Recent reviews by Dom the Elegy

Game refuses to play in fullscreen on my main monitor and the windowed option is blurry as hell. No amount of fiddling with options or the .ini files fixes this. The game also loves to just waste your time with entirely empty corridors, long respawn times after death, and countless of extremely slow moving elevators. This makes the pacing of the game absolutely atrocious.
Called it quits after I beat a boss and the only way forward was through water that immediately killed me, which caused me to respawn back to before the boss. Life is too short for ♥♥♥♥ like this.

I don't think I have ever hated the combat in a game more than I hate the combat here.
I was a huge fan of Shovelknight so I was looking forward to this game a lot and it is such a tremendous disappointment that it's hard for me to put into words.

Everything in this game seems to be designed around the principle to be as annoying as possible. The mix of Castlevania sub-weapons that you lose on death does not mix with Legend of Zelda style puzzles that require specific sub-weapons AT ALL. At best you'll have to make notes of inaccessible areas on the map to come back to later when you find the item you need through dumb luck. At worst you'll have to search the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map for one specific item the game can very easily just rip away from you because of how bad the combat is. Your attacks only cover 4 directions while every single enemy will attack you from diagonals, forcing you into sub-weapons which require ammo. Run out of ammo, well sucks to suck, no more fun for you.

On top of that your dodge takes well over a second to come out because it only works out of a full jump that you can't speed up or influence in any way. So fast enemies will just rush you down whille you hop around helplessly, BEGGING for a proper dodge or shield. The game is also absolutely lousy with pits and getting hit naturally sends you back quite a bit so every source of damage is essentially doubled. To top it off, the game decides where to respawn you after falling down a pit where it would be most annoying. Trying to get through a room but get knocked into a pit just before the transition to the next? Back to the start of the room. You want to get out of a dead end room but got hit back just before you made it? Get put back into the furthest corner of the room. It's horribly inconsistent and insanely frustrating.
Inconsistency in general is another big issue with the game. You can get hit by tons of stuff even when you're burrowed underground even when it makes no sense whatsoever; the most perplexing example to me being spikes on the floor.

And before people bring up that you can find/ buy trinkets that buff your options and make the combat suck less, that's not an excuse and I so do not care that the game might get better 5/10/X hours later. The start of your game should not be THIS miserable, borderline unplayable unless you grind for currency.

So yeah, it brings me 0 joy to have to write this but I really hate this game and I'm so incredibly disappointed.

Godawful hit detection and mile long walk backs to where you got bullshitted to death. ♥♥♥♥ this.

Thought with the discount I'd give the series its 5th or so try to see if I can find what other people see in it.
Nope. Still can't. Still has THE worst feeling guns in any game. Throwing the bullets would deal more damage than using these stupid looking Fisher-Price toys.
It completely baffles me that this made it past the first entry.

The cute artstyle is just about the only good thing I can say about this game. It is extremely slow to start, the combat feels terrible because of the very short range of your attack and the pointless inclusion of a stamina system, you get no map and a limited inventory which includes progression critical items, and despite having several buttons open, you have to awkwardly juggle a ring menu to swap between items. Just... no. On all accounts but the visuals.

This is one of those cases where a mixed option rather than good or bad would be most applicable.
The game itself is fine but it is just so horribly buggy. Even getting it to boot is an entire ordeal. I've had to verify the files and straight up un- and reinstall the game about a dozen times just so it launches which would make me straight up ditch it if the game size wasn't so small.

Bugs sadly also plague the actual gameplay itself. Clicking on tabs often does nothing while you're in a folder like the shop so you have to click off the shop, click back to it, just so the tabs work again.
Further, massage bots will randomly and without notice detach from assigned programs which the cluttered UI makes hard to notice and even harder to fix.

There's just way too much friction based on all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bugs. Because of that I'd say definitely still wait till this game reaches a playable state.

Rig specs:
Win 11 Pro
Aorus X670 Elite AX MB
Ryzen 7 7800X 3D
Nvidia 3080 Strix
2x Vengeance DDR5 16GB 6400 MHz

I get that it's a low budget title but this just has way too many glaring issues to ignore. This starts on a technical level. There's barely any options, the game only supports resolutions up to 1080p and there's no framerate option at all, the game just defaults to your monitor refresh rate. This wouldn't be a problem, except if you go above 60fps, the enemies speed up by the same factor. Never seen anything like this, it's only the enemies, not your character, the physics, music, or sound effects. So right off the bat you're forced to use external tools to limit the game to 60fps for it to even be playable.
Things do not get better from there tho. There's barely any enemy variety, everything is way too tanky, you get no actual new tools or abilites save for weapons that just deal damage. In terms of what your character can do you only get a higher jump and a higher top speed. Think of it like the run in Super Metroid (NOT the speedboost, I mean the run you start with) which is used to extend jumps a bit. It's all very underwhelming. Worst are the bosses which each have 2-3 attacks each which they repeat ad naseum while you plink away at their WAY too long health bars. There's no escalation or hook to any of them. All fights stay the same for the entire boring affaire. There's more that bothered me but honestly the gameplay alone is enough to make this a hard pass.

Stolen art, AI slop, and unfocused blurry images. Just frustrating to play. Avoid.

All the worst parts of Elden Ring distilled with none of the good parts to counteract them. Just don't bother. It's an experiment but a horribly failed one.

Charming but EXTREMELY short action adventure obviously paying homage to Link's Awakening. But for your price of admission you only get a 20 minute campaign with 3 very short dungeons and a survival mode.