Castlevania Advance Collection
pretty good collection all 3 of castlevania gba games and Dracula X super nintendo game rewinding and save stating your game.
– Real player with 58.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania 2D Platformer Games.
Simple collection with all Castlevania GBA games. It’s the same games you know and love from that era, perfectly emulated. If you want to revisit them, this is the best way to do it.
– Real player with 37.1 hrs in game
Astalon: Tears of the Earth
I enjoy this game a lot. From an artistic standpoint, the visuals are detailed and interesting to look at, and the bright colour choices for the areas make the game lively. The choices for foreground and texture details make spotting secrets, well, not easy, but doable. There are very few ‘invisible’ secrets in the game.
From a game play standpoint, it is very fun. However there are some drawbacks. Until you find the certain items, changing characters can be quite a headache and involves a lot of backtracking. The fast travel system is decent, but it can still be very frustrating to climb all the way up the Ruins of Ash, just to die three rooms before the next lift and have to do it all again from the beginning. Besides the two lifts in Ruins of Ash, however, the lifts are close enough to each other or have plenty of unlockable shortcuts that makes getting around the rest of the areas much easier.
– Real player with 63.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania Pixel Graphics Games.
I’ve been following the development progress of this game since it’s first announcement, and I’m really impressed at how it turned out! There were of course various tiny bits that I could nitpick about, but in summary I loved 98% percent of the whole game. Even if I felt disappointed at certain things, it always found ways how to compensate those shortcomings with an amazing art direction, the whole strange universe concept and with it’s silly-cute horror charm.
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The Positives:
– Real player with 51.7 hrs in game
Lost Ruins
A beautifully crafted game that will probably not take you long time to complete, but hey - there are bonus modes and difficulties to try. If you like what you see from the screenshots and videos, you should definitely give Lost Ruins a try.
– Real player with 44.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania Anime Games.
This game is more about planning and preparation, rather than physical reflexes.
jump and roll are not your only options, sometimes using shield is much safer.
There is underwater damage that your own magic kills you.
It’s quite unique mechanic involving elemental damage. It makes you think twice in the water.
Visuals are so good. characters move so smooth and pleasant to watch.
And I love the character illustraions. it’s top-notch.
– Real player with 41.6 hrs in game
F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch
Pretty fun, and very pretty looking Metroidvania. Definitely worth a playthrough if you like this genre. It took me about 37 hours to 100% it.
Most of the game isn’t terribly difficult, but a lot of environmental challenges are unforgiving. However, the master level martial arts challenge and final boss are extremely difficult and are, by far, the most challenging parts of the game - even on normal.
The few critiques I have are:
- You can’t see what your moves are unless you’re at a repair station.
– Real player with 37.2 hrs in game
Graphics, design, animations, weapons, movement, map / exploration, secrets - everything is great, a real treat for metroidvania fans like me. The voice acting is fun (I recommend the Chinese original with subtitles; nothing comes close to a badass rabbit with a deep Chinese voice).
For me there’s only one downside: the combat. I never really got into it. It’s okay if you only fight one or two enemies, but the moment there are more the mechanics didn’t really work for me. In my opinion it’s a bad design decision to add parrying as a skill rather late in the game; I found it hard to integrate into the fights, especially those with many enemies. That’s because there’re a lot of combos in fighting which prevent the enemy from breaking free - but enemies also use combos and once you’re hit you cannot recover but must endure the whole combo. So, if you miss the first parry you are locked into an animation and get a beating - rather frustrating. If you’re fighting several enemies, I found it impossible to block on all sides; in the end I sometimes parried by accident, but I rarely used it on purpose. Even later in the game you get the ability to dash through enemies and attacks, which I found to be a lot more useful. So, I won most of the harder fights because I leveled up to the max and dashed a lot. Simply put: Other games do combat better.
– Real player with 29.1 hrs in game
Odallus: The Dark Call
The first part of this review will go over what I really enjoyed about the game, while the second half will go over what I found lacking. Let me start by saying that I have been looking forward to this game since its announcement. That being said, the game did not disappoint me.
So what is good about the game? It is a solid retro game. In the full time that I played the game for my twitch stream, I did not find any real incidents where I was left scratching my head over bizzare hit boxes, goofy control issues and generally annoying bugs that crop up from rushed development. This game is rock solid, plays well, and is pretty fair in terms of its difficulty curve.
– Real player with 40.3 hrs in game
Today, there seems to be the renaissance of games with retro atmosphere and pixel graphics. I prefer the ones without the latter, diamonds such as Far Cry 3 - Blood Dragon that brilliantly brings back that fictional 80’s feel, but with great graphics. Brazilian developer JoyMasher’s side-scrolling platformer Odallus: The Dark Call doesn’t have much to do with the 80’s, but it does feature stylish pixel graphics with an 8-bit colour palette and successfully invokes the era of old console/arcade games (and it’s an enjoyable one on its own of course).
