Recent reviews by Tyrian Mollusk

I attempted to run this three times. Two of those times started me in an empty room with nothing to do. One of those attempts ended in a freeze. One crashed. One hung my system.

The translation (what I managed to see of it) was poor, and sometimes nonsensical.

Control configuration was broken, and even if you did remap it, the game ignored your mapping. Settings don't seem to be saved, either.

Let this get some patches before you touch it, but I'd be concerned this was even considered ready for public release in such a broken state. Those are not good project standards.

The game, while pretty janky, has some cute aspects, but be warned if you play on controller that the controls are poorly converted keyboard inputs and basically feel terrible to play with. I played it enough like that on the prerelease demo, and controller play apparently hasn't been deemed worth basic fixes for this obvious wrong-headed setup after some nine months, so into the bin this goes. Recommending kbm is not an excuse for poor controller design.

Radio Free Europa is an enjoyable arcade space shooter, with some nice gameplay touches, but a cumbersome between-stage phase to get upgrades and a weird loot structure.

The play here is enjoyably rich. Your ship direction matters for shooting and for thrust, so there's an added physicality/mindfulness to the action, and you have a dodge-type move that has added movement utility and enhances the play rather than is just some iframes. The enemies have a variety of armaments to deal with, and staying on top of them takes a lot of attention and some acquired know-how. This is not an easy game, and your first time against new enemies tends to not be pretty, and may even have you quite mismatched.

It's very much an arcade slanted roguelite: you have little cross-run progression (a few loadout unlocks rather than upgrades), and your goal is very score oriented. No grinding to bring the game up to the level you're supposed to get to play. You also start with a nice variety of starting ship options, each with their own movement and weapons, and they definitely play differently. Scoring offers a hit-chain based multiplier to add interest and challenge you. It feels a little at odds with some of the play aspects, but maybe skill can overcome that, and either way chaining adds engagement.

There are a lot of in-run upgrade options, with many different weapons to play with. The system for using them has some issues and is a bit cumbersome, unfortunately, both mechanically and conceptually. There's a lot of information tied to icons and things you just need to figure out from bits of information scattered around other upgrades. For example, one of your weapon attributes is shot lifetime, but you only know what that icon means from seeing it used on the shot lifetime upgrade. There's no icon or concept key in the manual (which is on the main screen labeled "Compendium"--don't ignore that thinking it's one of those lists of things you've seen). You also can't actually use a drop without salvaging about 10-30 times as many other drops, and your primary shot is made of two weapons that each take their own base and upgrades, which makes for some tedium and limitation you work through between levels, but each slot can also have additional weapons added to it that all fire together. I'd like to see the loot/upgrade aspect get some improvement and more of a fun-bias, but as it is, you still have more things to play with, as well as some added interest to which enemy zones you choose (enemies do affect drops quite a bit).

It's a small project, which you will notice, but it does manage its own specialness and unique flair, which is always good to find.

Trinity Fusion is a bit janky here and there, but overall it's a good action platformer roguelite with a notably different feel from the norm. A big aspect of that different feel comes from making enemies solider and more imposing. You get far fewer hit-stuns from your attacks, and you can dash by enemies but not simply walk through them. There's a distinct feel to the combat here that takes some getting used to, so be patient with it.

For fighting play, you have a main weapon and two slots for side weapons (generally charged by main weapon hits), jump, dodge, and a couple slots for consumables/cooldown abilities. There are also some traversal abilities you get depending on character, which can make the gameplay a little confusing since sometimes you can double jump and sometimes you cannot. A post-release update added parry, which you need to unlock and slot through the metaprogression. It's not a flashy parry, but it works, and if you are a parry type player you will find it easy and effective with a generous window, so for me, a substantial gameplay upgrade.

Metaprogression--aside from the parry--is pretty boring and rudimentary stuff with two currencies split between upgrades and space to slot upgrades, so you are doubly constrained and have to manage which currencies you choose in runs. There are also a few ability unlocks requiring passing the various main stage bosses, and the bosses are tough, so that takes some time to open play up.

Metal Mutation is a bit clunky and oddly designed, but it's got some solid play if you enjoy a top-down melee roguelite with a strong parry.

