30XX

11.09.2023 - 19:51 / metacritic.com

Positives: The gameplay mechanics are fluid and satisfying, the music is amazingly composed, the general aesthetic wonderfully captures thePositives: The gameplay mechanics are fluid and satisfying, the music is amazingly composed, the general aesthetic wonderfully captures the retro feel of the megaman X series while injecting its own personal flair, the abilities and power-ups are creative and varied, the the quasi-random level generation provides good replay value.

Negatives: This game does a pretty poor job of explaining itself and how it works. The power-ups, for instance, oftentimes have descriptions that do not explain how they work or what they do effectively at all, opting instead to provide some tongue-in-cheek one-liner, leaving you to piece together what the power does.

This would be somewhat fine, except the game makes you choose most of the time to take one power up instead of another, and much of the time, you have to pay for it with pickups, so at worst, the game is asking you to guess what the power is and hope it’s useful.

The game also, as alluded to, has an obsession with juvenile quirkiness in everything from the menu prompts to the dialogue, and it’s, in a word, obnoxious. I rolled my eyes quite often playing this game; it actually wrecked my immersion quite often.

One of the worst offenders here was during the tutorial when the main villain ponders whether or not she should, and I quote, “Do a MuRdEr”. This villain is supposed to be a brilliant and sophisticated scientist by the way. And before anyone claims that the story/characterization isn’t supposed to be taken seriously, my knowledge of the lore, which I looked up out of confusion more than anything, implies just the opposite.

The story clearly takes itself quite seriously and clues to it are sprinkled esoterically throughout the game, so I argue that critiquing the awkward presentation is fair play.

Then there’s the gameplay, which is buttery smooth in its construction, but fumbles in two key aspects; difficulty and platforming. The game has two main modes, standard and megamode.

Standard is a roguelite experience where you traverse 10 randomly-generated levels that appear in a random order (except the last two) and get harder as you go, and you have to start over if you die. You can also collect persistent currencies to buy permanent upgrades between runs. Megamode, on the other hand, let’s you pick which order you do the levels, which are set for the entire run, and dying allows you to retry the level.