Cosmos: Stella Returns Reviews

I know this game is very cheap and thus i shouldn't expect too much from it, but what i dislike more than a bad game is a bad game that had potential. See this game could've been an easy good microvania but the stingey checkpoint distribution and resulting artificial difficulty dragged it down tremendously. It's literally the difference between a thumbs up or down for me, and given the very frustrating final levels in this game due to this issue i'm gonna opt for the later option. Every other aspect of cosmos stella returns is decent making it a fine albeit basic game. The combat is fine, with a rather respectable amount of different enemies for such a small game and even several bosses. Although these aren't really good bosses due to very exploitable blind spots, they are in the end bosses nonetheless. If anything, the gaunlet sections before each boss were the most fun part about the game, which played more like a shoot em up platformer rather than a metroidvania. Speaking of metroidvanianess, the game is very poor at that, while it does have a tiny bit of backtracking and ability gating, the world is barely interconnected and each level is basically 100% linear. At least going for 100% completion was easy due to this but it was still not that fun to explore in this, which is a metroidvania's most important aspect imo. The platforming was very basic but at least the controls were responsive. Enemy placements were very annoying though which made retreading old ground cumbersome. The music was fine i guess, nothing great although the aforementioned gauntlets had an upbeat and adrenaline fueled song to motivate you. Visuals were fine but uninspired and story was messy with tons of grammatical errors and typo's. One note even says 'humans humans' twice in a row??! Atleast the game ran fine with no crashes lag or bugs but there's many more complex and less frustrating metroidvania's to play so why bother with this one?