Smelter Reviews

7 hours later and Smelter is still fantastic! Really glad because I was looking forward to this one. I love platformers and RTS and this game has both to a very satisfying extent! The quality of aesthetics and gameplay really brings me back to the days when these types of games were the bread and butter of companies like Nintendo, just pumping out hit after hit on handhelds. A very nostalgic experience, but it still manages to go beyond that and keeps up with modern quality of life. Titles like this and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night are the reason why I still strongly believe that these types of games are still in demand and great fun, even with the level of detail and graphics that AAA and some indie titles have made standard today. For technical aspects, the controls are tight and responsive, and the menus and interface are good. The difficulty feels just right so far, though there is a bit of a learning curve; Anyone who is unfamiliar with action games or platformers in general might find it challenging, but that shouldn't come as a surprise for a game that looks and feels kind of like Mega Man X. After playing through some more of the stages, I can say the platforming is definitely tough, but never tear-your-hair-out unfair. Music is great as well! My favorite track is the one that plays during the trials, but a lot of them are just plain bangers! I managed to dodge the bugs, but the devs jumped on them and seems like they fixed the issues very quickly, which is a good sign. It's a 9/10 for me and the price is just right!

Smelter is gorgeous with a fun story, and some cool powers, boss fight are mostly well done (but a bit too easy), fights and challenges range from easy to really hard but are well done, the rts part isn't bad and is short enough so it's a nice addition. There are a few short twin stick shooter area which are.. forgettable at best but are really short so it's not that bad. I really wanted to like Smelter but the last zone(and a few others before were like that too) is such a pain i don't care enough about it to finish this game. My main problem come from the platformer part which are far from good, when dealing with the last zone the imprecise controls start to really get in the way (those lasers.. seriously did you tried your own game before, thinking it was a good idea.. ). I never thought the megaman x series to be easy(far from it) as they were hard but not tedious like this game.

It's gorgeous. It's complex. It's clearly full of effort and care. I want to love it. But it is so smash the controller frustrating. Trials are the obvious example. The controls are too full of float and imprecise for such unforgiving challenges. I also love one that involved constant mid-air movement without pause until my hand started going numb. There is a reason we left some bad platforming design back in the 80's. Brutal difficulty requires dependable controls. One-hit kills miles from a checkpoint. Damage and attack effects that prevent you seeing your character. Unreliable button combos that, you guessed it, can get you one hit killed. It feels like there is a classic game just below the surface here, but right now it's one where the bolts need tightening and the gears need oiling.

The Good Stuff: + The action-platforming is tight and fun + The pixel art is fantastic, and I love it + The game has a sense of humor. Doesn't always land, but the attitude is fun The Bad Stuff: - The first RTS/Base Building part of the game requires you to keep building long after you've learned how - Shortly after the first full level, you're thrown into a constant RTS assault that the defenses you're [b]REQUIRED[/b] to build for the tutorial portion are completely useless against - After defeat, you're given no time to make changes, and no guidance on a decent defense strategy - which would be fine, if they hadn't forced you to build a completely inadequate defense first - The one thing the tutorial doesn't go over - how to remove buildings to replace them with different ones - is [i]vital[/i] to getting past that first RTS assault. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm dead certain that this is going to be a lot of fun for people who are into it. And there [b]is[/b] an "action mode" that skips all the base building and just does the platforming. But I'm not willing to pay for a whole game when I'm enjoying half of it and getting pissed at the other half, and it seems ridiculous to only play half of a game when there are tons of other games out there where I enjoy the whole thing (or at least more than 40-50% of it). SO, if you're into simple RTS/Tower Defense/Base Building and action platforming both, then you might enjoy this more than I did. Me? I'm sad to say that I'm going to have to return this one.

