I got a bit worried when this game touted its "five insanely difficult levels," because games that are "insanely difficult" tend to have that become their most memorable, if not only, defining characteristic. What do you remember about Battletoads or Ikaruga, for example? Wait a minute...Ikaruga...oh, no...not again...
So yeah. You all know the drill by now, so I don't feel the need to tell you that I've grown a bit tired of bullet hell games centered around changing colors to not die. Whatever, though, as long as the mechanics hold up, this game is fine by me.
I'm glad to say that "insanely difficult" ended up not being the game's only defining characteristic. In fact, it's hardly a characteristic at all. I only played the first level, so it's possible they were just trying to wean me onto the more ball-crunching levels with baby's first bullet hell, but the only difficult part about it was the boss fight, which I dare say was nigh impossible, so there goes the notion of a difficulty curve.
You know what bothers me most, though? The boss didn't need to be as infuriating as it was. The attacks follow a near perfect pattern, being just unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes, but not so much to the point where it becomes random. I actually had a lot of fun with the boss fight until I realized what gave it the name "insanely difficult." It seems one of the developers added a few extra '0's to the boss's health, because the bastard simply does not die. I shot at the thing constantly for five minutes and I was only able to destroy one of its many segments. Its possible I was just doing it wrong, but how complex can a bullet hell boss be to kill? I shot at literally everything it had for as long as I could. I'm not saying I should've beaten the boss no problem, but I should've at least come close. I wasn't just screwing around, I was trying. I was making a lot of mistakes, yeah, but not enough to warrant killing only 4% of the boss.
"lazy" is not a word I like to throw around (especially not to a dev team that includes pictures of themselves at computers, captioned 'hard at work,' which was a nice tough). "Lazy" is a soul-crusher of a word that declares that not only did your project fail, but it failed because you didn't love it enough. It's a cruel word to use and one that I've made people my mortal enemies for using on me, but I have to be honest and say that simply giving the boss more health than Sardinia if it went to CrossFit is a cheap and...*gulp*...I'm sorry...lazy way of increasing the difficulty.
This game didn't need to be "insanely difficult." It could have been a really fun, if simplistic, shoot 'em up, but it tried to be something its not. This game was a pleasant, unathletic kid who occasionally dabbled in Magic the Gathering, but snubbed the nerdy crew to go hang out with the jocks, but the jocks ended up just giving him wedgies and calling him names. Or, if that analogy's a bit too obtuse for you, here's an overview of the game as a whole: It looks good, feels good and sounds good, but artificial difficulty is its downfall.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay modest.
Links
Letter, Letter, Hyphen, Number: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=521
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