Let's look at your basic combat options. For defense, you have a mildly janky dodge and a very strong parry. A successful parry allows a special follow-up rush-forward attack (and you don't need to attack the enemy you parry), while dodge can be canceled into a kind of air combo. Your main weapon choice sets your basic combo and your cooldown special, and your basic combo can be interrupted by most other moves, which gets good use. Your secondary weapon choice (used by the floating girl) sets two more cooldown attacks (one which is especially good for more safely ending the dash air combo). You can take another very dramatic cooldown attack from bosses, which will depend on what boss you get it from. You've also got a running attack that you can do after you run a couple seconds, which tends to be an upgraded version of your basic. And when you get a finisher prompt, for some reason doing that is also an AoE aerial attack you can move and drop on nearby enemies. So you do have things to do as you fight.

You have six unlockable main weapons, and three secondaries. Your basic, special, main-secondary, and dash can each get elemental upgrades, which also may change their looks and properties. Any element upgrade has a first and second tier form, and some can be further upgraded with a second element (in very specific combinations that do not cover all elements). Element changes to your attacks help weapons get a little more varied than they initially seem. You also have an array of other upgrade options that can add properties and various random effects.

One definite issue with the game is that many of these other effects are patently terrible, and I mean "small chance to heal comically insignificant health with highly situational activation and on a surprisingly long cooldown" levels of terrible. Another issue is that while the elemental attacks do vary, there are a lot of narrow, straight-line attacks and flashy AoEs, which do tend to feel overly samey beyond their graphics. The two element combination system also really limits your builds unless you abandon that altogether, and it seems like you have way too little influence over your elements to make focused builds work, meaning not fixating on the combinations seems to limit you without any way to compensate (there are upgrades that give you a general one-element boost, but you can only take those when you pass up the other upgrades of that same element, so there's just no way to use elements you are avoiding).

Another negative point is the co-op side mode, a set of just three non-procedural mini missions that just have no real interest, but that take a while and need to be farmed again and again. As you get stronger, these get easier to handle, which is good because the co-op aspect just makes no sense in the game. To enter co-op you need to be at specific points in your run and then find someone else also looking for co-op at the right time. In other words, you're not only bringing your own other players (because of course you are), but you all need to co-ordinate when your individual games are in a "can co-op" state, with huge power variations based on where you are in your runs. There's a way to do co-op from the pre-run base that's easier to co-ordinate, but doing that gives you a bunch of random upgrades that you can't even plan through (you don't get to choose between elements, you don't have needed rerolls, and you don't even know what you'll be offered as you build), so your build always comes out clunky, incomplete junk.

There's an oddball mix of metaprogression to work on, with weapon unlocks via currency, a stat tree built on XP, achievement-based weapon upgrades, and two layers of gearing. The first, you build up your gear objects for their slot bonuses, and then the second comes after the first clear, where you get another set of upgrades from enemy drops and slot into your gear (higher tier gear has more slots). These second upgrades also build up as you collect larger piles of their requisite drops, which makes this effectively a second stat/perk tree to advance. It's all kind of a lot, but there's kind of a nice novelty to it since it's not just flat feeding bonuses, and you get some small choice how you apply your options in the middling times before you basically have everything and are just piling on bonuses. There's also a token Hade-style piecemeal difficulty system you use to try and pull the threat side of the game up to match your power progression, but there's nothing really interesting there as it's still mainly raising enemy survivability and lowering your own.

All in all, I feel pretty positively towards it, even if it's a janky, half-baked mishmash of Curse of the Dead Gods and Hades. I like melee action with play options and parry-style active defense, and not many games lean into that properly.

There's an interesting game here, but the controller play is simply unacceptable and outright incompatible with the game's design. The game requires work from the controller player fixing bad design choices--obviously ill-conceived choices that were reported and ignored from the pre-release demo through the entirety of early access. Not just that, but working around bugs and misbehaviors, some of which also have been there since EA opened, and some which were added later and left in despite being wrong, like rolling target horde and sacrifice undead into the same button, so you have to be careful to avoid touching a minion or it will blow up. You never want to click a minion to sacrifice it, because you already have better buttons to sacrifice specific undead near the cursor. It's 100% wrong design binding those incompatible functions together.