As others have said, I want to like this game so much. There is so freaking much greatness I want to hug whoever did the writing, graphics, overall design, and sound. On the other hand, I wanna PUNCH whoever signed off on the finished product. This is not okay! This game is not finished and it plays like you had zero QA. Whoever you are, you ruined a potentially awesome game and you should feel bad. The good points: The graphics - retro, cutesy, and perfect really. I love them so much I'm almost willing to forgive the pile of other things that piss me off. The dialog - edgy and cocky. It gets the job done. Might annoy some but I really like it. The sound - satisfying sound effects. All fit together and well represent the actions they're tied to. The music - catchy, appropriate, and upbeat. Good times. Not particularly memorable but loads of fun to listen to. Some really epic tracks, especially early on. Pause is how I most enjoyed this game. The upgrades - I enjoy the linking of new moves to over world progress and vice versa. All the sweet moves gives your character incredible versatility and there are so many of them, I am even more remiss to dislike this game overall as a result. The elements - I love that each one has a completely different move set and feels unique but distinctly effective. I like that some enemies are weak to certain elements, and not just because of the element itself. Some moves are just better against some enemies. The concepts - This was one of my favorite parts! I love act raiser and this feels like a great homage. The story - what I could get was okay, but the game was otherwise too frustrating to find out where they decided to take the story. ::shrug:: The not so good: The controls - see above for who I'd like to punch. You know who you are. This game plays like a child designed it. Everything else about the game ranges from okay to AWESOME. But these controls. Damn... It's like finding out your otherwise awesome date is a die-hard trumper. Feels like love till she starts spewing toxicity. In this game's case, the controls are the toxicity. You think you can deal but it digs at you. Even if it's not specifically the point of frustration at any given time, you know it's there in the back of your head. Any semblance of fun is ruined by knowing the game is totally going to make you do things the controls are not designed for. The enemies - They are frustrating to fight unless you can kill them before they have a chance to act which is, dare I say, somewhat rewarding. But because of the controls (see above), there is no way to consistently dispatch them before they have time to piss you off. The game loves to inflict difficulty and annoyance by strategically placing them just out of your reach as well. It also enjoys sticking them in a corner where Eve gets stuck on a wall allowing the enemy there to wail on her. It makes pushover enemies feel completely unfair somehow. There are so many BS moments I can't even. Even if you somehow managed to address and individually remove the poorly placed enemies, it would still feel like garbage overall. The elements (again) - I think the IDEA is awesome but it was executed poorly. I don't really know how to fix it. Sorry. I think it belongs, but the way it is done is just... bad. I'm not a game designer. Squandered potential here really. The designers managed to take something great and make it annoying and I don't even know how they did it. The straight up bad: The controls (again) - different reasons though. Momentum is all wrong. The dash mechanics are horrible. The gravity and acceleration is wrong. Wall climbing specifically is extra horrible. Attacking freezes your character in place for the entirety of the animation, but not always, and not always to the same degree. The inconsistency is unforgivable. It must have been horrible to write the physics code to feel so obtuse. It feels floaty but also rigid, the worst parts of both. It is not perspective or opinion. It is objectively bad. The challenge trials - oh my... you know, if you took all these out of the game and just left hidden collectables, this game would have been so much better. Probably not good, but... just so much better. These are a huge, embarrassing mistake and not one is fun. They are all crap and some are controller-destroyingly bad. (The don't get hit electrical element one is truly awful) The cheap deaths - why does this game want to punish me? It's not challenging. It's player abuse. The combat - It's like the enemies mentioned above, but in addition to the enemies, Eve also personally wants to die. There is no way this game plays like they intended. That about sums it up. One of the most annoying games I've ever played because a part of me is in love with parts of it. There is so much right here, and not much wrong. Boy is the wrong wrong though. Update: I kept playing this game despite how abusive and unfair it is. I hate this game now. All of the awful parts just kept getting worse but none of the novelty remained. I think I can say safely, screw the developers of this game.

Really i want to recommend this game but i will not do it because of 3 reasons what killed all the fun for me in this game. 1. Not interestion storytelling. Found myself skipping all the dialogs after one hour of a game. 2. Questioning part of the game on the global map. Spam with the best units that you have, attack, heal structures and hope that you will pass time trial to unlock next stage. 3. Last Level - The most @ssbl@sting and funkilling part where difficulty rizes in several times. You must finish it in one go, there are several bosses, there are 8 (!!!!!) time attack levels in a row and after the last boss there is another time attack level. There is no challange only tries to remember and repeat the "right patten" to finish section. When i finished it, i wanted only to delete game, write this review and forget about its existence.

