Halcyon Days

Halcyon Days takes the best aspects of Mega Man Legends and gives it a new polish for modern audiences. Possibly the most impressive part of this game is that it was solely developed by one guy over the past two years. This game has an original "hard metal" and "rock" soundtrack which is an interesting choice that fans may or may not like. There's also voice acting, and it really fits in this game. Unlike Mega Man Legends, Halcyon Days is more open-world based, and there's a lot more to explore with tons of side quests (15 main ones, a lot more smaller ones). There's a cool upgrade skill tree for armor and weapons, and it's fun to re-explore the ruins once you're done to find more treasure. There are five "islands" in total. On average, it'll probably take a new player around four hours to complete the game and another 4-6 to complete every mission and unlock every weapon. The game, however, struggles to proceed with several bugs, including a notorious soft lock bug in a boss battle that was patched post-launch. My computer also overheats quickly as each map is loaded entirely without any kind of optimization. While I know the developer has made significant progress in taking feedback from Steam to fix these bugs, some additional bugs such as getting stuck in menus or locations may still occur. That being said, I'm letting that slide since they're being patched and the developer has done an excellent job handling player feedback. Definitely would recommend this game to anyone who likes open-exploration platformers. For a solo-developer indie game, there's tons of replay value, character customization and lots of other unique elements that set Halcyon Days apart from other similar games. I'd suggest to buyers to keep note of update patches during this month as well as joining the Discord to troubleshoot any bugs they may encounter.

Its amazing what 1 solo indie dev can do with a game they put passion into, Really fun, its not just a point and shoot, theres multiple weapons, cool enemy and boss designs. Having a blast and its also voice acted well! a few glitches ob atm but im sure hes on his way to fixing them!

I really like it so far but it has a lot of things in it that detract from the experience for me. Mostly bugs and missing QoL/polish. There's also a lot of empty space (not literally but just nothing happening and you have to walk through this area to get to where you're actually trying to go) and this is a personal opinion but I really hate the heavy rock that it likes to play. The gameplay itself is nice though and I expect it will only improve as I unlock more abilities. You can tell the developer put a lot of heart into the game so while it's rough around the edges now, I'm confident it'll only get better.

While I can respect a solo dev making this game, it doesn't mean I'm going to pretend this game is worth anything beyond $5. I like that it's trying to bring Mega Man Legends to the modern era, but I think the dev bit off significantly more than they can chew. Movement is floaty. Jumping/climbing feels bad. Shooting feels bad. The UI is atrocious. No camera sensitivity. No vsync (I had a lot of tearing). I mean these are basic things that are expected in gaming today. It's cool to have a passion project and to be excited about it. It's a different thing entirely to charge $15.99 for your passion project when it just isn't that functional. This isn't a finished product. I imagine most wouldn't even find this acceptable in an early access state. I'd recommend saving your money.

Brings back the classic hardcore games of my youth, where you actually had to pay attention to what you were doing and saves weren't just handed to you on a silver platter. Awesome indie project.

Haven't played too much yet but I'm having fun.

it's a fun throwback to Mega Man Legends 1. The Music is solid, the gameplay is good but could use just a little tightening. Looking forward to seeing more of what the dev does with this, glad I picked up it though, we need more games like this!

The game is unplayable for me. The lock-on function is buggy. Every time I play, at some point, the camera gets locked backwards after releasing the lock-on target. When I beat the boss on the volcano dungeon, I got teleported back to the dock and my player was stuck so I couldn't save the game. I had to force-close the game and lost my progress. Since you can only save at certain times, it's real pain to have to restart after a death. Every time, I have to re-equip the jet skates, talk to Vela, wait for her to slowly run back up the hill before re-entering the dungeon. Why can't we just save whenever we want? Also, why can't we change controls? Caps locks for targeting is not my preference. Very disappointed. Please update the game soon. Thanks

