I tried streaming this game on release day, but my 300 baud modem connection wouldn't cooperate. I picked it up again recently and have a bunch of things to say about it.
I've played
Steel Assault for about four hours, almost all in Arcade Mode, with just a little playtime in Normal and Expert for comparison. There are four difficulties with infinite continues and progress saving (Very Easy, Easy, Normal, and Expert), and then there's Arcade Mode, which has no continues and must be beaten in one sitting. All modes utilize health bars but no lives, so reach zero hit points or fall into a bottomless pit and you'll see a Game Over screen.
The developer really fucked up the difficulties because there's a vast gulf between Normal and Expert, and Normal is basically God Mode, as I'll be explaining soon. According to posts in the game's Steam discussion board, players complained about the difficulty on Normal in the demo that came out last February, so the developer caved and nerfed it for release. That's why we're seeing everyone, including casuals and their grandmas, clearing the game in an hour on Normal.
Normal is incredibly forgiving, moreso than any other game of this ilk I've played. For the standard difficulty, this just might be the easiest 2D action game ever made. You get a health bar with 10 hit points, health pickups are plentiful, there are several checkpoints per stage, and bizarrely, you're even fully healed after you reach one of them. Plenty of games like the older Draculas will heal you after beating a stage, but I've never seen a game do it after a checkpoint, like after defeating a mid-stage boss. It doesn't matter much though because with infinite continues, you could kill yourself after the checkpoint and accomplish the same thing. And because there are no lives and thus no distinction between losing a spare life or losing your final life and getting a Game Over, checkpoints are never reset. In most 2D action games with checkpoints, if you continue after a Game Over, you restart from the beginning of the stage, but here, every death sends you back to the last checkpoint, and they're so frequent you're losing at most 30 seconds of progress. And with 10 hit points and health pickups throughout each stage, those frequent checkpoints (they should be called "healingpoints") mean you'll almost never die, except if you fall off the screen or get hammered by the stage boss or something. It even means you can race to the next checkpoint and absorb all damage from enemies and environmental obstacles because it's unlikely you'll get hit 10 times in that short span. It's mind-bogglingly retarded and totally unacceptable that Normal is designed this way.
Just watch the first few minutes of this guy playing like utter shit on Normal yet still managing to beat the game in 45 minutes:
https://youtu.be/nRWxyyw08twArcade Mode, on the other hand, is extremely difficult, the antithesis of screensaver mode Normal and in this case totally deserving of its name. It removes all checkpoints and thus all free healing from the stages, with no healing even after beating a stage, health pickups are rarer (according to a Steam commenter, they stop appearing after the second stage), and enemies do twice as much damage, effectively reducing your health bar to five hit points. And don't forget, there are no lives, so one death and you're sent back to the beginning of the game. I've probably played 30-40 credits so far and I've only reached the third stage once. Anyone who's cleared Arcade Mode in a relatively short period of time played through the game on Normal first and made several save files before the hardest bosses to practice against them, like some dude who uploaded a clear of Arcade Mode to YouTube the day after the game released. I don't spoil games for myself, so I'm not going to do that, hence why my progress is a lot slower.
Finally, you'd think Expert would be in the middle of these two difficulties, but it's actually much closer to Arcade Mode. It's identical except that there are more health pickups, and you can save your game plus you have infinite continues, though you'll start from the beginning of the stage you died on because there are no checkpoints. Expert could have been the Normal difficulty, but to make Normal a reasonable challenge, at minimum, it should just have a single checkpoint halfway through the stage, with no healing, and that change alone would keep random scrubs from clearing the game in an hour. Even better would be to decrease the player's hit points and limit the number of health pickups. It should have "Nintendo hard" difficulty, where even having infinite continues doesn't guarantee success, like in games such as the first
Dracula or
Ninja Ryūkenden on Famicom, where the final stages are so challenging that without decent skill, even infinite continues won't let you see the ending. I mean is this game supposed to be a nostalgic throwback to these old console games or what?
The above "Nintendo hard" suggestion is a compromise, by the way. If the developer had real testes, this game would contain Arcade Mode only, with no continues, no saves, no credit-feeding, no practicing—and from what I know about the developer, I bet this was the original intention. The difficulty could even be knocked down a bit because no one would be cheating the game for himself by practicing on an easier mode. But then scrubs would refund the game in frustration... which they might be doing now after finishing the game on Normal in under an hour. Hence why I suggest a "Nintendo hard" difficulty for the credit-feeders and Arcade Mode for the rest of us.
Note that I'm not complaining about the difficulty on Arcade Mode; it's refreshing for Steam to have a game like this, a 2D sidescroller with an arcade mode that might be the first to do away with lives and score altogether. It's a noteworthy release in the sewer of Metroidvanias and roguelites and whatever other dreck that sells well on Steam these days. Moreover, unlike almost all its 2D contemporaries, the pixel art is great, hearkening back to the top-notch art we got on consoles and especially in the arcades in the '90s. Every level features a cornucopia of colors across the screen, like the second stage that goes from a rain-drenched green and blue moody forest, with rain drops crashing into and rolling off of platforms, to a fiery (but mostly peaceful) orange and red burning cabin near a lake, with the distant forest in the background swallowed in flames. And the CRT filter that's satisfyingly on by default looks so damn good I wish all 2D games would include it. Best of all, the game can be run natively at 320x240, meaning you can display it on a 15 kHz CRT monitor using CRT Emudriver or Soft-15kHz. Also worthy of praise is the soundtrack, which can be played in arrange mode or FM, which mimics the FM synthesizer found in consoles like the Mega Drive. The tracks I've heard so far are much improved from what I heard in early previews, and they're memorable enough that they pop into my head at random as I go about my day.