Good and bad. The gameplay is very similar to Megaman X both visually and in some of the mechanics, not to mention the general level exploration. I like this about the game and it's what kept me playing for the roughly two and a half hours that I did. Unfortunately, the game has a ton of very specific mechanics that all claim to interact with each other, and in the time I spent playing, about 2 hours of it was mind numbing amounts of tutorials and game entry backstory. The controls are also very oddly formatted, and I had trouble re-mapping them to a position that I could handle. Because of this, I'd say the game is not very accessible to newcomers or casual gamers of an average to low skill set. Ironic, considering how in two and a half hours of gameplay, I didn't even officially escape all of the tutorials. The gameplay is further bogged down by that kind of self-awareness that comes when you don't necessarily believe you're making a good game, so you point out all the flaws and plot holes in a sarcastic manner. It's difficult to deal with a narrator/companion that's so very full of themselves while at the same time crapping on the game they're in. Please dev, I just want to enjoy your game, please let me enjoy your game without being told what to do and how to do it every 5 seconds by a companion that I want to like, but feels like if Bowser and Deadpool had a baby without genuine self confidence.

Smelter alternates between being a joy and a nightmare to play. The music, most of the graphics, most of the physics, the power unlocking, and especially the strategy/sim mode, are extremely well done. The writing is very humorous, and although I found it all appropriate and well timed, other people will get annoyed by the tone. I thought that part was good. But it has a lot of rough edges and plays like an unfinished and unpolished beta. The controls for dashing and dash jumping are just Not Well Done, half the time it doesn't work. Some of the trials are pointlessly brutal, and run into problems with the physics. I managed to complete all but one trial I ran into before I stopped playing. It has a lot of softlocks, entirely too many for a game outside of early access. People keep running into cutscenes that don't work correctly, and they have to go back to the main map. There are a bunch of shmup sections. And they're not really much fun or well done. They work, but they're not fun. They seem like an afterthought. The action platforming and the strategy sim are fine, but the shmup sections are incredibly weak. There are unmarked hidden unlockables. Although they eventually tell you which 6 stages have them, they never indicate which ones you already found them in. You'd have to write that down, which is bad. There are boss fights where the room scrolls, and the boss attack broadcasts can be offscreen, at which point you're just relying on luck for not being hit. Only get this game after a few more patches, if they fix some of the glaring issues. If you're looking for an action platforming game with strategy sim elements, go back and play Actraiser. Smelter just isn't up to code yet.

While there's alot to like like the Platforming and Nostalgia from games like Actraiser and Megaman X but there's just something fundamentally wrong with how the game itself plays and feels. The controls are clunky, even on a controller where levels are designed where it feels like it was "yup I did it once it's fine it doesn't need tuning" Switching between elements is slow and cumbersome, almost to the point where you are better off to stick to only one and ignore the others during any gameplay, thankfully so far I have no seen any required swaps to perform any platforming but if it were to be required it would be extremely difficult with how slow the switching occurs. The hit boxes are inconsistent both on the platforming and hit detection with certain enemies, falling through the edge of a platform is insanely frustrating, player expectation is if I can touch it I shouldn't pass through it or be pushed to the side of it by awkward collision but nonetheless that's where we are here. With enemies, specially the lightning ones you'll get hit by a dash attack at both the start location and the end location and everything inbetween making it hard/impossible to judge how to dodge certain enemies. Which leads to the ultimate frustration: The Trials. These are not fun, but are required for upgrades. Many of them have the condition "don't get hit" but are covered in INCONSISTENT patterns of timings which lead to failure after failure until you get lucky on a pattern. It's not uncommon to have some setups (Specifically in Trial 2 of the 3rd Lightning Dungeon) where you get corned by off-screen attacks and have no where to move, or a projectile that passes through walls was fired by an enemy off-screen. While I thought this looked appealing the amount of enjoyment I was getting has quickly been soured by the negative experiences and I sadly cannot recommend this to anyone in it's current state.