TLDR: This game is a rough, but a sincere love letter to the Megaman Legends games, specifically the first one it feels like. There are soft/hardlocking game breaking bugs, the UI is a little wonky and you have to swap to mouse/keyboard from controller for some inputs, but I sincerely hope the developer takes the lessons they got from making this game and continues to make more. But I do have A LOT of critiques because I think if they get ironed out this would be easily much more palatable to others. ---- The long version: The game is called Halcyon days it's a direct deep lore reference to the universe it's inspired by, Megaman Legends. It takes a lot of the broad strokes, typically in the combat, intro, and structure of it's society from that game. And I think this game shows that there's a deep, deep desire out there for something like it, and a profound sadness for the lack of a megaman legends 3, which was ripped so painfully from our futures by capcom so many years ago. It is, to it's detriment, quite rough in terms of bugginess and UI controls, which will hurt it in the long run when attempting to reach a wider audience than it's intended target audience (of which I am a part of). The easiest bugs to point out are the following: - dialogue text boxes sometimes overlap (and stay on) when characters speak - Sometimes if you try to skip through dialogue your character can get stuck and can only jump in place, too far to initiate dialogue again. - The Controller input sometimes messes up and makes it difficult to know what button you are actually pressing (the Y/Triangle button cancels, but doesent exit the pause menu) (the B/circle button is used for selecting inputs instead of X/A) (You can select parts to equip but they auto default to slot 2, and you need to manually remove the part in slot 1 to equip a new one but sometimes it doesent let you select it (via controller) Those bugs are, of course, able to be worked around, though you will waste time if a save didn't happen quite recently. But in my experience, if you have to work around them, you will tend to drop players. Then there's the world design, yes it's open world, but in the beginning, it takes you a VERY long time to walk anywhere. The distance between you and your ship after you leave the first dungeon isn't too far, however there are points of interest that take a while to get there. This is alleviated after you complete the starter town and you recieve the jet skates, but then you're forced into an escort quest which invalidates the use of them until AFTER you're done. I think the maps are about 2x larger then they need to be, and that's even with me knowing that the jet skates are on the table. The Jet Skates did make dungeon exploration and interaction much more interesting, and honestly they were my favorite part of this game, the way they aided traversal and broke up the circle strafing actually has me wanting something like this in more games. Then there's the custom parts/weapons, which are also elements I missed from this game series. Though now that I'm talking about weapons, I have to mention combat, and that it feels like half of my shots don't land, sometimes I get hit and knocked over, other times I get hit and do not, but am not given an audio queue of being hit, and there was even a time where I lost 50% of my health in one hit and got a game over and was not shown anything visually that hurt me (during the second boss fight). When it works, it's servivcable, but there's just too much tiny bugs that add up and frustrate me, which I can only imagine means that others are frustrated as well. And then there's the ledge grabbing, there's issues with the collision detection which makes platforming with them hard, and also the animation takes way too long. I almost wish the jump height was just one box (from the first dungeon) tall, just so this could be avoided. Another one of my gripes is with the camera, it's hard to get these right, and in closed corridors like this it only gets harder, but sometimes it would clip against a wall and bounce back and forth rapidly, which is disorienting in these close quarters and leads to me avoiding going near walls just to keep everything visually clear. And my last gripe, and I mean this sincerely. Please for the love of god make doors different colors or something. I only was able to navigate the game for the most part because I understood the design methodology behind the dungeons and the door placements but some of them blend way too hard into the background, and I honestly think the doors are way too small compared to the source material. They should be much more visible and understandable as -passages to the next zone- but that's just me nitpicking at room design at this point. All of that being said, I think if this game had an extra few months of polish, cleanup, UI adjustment, and maybe giving you the skates immediately upon leaving the first dungeon, that it could be something even more special than it already is. The only reason I am harping on so hard about this game is because I can *SEE* what they were trying to do here. I can *FEEL* the passion towards megaman legends and the bygone era of the PS1 as things were left behind and the 3rd person platformer genre evolved and dropped so many things. I want a title like this to be enough of a success that the dev and others like them see it and want to make more. I can clearly imagine a movement set somewhere between this and pseudoregalia with a similar artstyle to that generation becoming something really special that hits all of us drowning our sorrows in nostalgia with the purest of dopamine hits. Please please please keep making games dev, if you can polish this up and it's worth your time I implore you to do so. If not, I sincerely hope the lessons you learned from this game can be taken forward into something with more polish and that can be seen by more eyes than just the hardcore fans. Thank you for reading this, sorry about the intensity of the critique and I hope to see you on the moon!