I wanted to recommend this game, as it has some quite unique play, offers a kind of engaging experience (it's definitely nice to see a necromancer game where you actually have things to do and the mechanical play is active and interesting),and it's got at least one fantastic boss fight that really shows what the game could have been leaning into its particular mechanics, but there were problems that needed to be addressed in early access that are still central aspects of playing at release, even besides the frustratingly wrong-headed failure of controller play.

A major example is that while the micro is fairly busy and unusual, aside from the boss battles, everything you fight in a biome just feels extremely samey, and fighting through areas is pretty much the whole game. There just isn't enough variety and interest to the enemies (and there are so few kinds of enemies that even group composition isn't really a thing) or how/where you engage with them: manage the horde and push until done. You can be very busy, but it's like treading water. Runs often feel more exhausting than fun and they really drag on. The game saves, but like many of its features, it's only tokenly implemented. It saves just the beginning of a biome, so if you go forward any, you're slogging all the way to the boss, and if you quit or the game crashes, you start the biome over.

A minor example is the map, or more accurately, the failure that passes for a map because the devs couldn't just draw their simple level shapes and show you a map, so they eventually just made a circle that vaguely indicates the notable thing at the end of that direction. The levels branch and involve a lot of walking to the end and walking back to the branch (yes, backtracking is relentless and unmitigated here, and your horde decays as time passes), and with how samey the levels look, it can become a real nuisance just getting back on the untrodden path, so a map that showed explored vs unexplored was all anyone wanted. Instead, we have a circle, so you can at least try to avoid the flag/objective marker until you run out of alternatives.

Enjoying this game basically requires that you fix its problems yourself, that you put up with things you can't fix, and that you can be distracted by the play from how deeply rote what you are actually doing always is. If that works for you or you just want to see it's novelty/potential, then this might be a game to try, but that isn't exactly what I'd call a "recommend", and the way they clearly just quietly wrote off their controller customers patiently waiting for our reports and issues to get addressed, even just basic steps to be genuinely playable, is not ok.

Voidigo is a brightly colorful and wacky top-down shooter with a jump instead of a dodge and a big emphasis on the boss fighting. I don't normally enjoy boss fights much, but here they feel a lot more fun and integrated with the play, which is good because you tend to fight the boss several times over the course of the level as you wear it down until it switches to its final stage for the real battle. The system for this does overstay its welcome a bit, but nonetheless, the bosses are unusual and engaging to fight when there's one of them. There often isn't just one of them.

Runs are relatively short to see all the levels, with an emphasis on looping rather than more biomes. Looping has a bizarre and truly annoying minigame to sacrifice upgrades and weapons from your build when you loop. This is one of those game mechanics that can only be conceived of by devs who relish annoying their players (and it's certainly not the only thing like that in this game).

Visuals are cute but beyond noisy, and sadly, this got far worse over early access rather than better, to the point where it doesn't even feel like we ended up getting as good of a game as we had earlier on, as the balance shifted from play to upgrades. It's not hard to barely be able to see what's going on and fight practically by instinct. The end stage and all post-loop boss fights, especially, are a mess as you deal with multiple bosses and their comically aggressive attacking all at the same time (plus in the end zone, a background you can barely see) and that's not even with whatever mess is coming out of your upgrades. It's a real shame a game with such obviously lavish graphics makes looking at itself so unpleasant and useless.

Characters are few but varied, and weirdly so (in a mainly positive way). One, for example, has a remote device that your attacks come from, which you need to manipulate as you run around fighting. Each character has their own small pool of starting weapon options, and an upgrade. You need to unlock each of those specifically, and that's the vast majority of the metaprogression.

Metaprogression is of the unlock type, plus a couple run feature type unlocks. There's also a tracking style "progression" where you need to check boxes on using weapons, upgrading powerups, and killing bosses, pushing you to use things you don't want and sacrifice run opportunities upgrading things you don't even like just to eventually get to whatever is gated by checking all those boxes. I find box-checking tracking systems like that an ugly drag on a game.