But a challenging, arcade-influenced game has to be fantastic to convince me that the time needed to clear it on one credit is worthwhile, and while the graphics and sound deliver,
Steel Assault is so mechanically simplistic that I can't bear to do it. Don't let the high-quality and colorful graphics fool you, because the mechanics in this game feel like they were ripped straight out of a Famicom game. And it makes sense if you're aware of the game's roots: it started as an 8-bit throwback when it was announced on Kickstarter, and though the graphics significantly improved to the standout pixel art we have today, the underlying mechanics failed to catch up.
First of all, several Steam reviewers have praised this game as a great "run 'n gun", like a Metal Slug or a Contra, and sure, I'm seeing a lot of running going on... but where's the gunning? The default—and depressingly, only!—weapon in the game is an electric whip, with a relatively short range, and the only powerups in the game are a shield barrier that's destroyed after two hits and an electric charge that shoots three sparks out of the end of the whip in a spread pattern—and you can only have one powerup equipped at a time until you pick up the other one or run out of energy, which the shield barrier slowly drains while it's active, and the electric charge drains on every crack of the whip. You recharge energy by defeating an enemy up-close with a punch, which releases an orb of energy. It's like the knife attack in
Metal Slug, except here the bonus is a recharge of energy rather than extra points because there's no score in
Steel Assault.
The game's setting is a futuristic United States, the land of the free and the home of the guns, with most enemies attacking with guns, yet our protagonist can't be bothered to use one. Is there some backstory explaining why, of all the weapons he could have dreamed up for himself, he settled for a whip? Is he descended from Simon Belmont? And with only one weapon and two powerups in the game, you've seen and used the game's entire weapon and item roster by the end of the first stage! Even in
Shatterhand, the primary influence on
Steel Assault from back in the Kickstarter days, you can assemble eight different robot companions to assist you, or combine two of the same one to merge with the robot and become more powerful for a limited time. So in the 30 years of development in 2D action games that separate these two similar games, we've gone from eight powerups to a paltry two. And for another comparison, check out
Contra: Hard Corps on the Mega Drive, which has a similar 16-bit aesthetic, sci-fi setting, and slide move, and look at what it has that
Steel Assault lacks:
- Four selectable characters, each with unique weapons
- Four weapon slots, and powerups for the base weapon
- Bombs that clear all enemies on the screen
- Two-player mode
- Destructible inert objects (barrels, cars, etc.)
- Branching stages, with multiple paths through the game, leading to multiple endings
- ...Guns
And all of this back in 1994 on far inferior hardware! So
Steel Assault eschews all these incredible features and gives us in their place... a zipline? This is progress?
Yeah, remember that grappling hook thing from
Contra 4 on the DS? Now it's back, but this time you can also fire it upwards at 45 degree angles and parallel to the ground, rather than just vertically, and you can climb across it like a child on monkey bars. It allows for last-minute saves just like in
Contra 4, which can be cool, but so far in three stages its use feels shoehorned in. Like in the first stage, you have to use it to ascend a vacant elevator shaft rather than climb up the walls like you'd do in other games. There is an almost mandatory use of it during the second stage's end boss, where you have to suspend yourself below a floating ship in the sky, but the game could have accomplished the same effect by having you hang onto the ship's railing, which happens countless times in any random Contra. You can't even use the zipline as a weapon in a pinch, which I find particularly annoying, and though it looks okay when deployed across short distances, it looks absolutely ridiculous when it spans the length of the screen. And despite the whip and zipline being the main items in his arsenal, neither of these are displayed in any of the promotional artwork I've seen, so you'd never guess he has them—nor could you guess why a guy named Taro Takahashi is defending Washington, D.C. instead of Tokyo or something. No, I just see a cool-looking dude, scowling, in this sci-fi suit, which is enticing by itself, but then I turn the game on and he's whipping things and setting up his high beam or pole vaulting for Olympic trials or something. And the game's name also doesn't reflect any of this. Is the whip made of steel? Why not call the game Whip Assault, or Zip Assault, or Whipline Assault or some other bad pun? I assume it refers to the suit, but he's not assaulting anything with it. So why give him an Iron Man suit if it doesn't do anything interesting?
Actually, it does have two functions, a double jump and a slide, and props that in this game, the double jump has some believability, because it's a propulsive thrust from the suit that causes the extra jump, not the character pushing off of air like in most other games. The slide can be used to dodge enemy fire, though it has a cooldown to prevent overuse. The slide distance is short, however, and it's a bitch to time it against some attacks. For example, there's a boss that looks like a rhinoceros but with a chainsaw on its nose, and occasionally it will pause then charge at you. You can actually stand your sprite overtop the chainsaw without taking damage, because the boss's hitbox is in its center, but how am I supposed to know that when I first encounter it? And thus to time the slide, you have to do it right when the chainsaw is touching you. It's very janky to use and even after hours of play, it still feels off to me. And in addition to using the slide to avoid projectiles, the whip can cancel any brightly colored bullets, which are the most common in the game. You'd think these two things would make avoiding damage easy, but consider that only once have I beaten the first stage without getting hit, whereas in a game like
Metal Slug, I could do that pretty reliably after a dozen or so credits.
So overall this game is decent for what it is, and also quite pretty, but why would I prioritize
Steel Assault when I haven't even finished all of its vastly superior predecessors? I've 1CCed some of the Contras, Shinobis, Draculas, and Makaimuras (just the first loop). I've almost cleared the first
Metal Slug, but the last stage is a bitch. The challenge of Arcade Mode or even Expert isn't so thrilling when the game is so mechanically stunted, and I'm not going to bother with horribly broken Normal, where even attempting to one-life it would still be a walk in the park because of the "healingpoints" issue I mentioned before. For now, I'll hold my breath for the "Guns and Powerups" DLC to drop, then I'll have a great excuse to fire up this game again.