Rebel Transmute

I picked this game during the 2025 christmas sale...I been playing slowly and taking my time...Having played the original metroid back in the 80's this brought a lot good memories....well done looking forward to part 2 :)

Jogo incrível. Eu demorei para adquirir, mas quando comecei a jogar me diverti bastante. As habilidades foram bem divertidas de aprender também. A habilidade que tive mais dificuldade de me adaptar foi a do peixe. Muito complexa e houveram locais que não consegui acessar devido a não ter o controle correto dela. No geral, foi um jogo muito bom.

I've got mixed feelings about this game as far as recommending it or not. But I did in fact play it all the way through to 103% completion, I had fun, and most of my complaints I think are setting very high expectations against what is basically a solo dev indie game project. So with that in mind, this game's pretty good. I'll divide this review into segments. First, the early game. It starts very slow, you're very weak and have no abilities for a good 1-2 hours. This phase is mainly simple platforming and meticulous combat with enemies, dodging and sniping with your blaster that only shoots 3 meters in any direction. You find a boss or two and get new powerups, all good. The mid-game is... "broad". You are given 3 destination markers in the very corners of your map, and you have basically 2-3 huge areas to explore trying to get to one of them. The markers are actually kind of a lie since you can't actually reach them immediately without a bunch of other augments, and they have a fairly clear intended order even though the game presents it like they're all equal. So there is a weird couple of hours in the midgame where 1) you have this huge area to explore and wander around trying to get to these beacons 2) you need to sort of stumble upon the correct rooms to reach bosses to unlock augments to actually make progress, and 3) once you have those right augments (there's no telling what the "right" ones are) then you can try for one of the beacons, but only one or two of them are actually accessible at this stage. The midgame is mainly defined by the sticky bomb and then learning to use these rather awkward bomb jumps to get around. There were so many times I did a sketchy bomb jump to cross a gap and then said "there's no way this is the actually intended move" and then just... never being sure. The exploring and getting lost feeling is kinda fun, but I can also see lots of players just giving up around here. The late game seems to quickly unlock a whole ton of movement options all at once, starting with the air booster. It feels cool to start going fast everywhere, but the total number of movement options starts to feel pretty jank the more of them you have. Soon you have a slide, air dash, drop + spin chained to bomb jump and/or bounces, air booster chained to diagonal boosts, a midair hover augment, midair booster augment, wall grip, water dash and speedy swim, water "shinespark"..... In particular the midair booster seems to be the least reliable. You're supposed to be able to stop in midair and charge a boost (with the right augment) but even though it's a single button press it seems to just ignore the input 20% of the time and I just fall to my death. Again, a couple rooms where I thought "there's no way this is intended" and just brute forced my way through it (mostly shinespark stuff which is kind of interesting in its implementation but very frustrating to actually use). Boss fights also become trivialized once you find the Violent Injector. Fast travel becomes more of a pain when tracking down the last few powerups, and while there is a teleport mechanic, it isn't actually unlocked until you're at like 90% completion. There is a huge difficulty spike in platforming right at the end (Sparkblood mines... the vertical conveyor belt segment combined with all those spikes + lava). Then you just go to the last room and fight a boss and the game just kinda.... ends! It's very abrupt and leaves a ton of questions and is not really satisfying at all which is why I haven't mentioned the story here. All in all, that's about 17 hours of gameplay, which is way more than I was expecting. I probably won't do it again, but this was an overall fairly good experience and pretty well polished for a solo dev project. So I gotta respect that.