Axiom Verge
Remember the demonic imagery and disturbing backgrounds of Ninja Gaiden as you got closer and closer to fighting the demon? How about the sci-fi creepiness of Metroid? Or the creepy alien lair of Contra?
Axiom Verge takes these elements and cranks them up. The setting is creepy, the music unsettling, and the story increasingly disturbing. There’s even some impressively melancholy chiptune music at one point.
The game first starts out as an utterly shameless ripoff of Metroid. I’m talking totally shameless - everything from the enemy types to the types of environments encountered early in the game, to the Super Metroid-esque map - it all screams Metroid, and it’s painfully blatant, to the point where I rolled my eyes and thought “Does this game have any originality?”.
– Real player with 44.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania Pixel Graphics Games.
tl;dr This game is an excellent successor to the Metroid style platformers. You should get it if you liked those.
Wow, where do I even begin? I installed this to see how it was. Here I am, 13 hours later and I binged it. Played it in two 6-ish hour sittings because I couldn’t stop for anything but falling asleep. There’s a lot to talk about with this game, both good and bad.
Gameplay
This is the meat and potatoes of the game. This is what’s going to keep you occupied for most of the time, so it’s important that this works well. It does. I’ve found very few situations where I was annoyed or bored with the game. The shooting feels great and suitably difficult and kept fresh by the insane variety of weapons and tools at your disposal. I particularly enjoy that each weapon more or less seem to have a specific playstyle and enemy type in mind, which keeps you varying up as the game goes along. There were a few I simply didn’t find useful at all, being the Nova (which you get very early),
! Firewall and
! Multi Disruptor. The only thing that stood out to me was the grappling hook. Yes, I’m spoiling that because the grappling hook exists in every Metroid game ever, so it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t act like other grappling hooks and that threw me off a lot and it took me about an hour of gameplay to get used to how it works and its quirks.
– Real player with 27.3 hrs in game
Ghost 1.0
Game Overview
Ghost 1.0 is an indie metroidvania that is set on a sci-fi world where robots and machinery are becoming a trend to humanity, whatever the purpose for them may be.
You play as “Ghost”, a digital ghost who performs mercenary work and was hired by two genius hackers in their attempt to uncover the secrets behind the success of the Nakamura Corporation with their robots. Your mission is to infiltrate the Nakamura Space Station and steal their Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
– Real player with 50.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania Action Games.
Ghost 1.0 is one of the best modern Metroidvanias you can buy and definitely sits alongside Axiom Verge as a standout of the recently quite crowded genre. Unlike Axiom Verge however which follows the formula to the letter Ghost 1.0 finds its own way and throughout the course of the game constantly throws in surprises and breaks conventions that really make it stand out.
The premise of Ghost 1.0 sees 2 hackers hire a mysterious agent (you) in order to infiltrate the Nakamura Space station in order to learn its secrets. Ghost is an agent capable of taking on the form of an electronic ghost and taking over Androids at will allowing you to control your main android body or a number of other androids around the station and it is this mechanic that really shines through as the game’s unique selling point.
– Real player with 46.5 hrs in game
Aquaria
Aquaria is a Metroidvania game where you go about as Naija, learning songs and dishing out malice upon the bosses of the under water world. I 100%’d achievements in 21.5 hours (A big part of this was not having the fish form until later), but you can beat it in 12-15 hours easily. Difficulty is deceptively hard. Used a game controller for the bulk of it, with mouse for the menu and keyboard for quick changes. Recommend keyboard over controller.
Pros:
- The art and environments of the game are great and really do stand the test of time. Each area of the map is unique and identifiable. There are plenty of fishies in this sea.
– Real player with 23.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Metroidvania Female Protagonist Games.
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Large beautifully detailed world with various different looking areas
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Dozens of spieces to discover
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Astonishing soundtrack
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Lifetime (about 20h)
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Sweet story and swell voice acting
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Lightweight system requirements
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No RPG elements
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Stiff controls on the land (very rare)
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Pad is supported, but basically useless
Many might have not heard about Aquaria which was released in late 2007 by two men independent game company Bit Blot. Being an indie title is one of the oldest of the genre and it was realeased much before Braid which is considered a game that launched wide a boom of independently-developed video games since 2008 and onward. Whatsoever Aquaria is absolutely marvelous game all the way! Thanks for its excelent gameplay design and classic colorful graphical design - years have threated it very well.
– Real player with 22.1 hrs in game
Unworthy
An extremely underrated 2D Souls-like made primarily by one guy.
It’s playable on both KB+M and a controller, but you can’t rebind the mouse controls.
Right off the bat, the game shows the silhouette, monochromatic pixel graphics, which is like that for practically the entire game. Depending on who you are, that might be an immediate turn-off or a unique interest. There’s a surprising amount of detail being shown off in the background, foreground, the enemies, etc.; what little you see can be left up to your imagination, and given its extremely dark theme, it can do some wonders with that.
– Real player with 32.0 hrs in game
I’ve enjoyed watching Unworthy develop through updates on Aleks Kuzmanovic’s twitter for the last year or so. The game is a triumphant accomplishment with outstanding presentation and great twists on its sources of inspiration. The slickness of animations on monochromatic sprites is pixelated eye-candy. It produces an uncanny effect where motion displays so much information despite being made from intuitively shaped characters.
