Dustforce DX

"dustforce" is a really incredible precision platformer. i bought it on sale for 5 dollars and i already feel like i got my money's worth. if you like celeste or meat boy this is a must buy. that being said, if you're buying this game in 2026 there is one thing you need to know: [b] !!! IMPORTANT !!! [/b] If you are like me, and playing on a 144hz monitor and are using an x-input controller, your dash is not going to register every time you input it (at least if it's on the trigger, i have not done any testing elsewhere.) For the first 10 hours of playing this I thought there was a hidden cooldown i wasn't getting, [b] NOPE!! [/b] Downloading "dustmod" fixed this for me. So if you want to dash with the triggers to keep with your hollow knight muscle memory that is a must-download. also, [b] I had no luck with steam input on this one with my 8-bit-do controller, and had to remap the buttons from within the game. [/b] but that might be user error. [b] TL;DR: [/b] buy this game!! it's sick!! just be prepared for some finagling if you want to play with a controller.

100% recommend this game for one reason: soundtrack. This game is 14 years old and I still regularly listen to the soundtrack by Lifeformed. It's fantastic. Came for the janitorial work, stayed for the OST.

So part of me really likes the game. It controls well and the mechanics are fun The other part of me dislikes that you cannot sightread the levels. You're supposed to replay and master the levels. And replaying is slow. Super Meatboy: You ♥♥♥♥ up, it takes .3 seconds to restart the level Dustforce: You mess up, you lose all your momentum, the run is ruined but your character just stands there. You can either shamefully crawl to the finish line or open the menu to restart the level Dustforce is zero fun to "just play through". It's not a "finish all the stages" type of game. It's a "practice this stage until you get cinematically good at it" type of game. It's great at what it is, but it's not for me. I would, however, easily recommend this to someone who likes record huntiing movement games with great flow. My closest comparison point would be Sonic - which to me has the same problem. Amazing when you know the levels and have your timings down, absolutely impossible to just flow through by sightreading.

Dustforce is my favorite 2d platformer of all time and a common pick for my favorite game of all time. Many other reviewers have commented on the early clunkiness of the controls and the learning curve. Players interested in this game should know that the learning curve is not nearly as long as it seems. Playing through and achieving a perfect rank (something that is challenging but doable on every level in the game) on each level was one of the most amazing journeys I've gone through in gaming. It culminated in a final level that gave me my proudest gaming accomplishment and also served as a perfect capstone to the escalating difficulty of this game's levels. To this day I still pick this game up and polish some old times of mine. I can't imagine that I'll ever permanently shelve it. Please pick this game up if the platformer genre even remotely interests you. I cannot stress enough how incredible this game feels to play once you break that first learning curve. As I've stayed abreast with indie gaming I've seen many amazing 2d platformers come out and achieve large popularity such as Celeste, Super Meat Boy, and N. It's a shame Dustforce hasn't achieved the same amount of popularity as those titles. Despite that, this game is so amazing that I'm sure it will stand the test of time in its own way.

For me as someone who came here thinking it was going to be a platformer like celeste i was simply wrong. After youve input your action, most notably the jump, you feel like you lose a lot of control over the character wich makes the game have a higher skill ceiling, but also makes it feel clunky to get into and a bit unintuitive. There are lots of people who enjoy this though so if youre able to deal with that and want a good precision platformer, great purchase!! As for me, not so much

There's a good game inside here, but this isn't that game. The movement system is exhilirating when you master it, but feels more than clunky for hours once playing. Controls, even after mastery, feel unresponsive. There seems to be very little buffer, and for the dash specifically, has very specific conditions that need to be met to preform one, paired with the fact it struggles to register past 60hz. The levels are mostly alright, but the difficulty curve is horrendous. Normal levels and wood levels are a huge amount different in difficulty, and a couple gold levels are way harder than the rest. And those enemy spam levels are genuinely the least fun I've had in any video game, ever, not exaggerating. The map you access levels from is really hard to traverse, the skill needed to access some levels is astronomically higher than the skill to actually play them. I could complete every level in this game, other than the difficults and two golds, but I had to look up how to get to multiple levels because I simply had no idea what to do or what I was doing wrong. The thing is, as said before, when you master the movement, this game is unmatched. You feel like you're flying, an unstoppable force blowing through the level with ease. Playing it becomes second nature, easy as breathing in the moment, everything becomes instinct. So despite my harsh words, this game is very, very fun, although I wont hesitate to call it genuinely bad.

There's an NPC who advises the player against entering the final stage hub. Consider listening to them.