Upgrades are mostly pretty simple but with wacky aspects to them, like rats instead of homing missiles. There are a number of pet type upgrades that do various oddball things alongside you and used to be quite amusing, but pets took an absurdly heavy nerf during early access (on a philosophy that's strangely absent for several other builds that readily fight with little to no real attention from the player...) and have never really been up to par since that.

Weapons have a fair bit of cartoon variety to them, and there's the significant addition of melee weapons to the usual weird gun array, which both add blocking to your play and have a unique system where weapons have a sequence of different attacks they make and the game keeps track of where you are in that sequence as you attack. Unfortunately, the game also uses a rarity system for both weapons and upgrades, so you see the same things a lot and generally get a lot less access to most of the pool. Some probably like this, but run variety through refusing to dole out the variety the game actually has feels annoyingly artificial. Guns and melee both have noticeably restrictive ammo-type mechanics, forcing you to be careful how much you use anything. You only have two weapon slots.

Has a lot of difficulty levels to pick from, but the difficulty is tuned to the type where you're basically supposed to just not get hit, so while higher difficulties feel more engaging and fun to play, they also do more damage and give back less health, making them harder to enjoy and progress in (you basically get nothing for your time if you don't beat the boss and win the level). I wish those weren't tied together, but at least it's pretty easy--if a little boring--to grind lower difficulty to unlock things.

Exploration is a little tedious, and this gets genuinely annoying if you have any backtracking to do, which you often do since health, ammo, and weapon drops need to be revisited. Levels used to be fixed squares of cross-connected rooms that were always easy to chase down the boss and backtrack to things since everything was one or two rooms away, but they changed that into random arrangements that have zero effect on anything except that you have to spend a lot more time crossing empty rooms now. For some reason, they refused to add teleporting like is commonly done to address backtracking. Speaking of intentionally bad decisions, the game also zooms way in while out of active combat, significantly reducing what you can see as you look for objects and enemies, another thing the devs simply refuse to offer even an option to disable even though no one likes it and it has no gameplay effect other than annoying the player.

Achievements are pretty ruthless, with not just all the higher difficulties but looping as well, and a couple of those annoying practically random edge case achievements just to be annoying I guess. Definitely not an easy game to 100% for those who care about their percentages, but good for people who want achievements that are actually difficult to get.

Overall, despite some flaws and oppressive annoyingness from the devs, there's some fun to be had, and it's got a number of unique aspects on top of the unusual visuals. Kind of 50-50 between problems it shouldn't have and decent novelty. I'd probably err on giving it a thumbs up, but then it has had dumb bugs since even the beginning of early access where it stupidly tries to use the 4k/30 video mode on my native 1080p monitor so I have to run it windowed (and I do mean windowed, since devs apparently never could be bothered to implement a borderless fullscreen option like normal games would have), and even then it randomly drops to half speed because maybe I want to play at 30fps for no reason whatsoever. Devs that can't be bothered to fix basic things leave me not being bothered to give thumbs up reviews.

Quote from devs on reporting glaring controller problems: "Right now the only way to properly play the game would be via keyboard/mouse!" 30 days and multiple updates later, and controller play remains exactly as unacceptably and unignorably horrible as it was at release.

This is core behavior like aiming, and not "compatibility". Can you imagine a developer putting a game out where the mouse moved extra slowly, gravitated to cardinal directions regardless of whether you want to aim that way, and actually slowed down as it got close to where you want it to be? Amazing a dev can even put something like this in front of players, let alone suggest people actually play that way.

Recent devlog post has an extensive list of things getting worked on and improved--controller fixes were not even mentioned. If the dev cares this little about how their game fundamentally plays, I will spend my time elsewhere rather than wait to see if they eventually bother.

Development company fired over 200 people, including everyone on this game, and cancelled the whole project. Neon Echo was a cool game with genuine heart, and the people working on it were doing real quality work that should be a model for other early access projects, but it's far from finished and the people who deserve positive reviews are gone and can't benefit from them or from your money. Only the people who stabbed this game and its team in the back will benefit from your purchase. Do not buy.

Controller support: Yes (all my playtime--including launch day--is on controller)
Controller remapping: Yes
Separate text and speech language settings: Yes
Separate volume for voices: Yes
English translation: Understandable as far as gameplay but a bit janky. Some weird language to get used to, both theme/stylistic and odd (occasionally mistaken, but at least consistent) word choices. Fairly impressive, given the large amount of text.

