Panzer Paladin

I'd love to leave a positive review about this game, but the cons are so strong that they made me drop it completely. This game starts as a solid 9 or 10/10 — great soundtrack, beautiful pixel art, awesome animated intro and cutscenes, and a basic plot that serves as a simple backdrop. It's a platformer in the style of the old Mega Man games, with some innovative mechanics. The weapon system is interesting; however, I'm not a fan of having to break items to get a buff, heal, or deal damage — this mechanic gets old quickly as you're forced to rely on it. The bosses are usually a joke, with the exception of two or three — the stages are a breeze for the most part (I say this having played them all on hard mode). As expected, once you finish all stages, a final stage gauntlet appears — and that's where the game's biggest issues become clear: - Horrendous stage design: some levels are filled with instant deaths, tight jumps, or cheap death traps; - The game offers upgrades for your mech by consuming stored excess weapons; however, this only restores a small amount of health each time. That’s it. The game's shop and upgrade system is purely focused on mech HP and is essentially worthless, as the stages are filled with cheap and instant-death moments. - The checkpoint system is atrocious — you must sacrifice a weapon to activate a checkpoint, and there are only two per stage. They're so far apart that if you die too early or in between them, you're forced to restart everything. I get that it's meant to mimic retro platformers, but I find this an obnoxious practice and an example of poor game design. This kind of thing should’ve stayed in the '90s (same with instant-kill spikes — but I digress). - Boring enemies and challenges — they're either absurdly difficult or extremely shallow; - Some platform elements blend too much into the background (which I believe is intentional, but still frustrating) as they share a similar color palette. One example is a falling platform placed directly above spikes — and bam, you're dead, whether you're in your mech or not; - If your mech dies, you're stuck in human form, and then it's a gamble: either you get lucky and find a revival point nearby, or you're doomed to complete 60% of the stage in your weak human form; - The dichotomy between going in and out of your mech initially feels like a puzzle mechanic and introduces some interesting ideas... but ultimately falls flat, as the game doesn't explore it beyond forcing you into formulaic sections for a life or healing bonus. - The final stage gauntlet is so infuriating that I dropped the game entirely. It gathers all the worst aspects and dials them up to 100%. I really wanted to like this game, but the poor design choices, unfair mechanics, and cheap deaths — combined with the awful checkpoint system — dragged it from a 9/10 to a 2.5/10. I believe that games should present challenges to the player and not frustrate him to the point where he doesn't want to ever touch the game again. The only things that still shine are the soundtrack and the sprite/artwork. Wanna know a game that goes for the same genre and does the complete opposite in an amazing way? Gravity Circuit - you will not regret it.

This is a good modern "mega-man" style game where you're bashing classic mythical monsters instead of robots. The "forge" which allows you to design your custom pixelated weapons is a great time, and, with 16 levels and bosses, its definitely not too short. For complaints, the game leaves itself a little too much leeway in terms of difficulty where you can easily force a win by sacrificing weapons you've picked up to either keep healing during a fight or give yourself attack/defense bonuses. It might be recommended to play on a higher difficulty to get a sincere challenge out of the game while still using the given mechanics. Speaking of which, the game does appear to have some special mechanics like being able to parry and disarm, but its never explicitly enforced and only mentioned briefly in cutscenes, so you're left to figure it out yourself. Also, I did not like fighting the horseman 16 times as the midboss for every level. That got boring really fast - especially since his moves never changed.

Well made, but extremely repetitive. Wasn't enough in the main gameplay loop to keep me invested in finishing the game.

While faithful to 8bit platformers of the past this can be a plus or minus. Movement system is clunky, the weapon system is part of the games gimmick. Jump then Up + Attack is a double jump which makes you jump into some enemies above you. Using the shield to block is fun and one of the highlights of the game. For me the game would overall be more fun if there controls weren't going for an old 8bit style. Some modernisation around movement and jumping would make this better.