Go Mecha Ball Review (Squip)
The sugar addled love child of Super Monkey Ball, Hades, and Doom. This game slaps.
PROs:
The best part of the game is it's incredibly fun, unique movement. Almost every environment is full of bumpers, fans, boosts, and more to creatively navigate between enemies at high speeds. Chaining these together is a satisfying skill.
Combat and enemy design is pretty on point, they're easy to read, have a large variety in threat level and how you play around them from ammo fodder you can pinball through to big bads you absolutely have to watch your step around.
Aesthetic and sound design: It's a chaotic, bold, glitchpop feel. Some might not like this or find it overwhelming but I found it unique and immersive.
Cons:
Upgrades: I have a couple issues with the upgrade system. A lot of the upgrades are stat bumps, but you have no way of knowing how big that bump is. For example, if you're offered 2 upgrades, one which boosts gun damage, and another which boosts gun damage and fire rate, they each buff your gun damage by a different amount and there's no in game info to figure out those amounts. Also, once you've taken your second ability, all ability offerings for the rest of the game are effectively dead options so your upgrade choices are limited. The game should either greatly reduce the offerings of abilities after you've taken your second or allow you to pick more powerful versions of the abilities.
The design of some levels: most of the levels feel incredible to play. But some are super clunky and really throw off the gameplay flow. The biggest offender here is a level in the sandy region where you have to land on a set of small platforms to take out the enemies perched there, but the games controls and isometric perspective make the depth perception and movement required to land this jump very awkward. It gets easier with practice but I'd rework this level. There a few other levels that could use a couple extra traversal options.
Run variety: As far as I can tell, you play the same maps every run, and many of the upgrades are pretty incremental, and you face the same bosses each time as well. At about 3 hours of gameplay I won my first run and haven't gone back to see how the ascensions work, so I might update this later, but if they could find a way to make each run feel a little more unique that would add a lot to the game.