Haunted Lands

We've got more retroslop here fellas. Don't tell me: The dev saw a video of someone playing that sidescroller Romero made and said, "I can do that." Well no you can't. You did not. Per usual I'm gonna get the short part out of the way, that is, the good parts. And yes, per usual, these retroslop devs do have a knack for creative and otherwise competent visuals, plus decent musical talent and sound talent. Can't take that away from them. What the devs can take away is your time and money, though, and we've got a huge imbalance here. 1. For some stupid reason, looking up or down cancels your reload. There is no gameplay purpose for this. You can already reload-cancel by firing. Why should pushing up or down stop you from reloading? I ask this, developer, because if someone is playing on a controller that has a d-pad, y'know, to recapture that 1991 spirit, you should know that a lot of controllers with d-pads, like say the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful Dual Shock 4, have it so that you can accidentally press up or down when moving from side to side. I'm not even talking about fat-fingering. The d-pad is notorious for hitting up and down inputs because of the way the controller works. You would know that if you tested the game. You didn't test the game did you. 2) The game's buffer doesn't seem to work right. Lots of times I hit the reload key and my character didn't reload. I could also blame this easily on the DS4 but I'm not going to be fair to a developer who insults me. 3) When I looked up reviews of this game before buying, I noted that a lot of reviews, including some positive ones, conceded that this game "does not respect your time." Huge massive red flag. That is 100% true and this game's most fatal of flaws. The issue is that the player has the option of spending gold on buying a checkpoint in the game, otherwise dying means you have to go back to the start. Right, like Mario? Well really more like Ninja Gaiden, which is what this game's gameplay reminded me of. But here's the issue. When you buy a checkpoint, the game saves your position with EXACTLY the health/items/whatever you have. So, if for instance you buy a checkpoint and then move off the beaten path and find health or gold or an item or whatever, the checkpoint doesn't save that. And then you die and respawn at the checkpoint. And then you have to spend another 20-30 seconds backtracking or diverting the get the stuff you should be grabbing. That adds up if you die a lot, and you probably will. This is even stupider when you save at a checkpoint and are down to your last hitpoint. So you could go for like 8-15 minutes of gameplay praying you make it to a stage clear when you can only take one hit. The checkpoint doesn't give you health, you don't respawn there at full health, nothing. The game actually discourages you from using it if you've taken damage. WHY. Ninja Gaiden has invisible checkpoints in stages. When you die in Ninja Gaiden you come back at the checkpoint, but with full health. What are you doing dev? NOBODY ACCUSED ANY NINJA GAIDEN GAME OF BEING EASY. You've gotta throw us a bone and restore half health or nothing. But no. These oversights are the product of either a lazy dev who didn't properly test the game or an incompetent one. I alluded to this in my Mina the Hollower review but video game reviewers need to cut the crap and get serious about reviewing these retroslop games. You do not deserve a cookie because you got the visuals of Commander Keen right when the game handles terribly and shows no progress in game development from the past 40 damn years. The sad truth is that for this genre in particular, once Iga, Inafune, Kojima, Romero, the Carmacks, Miyamoto, too many others to name, once they're all retired or dead, this kind of game simply will die with them. Today's devs have not clue number one how to make these kinds of games and it's getting really embarrassing now. I will end on a positive note: This game is like only $6, so while the dev does not respect my time they do respect my wallet a lot more than Yacht Club Games does.

Haunted Lands to oldschoolowa platformówka akcji, która bez większych ceregieli wrzuca nas w świat pełen kultystów, demonów, zombie i innych potworów. Do wyboru mamy sześciu bohaterów różniących się stylem walki – część lepiej radzi sobie na dystans, inni nastawieni są na bezpośrednią walkę. Zdobywane artefakty pozwalają dodatkowo modyfikować ich możliwości. Największym atutem jest klimat. Pixel-art, brutalna stylistyka, grobowce, krypty i ogromne potwory świetnie oddają ducha starych gier akcji. Gra jest jednak naprawdę wymagająca. Bossowie potrafią solidnie dać w kość, a śmierć często oznacza konieczność ponownego przechodzenia sporego fragmentu poziomu. Dla części graczy będzie to zaleta, dla innych źródło frustracji. Na plus wypada również sporo sekretów, ukrytych przedmiotów i dodatkowych wyzwań, które zachęcają do dokładnego przeszukiwania poziomów. Prosta w założeniach, brutalnie wymagająca i bardzo klimatyczna retro platformówka. Jeśli ktoś lubi oldschoolowe wyzwanie – warto. Polecam.

