Powernaut VANGARDT Reviews

new name: waste of money

Powernaut VANGARDT is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one is particularly badly made and carries a huge list of defects... this is so bad the developer couldn't even work out how to use ClickTeam Fusion to add colours to the game, it's just in greyscale. Oof. It gets worse. Before we go into the long list of defects, just a note that the game design itself is also extremely poor, single screen platformer gameplay with some shooting elements... seems the developer also couldn't work out how to do screen scrolling in clickteam fusion so you move between screens instead. Even Atari 2600 games in the 1980's had that functionality, and ClickTeam Fusion, while completely crap, is capable of it, so the failure here seems to lie squarely with the developer. Think of this as a ripoff of Metroid, an experiment to see if taking someone else's game concept and making a cheap nasty knockoff can cause a DMCA takedown. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Powernaut VANGARDT has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. There's an achievement just for starting the game, so everyone who played this will have it, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Powernaut VANGARDT is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Powernaut VANGARDT is a fun little platformer that looks like it belongs on the Game Boy! Has an open world structure, kinda like Metroid, but instead of finding items you collect DNA from enemies to upgrade your powers. You start off pretty weak and it's easy to die, so I'd only recommend this to people who are used to old-school games. Has great pixel art and decent music. I haven't played a ton, but it seems like it's easily worth $2.

Note to the dev: I figured out the glitch where you lose the double jump. The third set of letters is JNQ when it should be J_Q An great GameBoy style Metroidvania if you're willing to put in the work of overcoming steep challenge. There aren't many games like it on Steam. Give it a go. The fun you'll have with it is worth well over the modest $0.99 the developer is asking. If you like grinding, platforming, exploring, and action shooter combat, don't hesitate to buy it. It's loads of fun. Think Dark Souls meets Castlevania on a handheld and you'll know what you're getting yourself into. Good stuff!

Not to parrot the other reviewers, but this absolutely took me back to being a kid and playing the old Megaman and Metroid ports on the original Gameboy. The controls feel good and I really like the classic art style, even though I'm knocking on the doors of middle-agedom, and my eyes have a bit of trouble with the black and white color palette. Not the dev's fault, I'm just getting old, and decades of staring at a monitor for work and play will do that to you. Haha

Powernaut VANGARDT is an arcade platformer game where you play as a warrior who needs to defeat a army of enemies as you collect points to upgrade your armour and weapons. As you move throughout the 8-bit map you come across a wide range of bosses along every level that you mus defeat to move on. Graphics- 8-bit Soundtrack- Alright Audience- Kids, teenagers or adults Difficulty- Not too hard to start, but gets difficult as the levels increases Story- No story really Game time- Not too short Price- Its very cheap 6/10

this is a legit "old school" game make you feel you are playing a old gameboy game instead of a saving system you have a password system to save your progress thats pretty neat lol

EDIT: Also, doors that previously opened will randomly be locked, in the middle of your game, leaving your literally stuck where you spawned. And on top of that, the game is actually impossible to clear without using the password system to skip the third boss, as he has been invincible since release, apparently, with the dev promising a fix in 2017 and people still posting that the boss is invincible after the update (and, I can also attest to that, he does not take damage, his shield never goes down). Bad. Just bad. I know the screen is supposed to emulate Gameboy, but it's so zoomed in you can't see anything coming. Instant death spikes and hazards everywhere, especially later. When you buy double jump, you get to use it until you die, then it's gone. Why??? Why would you do that? Terrible, terrible game design. You can just grind up to max at the start of the game, which, is probably the best way to play the game, because it's quite unforgiving, especially the bosses. The "wet" debuff or whatever, that some enemies inflict, or from going in water, makes you move ultra slow and is a death sentence if it happens to you mid-jump, because every jump in this game is over instant death spikes. This debuff effect is way too strong and lasts way too long, but that's more annoying than absolutely terrible. The worst part though, is the incredibly abrasive annoying screenshake every time you kill a guy, that completely EATS YOUR INPUTS while it's happening, making timing jumps over the numerous instant death spikes that line every single level of the game, incredibly annoying and frustrating. 95% of my deaths were due to this screenshake thing eating all inputs and making me walk into spikes. Absolutely terrible. Some of the save points are very far from the bosses, and there's even instant death spikes in one of the boss arenas, where you have to jump constantly. He has multiple parts, and destroying these parts also causing the screenshake that eats all inputs while you're jumping around over the spikes. So guess what all my deaths at that boss was from.... if it had some polish, and was programmed better, it would be a perfectly fine retro platformer.

The only issue I have with Powernaut VANGARDT is the weird password system. I'm OK with these, you can use it easily for all unlocks, killing bosses and such if you start it again, but upon launching the game with password, you are still stuck on the first map/room and you need to get over killing the bosses again to make the progress. Weird, but it's not a big problem and it doesn't make the gameplay any less fun. Other than that, I loved it. The visuals are great, and you can change the color palette of the graphics to any you like. It's worth the price, which isn't a big anyway. I will surely grab the sequel once I feel like playing it!

Pros: Classic Gameboy aesthetic & controls Difficult gameplay Only two bucks Cons: Password based save system.