Beat on Normal as Mike. I did not like the goofy aesthetics of the characters, and felt the game was sorely lacking in voice acting and story. It felt like randomly going from level to level for no real reason. The core gameplay was fun enough, but the level and enemy design was often frustrating. It had Borderlands style introductions for each new enemy type, but they looked so ridiculous and had such nonsense names that damned if I remembered any of them. The basic robot enemies were fun to fight, with easy tells to deflect their shots. The bomb enemies were just there; not fun but not too annoying. There was also a kamikaze bomb enemy that glowed red and charged you to explode. Great idea, putting suicide enemies into a melee beat em up…. If I actually noticed them in time to shoot the gun, then I could take them out without getting hurt. The discount Doom 3 pinkies were very annoying because they had an unblockable charge. They glowed red before doing the charge, but their brown color made it extremely difficult to notice the red glow; poor game design right there. I disliked the entire concept of unblockable attacks, given that blocking consumed energy, which was also used for the gun. Soon after that came the absolute worst enemy type in the game; the god damn minotaurs. They glowed red before doing a long range charge, which could only be dodged by waiting until the last possible moment before dodging. Then their normal attack was an unblockable 3 hit combo where any hit stunned, almost guaranteeing that you took all 3 hits. And to top it off, they had no pattern and could do either attack at any time. So I would bait them into charging, run in for a few hits, then dodge out of range before the 3 hit combo came. But sometimes they did another charge, which hit me every single time because of the cooldown on dodging. They were obnoxious, frustrating and tedious, especially when the game put in environmental hazards that forced taking them down faster than the normal slog. The first boss took me several tries to learn the pattern and it was all about dodging at the last possible moment when he glowed red.

The second world introduced brand new enemies and did not recycle the old ones, so thank god for no more minotaurs. The 2 headed gun guys were a little more tricky than the robot gunners, but the same principle. The brown wrestler things were tough to fight in groups because they alternated attacks and would circle behind me for cheap attacks. I found myself trying to separate them as they were easy to stunlock when alone, or using the gun. After beating the game I tried out some basic combos and found the light charged attack to be good for knocking them down. The big grey tank guys were not bad, just punch and block when they attacked. They had a glowing red jump attack which could be tough to dodge because they could change god damn direction in mid air to track me. Then there were smaller grey things with arm cannons that were easy to deal with alone, but extremely difficult in groups. So of course the later levels made me fight groups of them. The light charge would likely work well on them. My strategy was use gun as much as possible, then focus 1 down with light attack spam while trying to at least block some damage. The second boss was incredibly obnoxious with cheap attacks that lacked proper tells. Where was the red glowing?? While I could get behind him to avoid the arm lash, the gorilla smack combo hit me almost every single time. I died several times before deciding to go full cheese and run around waiting for my energy to regen to kill him exclusively with gun; a measly 20 damage every 15 seconds. Terrible boss design. Then the second last level was a brutal gauntlet with the toughest fights in the game. The first checkpoint did not work as it respawned me at the beginning of the level with a forcefield preventing me from getting back to the enemies, so that took several tries. It got to the point where I left the game running between fights to let my energy regen to full for maximum gun abuse. The last fight even had a place I could jump to that enemies could not reach, so I just hid up there until my energy regened. The final boss took a few attempts and it really came down to being aggressive with light attack spam, and interrupting his flurries with perfect blocks. I tried being cheap with the gun, but the later stages had him summon those gun robots.

There were only 2 levels that I did not get full xp points, near the beginning. I upgraded my melee skill twice, but after seeing that all it did was unlock more combos, I did not see the point to upgrade it further. I dislike fighting game style button inputs, so I mostly spammed light attacks, block and dodge. Light attack spam did extremely well actually, and the few times I tried using a simple combo I was usually interrupted by taking a hit. There was a simple 3 hit aerial combo, which was not really worth using. Heavy attacks were not really useful. The light dash attack was good, and the heavy caused me to fly up over the enemy, which was kind of useful on the minotaurs. Beyond that I did not bother to learn any moves, and instead put all my xp into maxing blocking and gun. After beating the game I tried out the girl. It sucked that there was no way to switch characters on the same save. She could not spam light attacks because there was a short delay after 3 hits, thus forcing me to use more variety. So she sucked.

The level design was all over the place. One was sprawling with lots of opional areas, some had platforming and hazards that were annoying. Some platforming was even of the hated instant death variety, and the hazards did not affect enemies. I did manage to knock a big guy to his death, and get a minotaur stuck on the edge, but far more often the enemies knocked me to an instant death. The few times I got to drive a mech were good, though I stopped using the ranged attack because going melee allowed the mech to last longer. This game felt like a 90s or early 2000s beat em up with the only good things being the controls and full 360 movement and attacking (for enemies too). It was annoying that the D pad could not be used in menus though. It needed quite a bit more content and balancing to be a decent game.

5.5/10