This game does what it's trying to do well. I understand the complaints about difficulty, but that's clearly what the game wants to be. "Punishing" is a good word for it; if you die, you are re-doing a significant portion of the level (which *does* make the shortcuts you open seem rather pointless; they don't stay open if you die). The levels are a bit long, imo, but that's more than forgivable, The bosses are definitely the highpoint, and I'd take more of those over also a-bit-too-long arenas. One kinda big complaint: "Next Area" doors need to be clearly marked as soon as they come on screen. The number of times I've pressed up on a "Next Area" door because the text came up way too late is uncountable. That's super frustrating in a game with collectibles like this.

They have shot themselves in the foot with the souls-like/nes era complexity with this one. This could've been so much fun but the same level grind is too slow and not interesting enough to be a rewarding souls like experience. Even original dangerous dave felt less tedious. Even though you slooowly gey better and progress, it felt it was made unnecessarily obstructed and the pacing was so tedious with so little reward that i did not feel like coming back to it after ~10hours of gameplay and the only feeling i had while thinking of turning it back on were "ugh nah that's gonna be boring"

In principal this game has potential; it looks good and has creative characters. However it's problem lies in the difficulty. This is the primary reason i would NOT recommend this game to people. A truly decent game needs an easy difficulty to help you get the hang of the game and just enjoy it...and as far as i can tell this game doesn't have one. Difficulty spikes up very quickly in some areas and certain characters have flaws that make it very difficult to progress (slow reloading for example). On top of this when you do reach save checkpoints you have to have gold to actually USE them...which is so outragoues. i have never seen that before in all my years of gaming. i don't know who designed this game but IMO they need to make some alterations...if they did they could have something pretty good. but right now it's just an unbeatable mess.

Gotta give this one a pass. I was really into it for about 5 hours but eventually it just began feeling like a chore designed by a jerk that played his game so long he got really impressed or bored with his own runs. Successfully dodging 5 things in rapid succession only to have a sixth thing spawn right on top of you just isn't fun. Actually that's the opposite of satisfying. I enjoyed the challenge up to a point but every encounter feels optimized to the breaking point of what's possible with the stiff controls in the game. Why does looking up interrupt/prevent reloading? Planting your feet to shoot is fine but it takes a beat too long to respond to a jump after you fire. You end up repeating encounters so many times that it becomes a choreographed sequence of moves with little room for improvisation. I'm stuck at a point rn that's difficult to escape without losing the majority of my health near the start of the checkpoint. Which just means I'll die to something cheap soon into the rest of the level. I'm dying of boredom here. I was impressed with how much the game does with so little graphically, but I'm too fatigued with the current section to bother seeing the rest of the game. The sound is pretty monotonous too, even for a lo-fi style. Just exhausting now.

Incredibly difficult, unforgiving. This isn't much of a problem in itself but the frustration, controls and upgrade system ruins it for me which is a shame because it is very true to its 8-bit inspiration. It just takes a little too much with its commitment to stiff controls, sudden deaths and love for arena fights. I had a brutal and nasty time with it but it clearly want to be this kind of frustratingly difficult so thumbs up for achieving that.

Haunted Lands is a love letter to a bunch of early platforming games, from its colour pallet that is used extremely well, to the sound effects, and the harsh but fair difficulty of the game play. I found myself thinking of the Veterans jumping animation and how it reminded me of Commander Keens, animations, for those of you old enough to remember those games. There have been complaints about there not being enough health or enough checkpoints, or that it costs you a portion of your score sometimes to use those things and this prevents you from being able to complete the challenges, however that is the point of them being challenges. The game is hard by design, but not unfair. The game has a variety of environments to explore with a range of different characters that all play and move about the levels very differently, this lends itself to a decent replay-ability as only certain characters can access certain areas on a given level generally secret areas in order to obtain items/upgrades. The items themselves provide a great functionality that allows you to optimise your completion times for the speedrunners at heart. If you were a fan of games like Ghouls and Goblins or the old style Castlevania games, then this is a refreshing addition to the genre with improved controls and mechanics compared to yesteryears titles. Definitely worth picking up given how cheap the game is.