Silver Axe - The Honest Elf Reviews

Annoying music, flash game visuals. Quite a lot of dialogue to skip through at the start. Somewhat annoying spell system. Nah, not for me.

This game is among the worst metroidvania's i've ever played, it feels clunky to play due to floaty controls and input lag. The balance is atrocious with insane difficulty spikes followed by mind numbingly easy sections or vice verse. And the translation and story are laughable. I let myself be convinced to be buy this jank by the highly positive reviews. Most if not all of these reviews are chinese, so the translation bit does not apply to them. Still the actual gameplay is so bad that i'm baffled how this high score came to be. I normally don't quit a game before i've reached the credits but this one really pulls the skin from under my nails. It's not fun, it's not engaging it's just a frustrating mess all around. That doesn't mean there aren't any positives though, they're just massively outweighed by all the bad things that plague this game. Still i'll try to elaborate on the good and the bad so you can make an educated descision on wether or not this is for you. The good is mostly the visuals. Even though they look very basic and made with MS paint, it's so colorfull that it looks quite good in the end. Some of the music is also beautiful but there's so little of it that it gets very repetitive and stale fast. The spell system that you use in combat is actually kinda fun, and using it vs basic enemies or the easier bosses is highly entertaining. However it's balanced in such a way that these spells are the only real way of taking down the tougher bosses, which is really hard at times and takes the fun out of it. I'd have prefered the regular axe hits to pack some more punch so the bosses wouldn't feel like such sponges. Lastly load times, performance and bug fixes are very good. I did not encounter bugs or frame drops, and the game loads in an instant. The game is well made, just not well designed at all. Now onto the bad, where do i even start? The balance is atrocious, bosses are massive difficulty spikes in the latter half of the game. They never give you any opportunity to heal or get hits in, and they can kill you in about 3 hits. All the while they themselves taking an absolutely ridiculous amount of hits to kill. I would've actually recommended this game wholeheartedly if the balance wasn't such a mess. I swear this is one of the hardest games i've ever played, not only because of the balance but also because of the controls that you have to fight all the time. They don't feel good or responsive whatsoever, so playing it becomes a chore quickly. And no this isn't a skill issue, i've beaten grime, blasphemous, vigil and many other hard sidescrollers. Those games were properly designed and balanced, this one isn't. The level design is also ass, The map is basic, barely enough to qualify as a metroidvania, and the movement upgrades are barely needed or interesting. Lastly the localization and story are a very poor effort. If the rest of the game was passable i'd see past it but it's so bad that i just couldn't engage with the story whatsoever. These devs need to hire a decent writer and translator before they make anything else. And while they're at it they should get a decent game designer who can turn this thing into an actually fun game. The worst of all this is that all these issues only started popping up at around the 3 to 4 hours mark. I was having good fun for the first 2 hours but once i got past the refund window the game became a chore. With no possibility of a refund i pushed on through countless ridiculous bosses before i gave up at the last two mayor bosses. These guys only have a succes rate of 10% based on the achievements, so i'm not gonna waste multiple hours to try and beat them. The only consolation i have is that the game is cheap, but i still wasted about half of my gametime not having fun. Time i'm never getting back and i wish i had spent (re)playing any of the other countless amazing metroidvania's to chose from. Just avoid this unless you're a massochist, or speak chinese. 3/10

So far I’m really digging this Metroidvania game. Even though it is in EA there is a fair amount of stuff to do. It also feels fairly unique even though there are a few places where comparisons to Hollow Knight are bound to occur. The tutorial area is very simple, but don’t let that fool you. By the time you get to the the 2nd or 3rd boss they are sponges!