[i] For disclosure, I participated in the beta, but I purchased a copy for myself to support the devs anyway. [/i] The thing about Smelter is that it's a really good platformer, but there is a lot of story and tutorial shoved into the experience to support the strategy features, especially the first 2 hours or so it tends to interrupt gameplay a lot - not as much later on. The campaign can take anywhere from 10 to 15 hours to finish, so keep in mind that it takes a few hours to get going. I understand that it's not ideal, and no game should be boring for that long, but it's where we at, and I think the devs are very much aware of it. I didn't like the game at first, I thought the 'RTS' was too much of a chore, that said, the platforming gameplay is very enjoyable once you can switch between 3 different armors. I am not against the narrative in my platformers, but it feels like you get bombarded with text walls, and if I being completely honest, the narrative had very little impact on me, even though I like the design of the characters. The game does not take itself seriously, instead going for a silly take on the world, but on a personal level, I found it a bit uninspired. I would say that Smelter is an overall tribute to retro platformers, not just ActRaiser because it has a similar genre, but also games like Megaman and Castlevania. To give the devs some credit, outside of the Nutoro armor, I don't think the movement and abilities are all that similar. It's a hybrid game, the way it works both games are engaged in a symbiotic relationship. You can collect resources during the stages for builds on the overworld, and by exploring the map, you will unlock power-ups for the platformer. For the most part, I think the system makes sense, if there is one thing the game does well, it's the power-up variety. You can switch between 3 different armors that have individual skill trees, and the cool part is that each armor has a unique way of mobility. The game is not a metroidvania, but when you explore the map you are being funneled by the abilities, so in order to access a new zone you will need a specific power. Personally, I did not have any issues with the controls, and I don't mean the buttons, I am talking about actual platforming and the movement mechanics. I noticed some criticism in regards to those features, and I can't say that I agree, I think you did a great job with the momentum. I can't say that I ever struggled with how the character behaved. [h1] Pros: [/h1] (+) [b] Stage Design [/b] - not including some of the cave stages (the tutorial and the last one), I think the levels were very fun, both visually and from a gameplay perspective, continuously adding new features and utilizing verticality. Every stage also has some hidden areas in a form of challenges and special resources. I would say the difficulty is very fair, and it gradually gets more challenging toward the end of each zone. (+) [b] Abilities and Power-ups [/b] - each armor has a unique set of skills and it's not just some passive trash, they all have some mobility tools and other niche qualities, and depending on what you doing, they excel at doing different things. Some of the bosses are designed in a way where it's beneficial to switch between them. Overall I think the platforming gameplay is executed very well. (+) [b] Content [/b] - you can debate if it's good content, but I still appreciate just having it. Many stages, lots of challenges, bosses with multiple layers, some hidden trinkets, and lots of achievements. Even if the strategy was not a part of the experience, it's still longer than many regular platformers. (+) [b] The artwork [/b] - I see all the hard work with the animation. Overall, I feel the game has some issues with the direction in general, but if we talking just purely aesthetic, Sina did a fantastic job. I like the visuals, it's just that the world did not capture me. [h1] Feedback: [/h1] (x) [u] Interrupting Gameplay [/u] - the way the story in this game works is always a pop-up, you stop what you doing and read the text. Like I enjoyed the cutscenes, that is visual storytelling, use that. Have a conversation between characters without locking the player, have some optional lore, just not text walls everywhere. I hate complaining about pacing in games because I sound like I take it a little too seriously, but it's important, I don't want those moments that put me to sleep. You have a wonderful platformer here, but you drag it down so much, it's so slow for the first few hours. The first feedback I ever gave in the beta was - "will there be an arcade" mode, and I was not the only person. Many of us saw those MegaMan references, and I think many of us bought the game because of them. (x) [u] Strategy Gameplay [/u] - I think what makes a good strategy is an AI that plays a tug of war with you. There is no sense of AI taking over or pushing you back, you just kind of build toward the desired location, and kill a few enemies on the way, kinda hard to lose. Maybe if the AI could build his own buildings and upgrades to fortify positions, maybe if I actually had to think for a moment it would be more fun. I realize that it would delay platforming even longer, but if you going to make me watch the map for hours, might as well make it challenging. I still like what you did with unlocks, just not the actual gameplay getting there. [b] Overall Thoughts: 7/10 [/b] I recognize that devs put so much work into game, I just don't think it was necessary. Honestly, I would enjoy the game more if it had the generic stage select with the boss icons. One of the best platformers I ever played, but then you add other features that are not as enjoyable, and ultimately I think it did more bad than good. I got very bored, then I was very engaged, and then I got bored again, and then it was fun again... [code]Review By: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]