I initially wrote how the game really lacked enemy interest, especially in the cakewalk-tier first area, but have to revisit that point after more time because the game actually gets substantially harder as you play, not merely via difficulty levels (unlocked, of course) but by changing the enemies, hazards, and fights even in the very beginning of the game. This is a big bonus as far as play and fun, but does not segue well with the hugely grindy meta-progression (eg, the hundreds and no I'm not kidding of boss kills required are going to take a lot longer now than it was taking in the early hours, because it simply takes longer to get to the bosses). Still, good for them adding interest.

Combat inputs are: jump, dodge, normal attack, special attack (timed cooldown, enhanced on specific music timing), ultimate attack (charged slowly by hits), and some character specific action (sword fighter gets boost mode, gun fighter gets hold for rapid fire). There's also a jump slam attack and a counterattack you get by dodging through an enemy attack (which is pretty strong and generous on timing), and the counterattack and ultimate each trigger a small boost mode which can trigger some special upgrades (you can get upgrades to trigger it other ways, too). You can duck, but aside from an upgrade that was triggered by it, it's not very relevant.

So far, the rhythm element seems to be limited to activating your special attack on a specific fixed beat every few seconds (instructions say "on downbeat", but it's more like every fourth downbeat). Timing is reasonably generous there, but you'll want to adjust the volume to bring the music level above the fighting. I'd have liked to see a lot more music linkage adding potential complexity to the combat (and support for more personally engaging music the player could provide), but at least it doesn't entirely force you to play a certain way/pace. The cooldown on the special feels overly long given the very few actions at your disposal, especially since you'll often need to wait for the beat if you want the better version.

You start with the sword fighter and have to unlock the other two (bubble gun user, then claw brawler) through a combination of story advancement and beating the bosses. The space between the first character unlock and the second feels overly long, and the second unlock doesn't feel very interestingly different from the first character, since both are simple melee fighters. There are some in-run upgrades that can change how a character plays, so that can help add some variety play interest--or it can leave you annoying you don't get to play the way you like as your picks there are very limited.

There is also a weird run-upgrade grid you slot items into at the shop. It's 3x3, random each run, and you don't get to see it until the first shop. Slot items come in different shapes to restrict where you can slot them, are pretty sparse, and you aren't allowed to fill the grid even if you get enough matching items. Each slot has a bonus (which can easily be useless to you), and each row and column has an additional bonus (again, often useless) if you have all three corresponding slots filled. Everything about this system is wildly random and can easily go against you (eg, had a huge fire run but all the fire bonuses were on the shape that I never got).

Metaprogression has three fairly shallow trees (they barely branch). Unlock nodes to see adjacent nodes, most nodes have levels it can be upgraded. Early meta-upgrades look fairly normal, but currency costs seem pretty huge, and there's a second currency required in substantial quantities to advance further into the tree (and at least the outer ring of nodes seems to be relegated to "coming soon"). There are a bunch of meta-currencies to gain and spend on several different mechanics (again, very like Hades). You look to have up to four keepsake slots, that you can fill in as you advance through a run (ie, you always have only one at run start). Keepsakes are pretty basic bonuses, but not trivial.

Each level seems like a fairly fixed simple platformer style series of rooms/halls, without much of any platforming opportunity, as you mainly fight the enemies on your current flat space, then move to the next.

There are some kind of trap-based obstacle levels and some things like a level type where you have to run/jump back and forth between rising platforms without hitting the top or bottom of the area. These require pretty different play from the rest of the game and don't really fit, but you aren't forced to take them (seems like there's always a level choice to avoid those levels if you don't want to take your chances and just fight your way through everything).

As far as early access, it launched in a good state and was quite polished for what was there, and the developer demonstrated good interest and commitment to players enjoying their work. Tragic their quality work was so betrayed by their company.

Kill to Collect is a sluggish game of noticeably uninspired play. Your characters have little to do and your enemies offer little to care about. Definitely don't get it to play solo, and if you have other people to play with, you have more fun games to play with them.