you do ANOTHER attack (and god help you if you just hit an enemy with the last charge of the weapon). To make matters worse, this game either does not have target lock-on or it's glitchy. I assumed that it would ne when you see the green circle, but the amount of times that I've whiffed the attack with the green circle up and then immediately died afterwards for it says otherwise. All weapons with a lunge have NO lock-on whatsoever. This means that you are going to see yourself doing a big old triangle with the rapier around the enemy you want to kill a lot. Another note is that the weapons you can throw/shoot also have a glitchy lock-on. The amount of times I've thrown my mug at a random box instead of the enemy right next to it is ridiculous. The gameplay otherwise seems fine. But it's imprecise just enough that instead of feeling the cathartic cooldown period I had after levels in Hotline Miami, I just felt irritated because of random BS like randomly whiffing a hit and getting hit immediately, or hurtling myself off a cliff/spikes due to travel distance, or breaking a combo because the player character couldn't properly get onto a ledge or wagon.