Combat uses those animations to its advantage. Charged attacks and switching weapons have nice ‘umpf’ and combos and dodges are satisfying to initiate. The level of detail on particle effects, sword slashes and flourishes is astounding. Boss by boss, the elements in battles stack up and encounters get more intricate.
! Learning to teleport into dodge into slam during the fight with Father Amandil was damn good time.
– Real player with 26.1 hrs in game
Castle In The Darkness
- OLD THOUGHTS - UPDATED THOUGHTS BELOW -
THOUGHTS: 02.07.2015
I haven’t finished the game yet, but at almost 8 hours in, I feel I’ve played enough to share my thoughts. I’ll update this if/when I finish the game to update/finalize my thoughts. Here’s what I feel right now.
This game is fantastic. It really captures NES-style fun, platforming and frustration.
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PROS -
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Great art direction; I really like the look of the backgrounds and characters.
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Great understanding of contrasting colors. Oftentimes a cool color will be in the background and a warm in the foreground (or vice versa ). Really makes the game pop (so many games get this wrong. It’s great to see it done well here).
– Real player with 27.9 hrs in game
This was a pretty pleasant little adventure down the Metroidvania hole. It’s got pretty much everything you want, weapon/armor/magic upgrades, hidden paths with challenging platforming, boss fights that are, for the most part, challenging but very, very fair, and a ton of hidden goodies to go back and find. At this time I’m at 94% completion and I’ve finished the ‘main’ boss. I probably won’t go back and find the last 3 or 4 things, because at least 2 of them I forgot to grab on a save and they’re behind a long platforming section :^)
– Real player with 18.2 hrs in game
OUTBUDDIES DX
Editing this review now that I’ve finished the game and I can say it’s one of my favorites in a long time.
Pros:
-The game gives the player many mechanics to master so it never gets boring, and paces it well so they have a chance to learn them all before they need to have them mastered.
-It feels massively vast but in a way that’s not overwhelming. It reminds me somewhat of Hollow Knight when it opens up, areas are similar in size or even larger, with lots of options for where you can go at any one time. For the sake of pacing it also makes sure the previous parts are thoroughly explored before introducing anything especially open.
– Real player with 32.7 hrs in game
There are so many things wrong with this metroidvania, but somehow I managed to beat it while still having fun.
### 📕Story:
Adventurer Nikolay is seen as a madman by his peers for believing in a hidden city. He decides to prove them wrong and sets off aboard a flying ship. But disaster strikes when he flies into a storm that sinks his ship. He wakes up 36,000 feet under the ocean next to a robot and sets out to discover a way back to the surface. He soon finds himself in a sunken city where he is welcomed by friendly creatures that call themselves the Wozan. They were once enslaved by the Old Gods that were now gone. However, some of their people are still trapped somewhere below the surface. Nikolay offers his help…
– Real player with 17.5 hrs in game
Chasm
Chasm gets a hard “Pass” for me. It feels like there’s absolutely nothing original or close to original about Chasm. It’s a great example of how taking gameplay elements from what you like, smashing them together, and releasing that, isn’t how you get a good game.
I backed this game after playing and enjoying the demo years ago, looking forward to where they took the development. After playing through the whole game to 100% to get the complete experience of what the developers built, every single drop from every monster and all, I’m coming away from the experience feeling like absolutely no one played the full game, start to finish, before release. I know that can’t be true, and there must have been people who did. I want to know what they think, honestly. I don’t get how this game was released like this.
– Real player with 40.1 hrs in game
Chasm: Mind the Gap
TLDR:
It’s a good game that could have been better. The pixel art is beautiful, the soundtrack is good, and the story is enjoyable. Sadly, it has a lot of frustrations that put it in the “Would Not Recommend category. There are a few things that could have been done to make Chasm REALLY good.
Player tips and advice:
[olist]
- You only need two magic items to be effective. The rest are, in my opinion, a waste of gold: the magic dagger and the magic shield. Get the witch to level both to maximum. Ignore the rest. Daggers are by far the most utilitarian and easiest to use. You can use it to defeat everything from a distance with rare exception. The shield is Extremely valuable with certain bosses.
– Real player with 29.8 hrs in game
Cirrata
Cirrata is a rogue-lite, metroidvania inspired, action-platformer.
You play as an anthropomorphic red panda named Kier.
You were once a great chef but your self destructive life style and an unfortunate event forced you away from your culinary venture.
You have been isolated from the world for many months. Finally, after an intense vision causes you to burst out of a stupor, you decide to stumble through the mess that has accumulated around you. You open the door to see a very unfamiliar world.
GoldFish Brain
Goldfish Brain is a nice Metroidvania style game with a really nice aesthetic. The art direction is really nice and the game players well overall. It does have a few problems with an inconsistent difficulty, and the translations are a little rough, but overall it’s definitely worth playing.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
super duper hard.
– Real player with 3.8 hrs in game
Mage
The Metroidvania Review
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How Metroidvania is it?
High Fit – Mage is short but it checks all of the Metroidvania boxes.
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– Real player with 1.8 hrs in game
Short and easy metroidvania that’s surprisingly good!
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game