izigame.me

It's Meat Boy with a cloaking device. I should hate it. The cloaker, which slows you but makes you invisible to any death trap that will kill you if it sees you, more or less guarantees you will be doing awful, fiddly jump-decloak-grab-cloak-land thumb gymnastics over and over until you perfect. The level gimmicks are all hugely different but you can find all the usual sins in one or two places: Exceedingly long trap reset wait times (Most levels are timed for speed running but there is at least one I can't figure out how to do anything but wait for.), risky runs that require frame perfect entry despite the fact it's completely on rails and there's no real reason to demand that annoying level of precision. And then the game proceeds to pretend to insult you by rating you on how much you died at a trial and error frustration platformer. May as well rate me on how many bullets I fire in Gears of War, bro. Worse, there's no tutorial at all, not even a hint (The ONLY time you get one is in world 3 to show you a door unlock switch. I thought at this point the developer was making fun of me.), you don't even know about your weird flippy mid-air jump or what it could possibly be used for, and a few traps are going to just kill you over and over until you figure out that maybe they aren't detecting what you think... like maybe it's detecting movement instead of you...?
I mean, this is all awful, but it's still some of the best I've played of the subgenre. The spy theme of the game is effortlessly cool in a Golgo 13 badass style. The traps are extremely well-varied, such that each world and each room manages to have its own identity, as opposed to Meat Boy's "the one with one square wide jumps between saws vs. the one with one square wide WALL JUMPS between saws". The controls are pretty tight, no Meat Boy sliding or physics based wall jump nonsense. Most of the tougher rooms don't feel on rails. Several are, yes, but the more interesting rooms seem to be fairly open on ways to complete them, at least with regards to the order of jumps you need to make. Some of the late game traps are kinda bullshit but there's nothing here you can't do so long as you can learn some simple thumb gymnastics for jump-decloak-cloak.
The music is pretty good, the art is great, and the cutscenes are extremely cool, again, in a Golgo 13 style.
Overall, this is a very solid entry in a crowded subgenre. There is a lot of care in this to make each level unique and interesting. It's certainly a worthwhile purchase.