Dust & Neon Review (Kamuo)
This plays a lot slower than what the previews show.
From the artstyle and everything, it feels like the game should be a lot more dynamic and chaotic, but the game is very simplistic, where you're just moving and shooting. Not even a melee attack, any throwables, or any kind of ability. Reloading feels slow, and your other guns don't automatically reload when unequipped. Navigating the home base also feels very slow, with interactables placed far from one another. You'd be walking for like 10 seconds every time just to get to the mission select.
The actual shooting gameplay does feel good once you get used to the isometric view, but this gets boring fast when the game expects you to do the same thing for hours and hours.
The game's structure is honestly just bad. It has a mission select for you to do randomly generated missions, so the game expects you to play the same missions, albeit with slightly different layouts. This would have been fine if it were a roguelike, where each playthrough of the mission would feel different, but the game doesn't have any of that. The game quickly feels repetitive because of how simple the gameplay is, and no effort was made to mix up the gameplay.
What makes this even worse is how grindy the game is designed. Each boss is locked behind a required rank, and if you fail to defeat them, you can't just try again immediately as the boss "goes into hiding" and their mission is inaccessible until you finish another normal mission.
I get the idea this game is going for. It wants you to prepare before facing a boss by arming yourself with better weapons, but that should be an option, not something forced on players. Players should be free to challenge bosses however they want. But since there's not even a lot of preparation you can do aside from getting better weapons, this mechanic just falls flat and feels more like an artificial way of padding out the game.
Once I saw this mechanic with the first boss, I honestly just didn't have the motivation to play again.
This game feels like it would be a lot better as an open world where enemies can respawn. This makes it optional to replay the areas again rather than a necessity. Being able to stumble into a boss anytime and see how stronger they are would give players more motivation to grind to be on the same level.
The game can still be serviceable if you're just looking for a simple twin-stick shooter, but there are a lot better games in that genre.