This is a 2D top-down shooter that the indiefags have been gushing about recently.
The screenshots don't do the game justice. The soundtrack draws you in, and it's like you're on drugs the whole time lol. However, this is another case where I'm in love with the aesthetics but the mechanics are terrible, specifically in the controls. I actually feel kinda dizzy after beating it, but I'm not sure if that's due to the trippy atmosphere or the shitty controls. Anyway, icycalm already covered this game's main problem in his review of Meat Boy:
icycalm wrote:And that's how Meat Boy plays: whatever is not retardedly easy is basically a crap shoot, which you try, fail, repeat and rinse until you've "made" it, at which point the game autosaves and you are on to the next asinine little "challenge".
Most of the game's 19 chapters are divided into 2 or 3 stages (after an introductory section usually at your house), and there is a checkpoint at the beginning of each stage. A chapter corresponds to one building and each floor of the building is a different stage. So, you have to kill everyone on the first floor to move on to the second floor and so on and so forth, and if you die you instantly restart at the beginning area of the floor you're on.
The enemies either sit/stand in one place or walk around on fairly regular patrols, except that sometimes they randomly stop their pattern and go do something different. That's cool for a game that involves some stealth and planning, forcing you to think on your feet.
The problem is that nothing but a computer can think on their feet this quickly. The mouse and keyboard in this game are hyper-sensitive and jerky, and when the mouse is flying around the screen, the cursor becomes extremely hard to keep track of. So, whenever you're required to improvise, the tendency will be to use some cheap trick like hiding around a corner and killing everyone as they file through it (the AI is quite dumb), or you might just stand there and swing a bat wildly by clicking your mouse indiscriminately. It's inelegant, clunky, and lacks fluidity.
This is most obvious in the boss fights, in which there is one specific thing you have to do to win, and you have nothing but a single instant in which to do it, which you discover through dying repeatedly. So once you figure out what that thing is, you then have to basically button-mash your keyboard and mouse in a certain pattern, and before you know it the whole thing is over. All in all the boss battles, though irritating, ended up being the easiest part of the game.
The whole game follows this rinse-and-repeat format, except that as a whole it is nevertheless much easier than the Meat Boy titles, since your crap shoot spamming tactics usually end up working quite well after a dozen deaths or so. Plus, the difficulty basically plateaus around chapter 5 or so, and only increases a little bit in one of the later chapters -- then goes back down again.
Yet with all that being said, I still cannot get the soundtrack out of my head....