Astronite Reviews

Clunky, overly punishing game that feels difficult for the sake of being difficult. The controls are somehow both clunky and over-responsive. Holding a charge shot locks you out of dashing, firing a charge shot hits you with recoil which also locks you out of dashing for a shot time. As a result, movement through the world always feels taxing and sloggish. The upgrades you get are miniscule, inconsequential charge time reductions for dashing and boosting. The game features only ambient music for 99% of it. There is only music for the bosses, and it still isnt much to write home about. The sound effects range from OK to godawful. Whoever decided to make a teleporter a permanently-ringing phone really hates the players of this game. The area-gating is almost exclusively done via doors. Locked doors, block doors, magic doors, doors with a symbol on them. I've beaten the game and still have no idea what tools I would need to get through most of these doors, and the lackluster upgrades do not compel me to want to try so I can go and beat the final boss a second time. I can trapse the entire map several times over again for a 0.1ms reduction in my jetpack recharge? Gimme a break. The game actually never gives you any indication of where to go next, exacerbated by the poor map functionality this means basically retracing the entire map at least once or twice every time you make a bit of progress. The map feels somehow less functional than the original metroid map. Most points of interest (like all these DOORS) are not marked, and you cannot mark the map yourself. Save / healing points are few and far between. Monetary rewards are punctuated on both sides by difficult platforming areas. If you die, you will lose all or most of your money until you get back to the same place again. If you die trying to get back to where you were (1 or two small mistakes away), you will lose all the money forever. iframes when you get hit are almost nonexistent, so taking a hit on a platforming section usually means taking 2-3 hits (you have 4 max hp most of the game so this is just crazy). The platforming sections beg for you to use skill and coordination to clear them, but if you TRY, you will die. You eventually figure out the intended method mostly seems to just involve standing still, jump-dashing and then falling directly down. The game is falsely advertised as 1-bit despite the use of a 3-colour pallette, which would make the game 2-bit. The only point I felt rewarded for my efforts was on beating the last boss, because I could finally be done with this game. The devs seemed to just want to make a pixel-art metroidvania without any consideration as to what makes a metroidvania good, or fun to play. Play a decent metroidvania instead like Hollow Knight, Chasm or Castle In the Darkness. I will probably look back on this game fondly in a few years, or recommend it to someone I really want to make irritated for 5-6 hours. But it's just so asinine and does not respect the players time or ability.

Had a lot of fun playing this game! I loved seeing all of the influences/references and how it was worked into the gameplay and world. The character movement felt really nice to me overall, and I thought the combat was fun and challenging with a steady learning curve that prevented things from getting stale. The health system can be a bit punishing at times, especially with no health drops, but it never felt unfair to me. The 1-bit style was super cute and it was really cool to see how each area was differentiated with such minimal design. The only major criticism I have is that the game froze a handful of times during my playthrough, requiring a hard restart, but it never set me back a large amount at any point.