izigame.me

So, I really wanted to like this game. It looks nice, it's clearly a parody of Castlevania with a Touhou theme, and on video it feels like it should be a good experience. But it's comically bad.
As I said, the visuals are very nice, although there's some sort of blurry filter applied on everything, making this both pixel arts and smudgy. While playing it's not too distracting, but it's a weird choice nonetheless.
The gameplay loop is very simple: this plays more like an arcade game than anything; you get some lives, you go through levels, and if you lose all your lives, you start over. This would not be a bad thing if the game was enjoyable. Unfortunately, it's a chore.
Movement-wise, it's mostly classic stuff : run, jump, attack with your whip. You can summon some "special move" that aren't particularly powerful but allows attacking in different angles. These special moves are limited (and you really want to keep them for bosses). In addition to the classic movement options, the game also allows free flight once per jump. An interesting addition, that would seem to be fairly balanced (once per jump, and if you get hit, you drop). Buuuuuuuuut it isn't. Nothing's right.
The movement is stiff. Jumps are not forgiving *at all*; if you've been used to coyote time, forget it. Unfortunately, the "fly" button is the same as jump, so you'll regularly find yourself flying when you wanted to jump. This breaks all movement, prevent your main attack, and move slower, all of which you do not want when tightly evading dozens of projectiles. Flying should have been a separate button.
You can also dash in a sort of crouch-kick motion. This is quite slow, don't go very far, and do not provide any kind of evasion frames. It would be fine, if any of these three points were missing, but no.
Let's talk about combat. There's three large categories of ennemies in the game : basic contact enemies, enemies with projectiles/leap, and bosses. All do contact damage, and their attack patterns vary from nothing to shoot in eight directions. There's a few of ennemies that have a clear "dodge here" pattern. And I do mean a few. Like, one, maybe two. Other than that, they're placed at random, sometimes in positions where they can attack you while you can't fight back (since you can't attack in that many directions). They're sometimes put together with no care at all for level design. Finally, bosses do have very large arena to fight in. Which is a good thing, since they just spam shoot everywhere.
Note that the "bullet hell" part of this game is expected; this is a Touhou-themed game after all. And merging platforming and bullet-hell can be done well (see: Luna Night). Unfortunately, in this game, the patterns aren't thought out at ALL. It's just a spamfest. And there's a crucial detail that did not make it in this game: your hitbox is enormous. While in most Touhou (or Touhou-based games) your hitbox is clearly identified and generally a small circle, here your whole character takes hit. Having a hitbox that takes a third of the screen and dodging waves of shots that have less space than that around them makes for a bad combination.
So, the whole thing is terribly tedious. It nailed the visual, but failed to have proper level design or ennemies patterns. Core gameplay element like dodging and a usable hitbox are missing. Controls are not well thought out, leading to a lot of frustration when you press a button and get an unexpected outcome. Level design is non-existant.
The pardoy aspect have some thought put in it, made obvious by the general character design and ennemies, but as a whole this is a very frustrating experience.