izigame.me

6/10 mid
full text didn't fit. for stroyline review go to
https://milkandhate.wordpress.com/2025/01/18/blade-chimera/
https://youtu.be/-DlN2VU6ijU
tts of the full text
English translation.
It's another game from Team Ladybug and once again it's on their ugly low-res engine. And i do understand why. Because they are lazy. Why improve anything, if they are getting paid no matter what. They already learned this ancient fork of Game Maker engine once, why learn any real engine with real graphics, if people are paying even for this. And it's not like they skimp on graphical content, they are ready to put the time into creating assets, they are just too lazy to pay the transitional costs in time and money. Players are ready to pay for call of duty and angry birds, they don't care if the things are "good" when they are ready to eat "good enough". And the casuals sure ready to eat this dung polished into a shiny dorodungo. It doesn't help that they are making actually solid games gameplay-wise and there's no one brave enough to criticize them. The big corrupt gamesjournos don't want to so-called "punch down" a beloved indie foreigners who create solid gameplay. Critics are extinct, and rabid fanboys hunt down anyone saying anything negative about anything at all.
After a break with a scroll shooter they are back to making yet another metroid clone. There are thousands of them. But out of thousands of them, only a few are fascinating enough to keep my attention, and this is one of them.
As a metroid game it has slightly branching paths, and routes you can take only after receiving specific upgrade at specific story points. The platforming isn't great, with the weird controls. And then there's zero coyote time so the jumps feel plain bad.When you finally upgrade your movement it kinda feels fun to think you are breaking the sequence. But then you discover that 95+% of the medium-sized  map is story-related and mandatory to visit. And everywhere you went, you will have to revisit to follow the story. But the game allows you to just to teleport to any point on the map after you visited it (if you are not prohibited from teleporting by the current plot point). So yeah it's less of back tracking. But you've just Skyrim-ized a metroid clone. No point in memorizing the maps and the routes, just forget about the traversal, you can teleport everywhere. This is not platforming this is a GUI-simulator. Some metroid clones circle back to themselves, creating cool shortcuts. Some allow you to use public transport and teleport from one save-station to another. Here you just teleport anywhere bypassing the game. And at the point, if you can teleport from anywhere to the save-station, why even have them? Juts add quick-saves. That wold be better design too. Save stations instantly restore all your bars, save would force you to come up with a creative solution to your current amount of HP.
And then there's the level design. Most of it is just linear straight long corridors filled with repetitive enemies with no even platforming. And, like, the enemies are not a part of the game design either. It's not, like, different corridors feature different combinations of enemies dictating different approaches to dispatching them. No, this location has these enemies in it, so all 7 super long corridors in it will have the same repeating combination of the same two, sometimes three enemies, all requiring the same solution. These repetitive corridors is the biggest part of the game, the puzzly or platformy rooms are much rarer.
There are vertical shafts but you never get any flight or super-jump upgrades. It seems like the solution was to actually jump, open a bit of the map, warp there, instantly jump in the air, open a bit of the map, warp there, instantly jump in the air etc. I don't see any other solution, i think this was done intentionally.
https://youtu.be/cJD1eTam7RA
The game is also in the igavania sub-genre, so it features rooms with enemies instantly respawning when you leave it. The meaningless leveling system, where you just get stronger if you grind, with no agency or choice. And the inventory system with diverse weapons offering diverse attack-patterns. But unlike something like Dracula X 2 there are no meaningful builds and combinations. All the weapons are basically just linear upgrades in two categories: ranged and melee. There's no point in using two melee weapons, since you can't use them at the same time.
And ranged weapons in a game with no mouse controls are, tsrk... Yeah... Having no mouse already sucks in the games that require you to strike diagonally with your melee weapons by pressing the movement keys. With ranged weapons it is significantly worse. And then this implementation sucks balls. The weapons are not stuck to predetermined paths, you have to also aim them with your movement keys. When you press an attack button once, the game optionally tries to aim-bot to an enemy with a variable success rate. Then it locks you in the firing mode, and it is sticky as all hell. You cannot turn around and fire in the other direction, you will be stuck in the same pose for a very long time for all you attacks, ranged or melee and even for jumping and mobility options.
https://youtu.be/PMFUOUz2TZw
The controls are just sucky overall. Besides your two slots of choice you also have the third mandatory weapon that can be used for platforming or for combat. Just like a lot of their games you use vampirism on the enemies to balance the two bars. Melee weapons reload mana, and the mana weapon heals you. You can also just stick it into the ground creating a shield so you stand inside it and shoot every enemy. That's your combat routine until you get the grenade launcher. Make a couple of steps, stick the mana sword into the ground, stand in one place and spam bullets into the bullet-sponge enemies. Unroot the mana sword, make a couple of steps, stick the mana sword into the ground, stand in one place and spam bullets into the bullet-sponge enemies. And no this is not a Devil May Cry situation. Your melee weapons deal either the same or much smaller damage. And they do that at the very short range, against bullet-hell enemies spamming you with projectiles. The bossfights is you just spamming all attack buttons you have, some of which you should hold to use, and all of that on gaypads where you have only two fingers.
The bad mechanics are excusable when they don't matter. But when you make them matter literally only in the last two bossfights you gonna reap what you sow. This game is entirely unfit for gaypads. Without aiming with a mouse, without having a full keyboard under your five finger you can't do shit against the last two bosses.
First of all, both all bosses have multi-part super-long cutscenes. All the bosses before this are push-overs. But with these two you will see the cutscenes hundreds of times. And there's no retry button, you have to walk up to there and watch the multi-part cutscenes again and again. There's no skip button, only fast-forward. And of-course that doesn't forward through all the parts of the cutscenes and it doesn't skip or speed up the long animation inside the cutscenes. That's such a bad game-design, not even amateurs are allowed to do that. Like, even one play-test would instantly highlight that notoriously the worst of all times easily-solvable problem.
6/10 mid