Cyber Shadow

Loved the first level, twas challenging, fast forward, loved it. Then the second level they start throwing flying enemies at you that surround you, which makes it difficult for you to maneouver and attack them, because you can only move left and right, jump, and hit in a narrow foward motion-slash. So you're gonna get hit by those. They also bump the traps that insta-kill you by a ton, and also have enemies that push you with each attack into said traps. The game has a checkpoint system similar to that of Dark Souls and games that try to emulate those titles, so you get stations that serve as your checkpoints, you die? Go all the way back to the previous station. On top of that, they introduce enemies in the second level that take multiple hits to go down, which completely kills the fast paced nature of the game's first level. Just really dissappointing. Vengeful Guardian Moonrider was significantly better at achieving what this sets out to do, imo.

A good retro-style platformer - the strongest points of the game are in the level and enemy design, with a good understanding of the fundamentals that stays consistent through most of the experience. Unfortunately neither are particularly stressed by the difficulty which is on the extreme easy end for this style of game; you'll clock a decent number of deaths in the latter third of the game, when the focus turns to platforming segments with insta-death pits and spikes, and a teleporting dash attack that relies on a dash that feels just a little bit inconsistent - during tight platforming sections it's easy to accidentally hit the forward input AFTER the dash input, and the dash does nothing while neutral so it gets eaten. Personally, I think dash from neutral should trigger dash for as long as the dash button is held, and pressing forward while neutral-dashing should convert to the forward-dashing state. If this were fixed and the game had a hard difficulty mode that flattens the difficulty curve towards the high end (you could probably just add more enemies/more aggressive enemies in this game), it'd improve the game massively, but this will never happen at this point. Actually, one more criticism: the bosses are too simplistic. They tend to follow a basic loop with no variation and attacks are trivial to dodge after you've seen them one time. Don't expect interesting or layered attack patterns with shifting overlap or anything even close to that. You never really get a sense of aggression or murderous intent and that in turn undermines the story presentation. This is actually my second time playing the game. I played it years back on Game Pass, and finally scrounged up the cash to actually buy the game on Steam now. I got 100 deaths back then, and 50 deaths now, so scientifically we can say that my video game prowess has doubled.