– Real player with 19.2 hrs in game
Shadow Complex Remastered
First things first: I do recommend Shadow Complex to any and all with an interest in Metroidvania titles. It’s more Metroid than Vania, mind you, despite the whole arbitrary leveling system and even more arbitrary (and actually entirely useless) stats gained from leveling up. Furthermore, I’ve played it for at LEAST 150+ hours in total across platforms, so I know the game better than 90% of all the people who’ve ever played it. But anyway… movin' on.
I’ve actually been holding off on writing my review for Shadow Complex, mostly ‘cause I’ve played it so many times on Xbox 360 and the free copy I got through EPIC’s own Steam-esque service, but also because… I have no idea, actually. Anyway. One thing I noticed with Steam’s version (that I never had ANY issues with on EPIC’s version nor the X360 version) was that there were a whole lotta more bugs and glitches in the game.
– Real player with 31.1 hrs in game
Shadow Complex was once an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive that broke sales records at the time and its Remastered (Unreal Engine 4) launch was free for nearly a whole month last year as a Holiday gift via the Epic Launcher. I got it just recently through Humble Bundle for a dollar. They didn’t have to do any of this, so it’s worth mentioning.
In Shadow Complex you play a guy and you will have control over a very powerful suit, which you put together piece by piece by following the story. The story is about rescuing a girl and killing bad guys, barring the twist at the very end. This is wholly uncharted territory for writers, so I’m glad someone was finally brave enough to craft this original tale. In all seriousness, it’s fine, but a “faceless” villain is no excuse. What matters is the overall experience. Much like Crysis, this game is about having fun with a suit. It’s also a game of collecting items and the stronger your suit, the easier it gets. Opening a map to get health, armor, weapon and ammo upgrades is a thing you do here and I like doing it. You also collect keycards and gold, to access a suit upgrade and to open a secret room respectively.
– Real player with 21.6 hrs in game
Valdis Story: Abyssal City
Valdis Story: Abyssal City is one of the best games i’ve played so far, i’ve been so hooked on to it that i have yet to become bored of doing the game over and over, it feels like each playthrough is a challenge and the hardest difficulty which is unlocked after your first playthrough really puts your skills to the test.
The storyline is quite a fun turn of events as neither hell or heaven is the good guy here!
You start off on a ship with your crew then some giant monster comes and crashes your ship and you all sink and end up in Abyssal City which is deep under the sea, it turns out that you have been caught up in the middle of a war between angels and demons and your only way out is to battle your way through hordes of angels and demons as you search for your missing crew!
– Real player with 434.9 hrs in game
8/10
This game in an indie gem.
Pros:
-Tons of replayability
-RPG elements done righ, lots of ways to build and customize your player to suit different play styles. skill trees, stat allocation, and equipment choices all work well together to build synergy.
-interesting upgrade and crafting system for your weapons and armor.
-Good amount of well made metroidvania exploration.
-Multiple playable characters each with their own takes on the story and style of combat.
-Rewarding, deep, and fun combat on the whole.
– Real player with 178.3 hrs in game
Escape From Tethys
My playtime: 13.5h (based on steam, 100% achievement)
Grindy Achievement(s): No.
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (7 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No (the speedrun achievement might be difficult for some people though).
Intro
Escape From Tethys is a challenging Metroidvania game with a more difficult mechanic and strong hitting enemies. The game has 7 bosses that are located in 5 distinct areas.
Pros:
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7 unique bosses
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Lots of optional Ammos, health upgrades, and weapon upgrades
– Real player with 13.5 hrs in game
tl;dr
• Metroid copy
• pixel art, music, world size, upgrades, gameplay → decent
• difficulty balance, story and boss fights → barely gud/not gud
• 72/100
Positive
☑ Generally nice-to-look-at 2D visuals. Seems like a mix of the first few Megaman games and Super Metroid’s graphics.
☑ Decent soundtrack that surprised me with its variety. The boss battle theme is definitely a keeper (expect some unexpectedly heavy bass and drums).
☑ World map is, I wouldn’t say massive, but vast enough for a good few hours of exploring in a fitting way that doesn’t make it feel overwhelming. There are also some secret corners here and there that are hidden behind walls without overlay lines on them, much like in Metroid. Those kept it interesting to look around.
– Real player with 11.3 hrs in game
Animosa
Animosa is a fast paced, challenging metroidvania about friendship. Fight alongside the knight, give him courage by hitting enemies and gain trust by destroying your challengers. spend courage for special attacks and use your trust to upgrade, unlock new abilities.
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Dynamic, fast paced bosses.
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Heartfelt story about a knight that lost his courage
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RPG mechanics based on friendship
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Local Co-Op mode (May come as a free dlc after base game)
Artifacts
Fun game. It’s super challenging, but it feels like you as a player aren’t good enough as opposed to the game just being hard. It’s a decent 2D platformer with fun combat.
– Real player with 2.4 hrs in game
Its hard to exactly point out why youd want to recommend this game. The camera is extremely choppy in its movement and its clear as day that this game lacks some polish.
But on the flipside once you figure out what is going on and more or less what you are trying to do it becomes very interesting after all and overall seems to be a very genuine product.
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game