So far I like it, but feel the rogue "lite" aspect of it feels at odds with the rest of the design. The controls also feel very odd to me and I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable with them. I feel this is another one of those games that I respect, but have to concede it's not really for me.

@furiousjodo: @sumjugei: Yeah, going back through season 1 to gather coins is something I've been doing, but it's just such an inelegant solution.

@csl316: The "can't touch this" trophy didn't pop for me until I finished the season I was working on. I know I completed no hits on mission 3. Also this was post patch.

I just booted it up after the patch. Got to the title screen and it immediately gave me that, along with the Gold for everything. So they fixed it retroactively.

Thanks, 17-bit!

I'm really not enjoying it.

i'm truly awful at this game and i don't know if there's any incentive to keep trying other than i will have wasted wasted money.

It's OK ....

I am really enjoying it, but I do think there should be something to counter balance an extremely powerful ship. Once you get the right set of upgrades, it seems like NOTHING can touch you. I don't have anything against a game letting you feel like a badass, I just wish there was something to add challenge in that situation. That's why I think I loved a game like Spelunky so much. Even if you had the best items, things could still go horribly wrong if you weren't careful lol. Maybe I'm just a closet masochist idk

Take out the go back to beginning of season penalty when you die and this is a good game. Replaying missions that don't change that much is not fun I'm afraid. I guess "rogue-likes" are not for me. I couldn't get into Don't Starve for the same reason of starting over and over. I got to the boss in Season 2 and died pretty much instantly. Hard to get motivation to go through season 2 again because nothing about it was hard until I got to the boss... I just played a different game.

A good game but with serious design flaws in the game structure I see no reason why it needs to be a rouge-like.

Firstly I loved this game and have finished season 4, that said I'm somewhat torn by this game's rogue-likeness. I think Kazdal quite openly said that it wasn't always going to be so, but that he fell in love with Spelunky while making it and decided to go that way. As a Spelunky obsessive I can understand that urge and I think it's worked to an extent. However there's something crude about the execution of the rogue-like mechanics. I can't really put my finger on it. The only real concessions to meta progression are crash coins and blueprints. I think blueprints work as a nice way to have some progression but it's undermined by limited and random of the shopkeeper's inventory. I get that this is rogue-likey but it feels like it's been transplanted from Spelunky without much care. The runs in this game are so much more of a time investment that having the shop serve up nothing but crap is less easy to accept. I'm not saying every item should be available every time but I think there a happy medium.

Crash coins again should work as a nice reward for a deep run. And they do. The problem is when you go to a new season, get your arse kicked, then have to start again with fuck all. Going in to 4-1 with little to no power-ups is not fun. To beat season 3 I had to go back and run through season 2 just so I could take a good swing at it with plenty of coins. A mechanic that forces you to grudgingly play an earlier section just to grind the coins to beat the next level is a failure.

This could be remedied by increasing the drop rate for coins each season, encouraging the player to play what's infront of them, not behind.

Losing your ship when successfully completing a season is totally annoying and a good haul of crash coins only partly salves this. I just don't see how there wasn't a better way.

This all really stems from the fact that Galak-Z isn't a game with 4 levels. It's one game with four difficulty settings. After the mech the gameplay hardly changes, neither do the enemies. It just gets harder. The tasks and environments are so homogeneous that there's no sense of a journey. In Spelunky each new world was a new and scary place. Not so here.

In summary, I fucking loved this game. The gameplay, the combat, the AI, the stealth: it's all dynamite. A pure joy. The end of season credits are just the best.On the downside the environments and the meta-mechanics leave something to be desired. Overall it's a 4/5 for me (it would be 9/10 on a ten point scale, but when in Rome...)

@dhiatensor: As much as I love this game, I think you're 100% spot-on. I'm not sure how the handling of basically being required to grind old levels to even stand a chance at beating the later ones was acceptable. It's the reason I've taken a break from the game after getting to Season 4. It's such a huge pain in the ass to go back and play the early seasons to get more crash coins, simply because it's a huge time investment, one that could ultimately be in vein. I will go back to it soon, but the design choices for handling the late-game are very questionable and off-putting.

I really don't think this game needed to be a rogue-like, either. The gameplay is far and away the game's strong suit and it really stands on its own. I would've much rather seen this gameplay in a game with a more linear and predictable progression, with more unique environments and objectives that aren't so rote. I don't feel that the rogue-like elements meaningfully add anything good that wasn't already there.

@onekillwonder_: Yeah I tend to really love rogue elements in most games but it feels a bit weird based on how the game plays. Still really fun to play and feels really good but it feels like those elements could have been transplanted to a different sort of game.

@onekillwonder_: yeah agree on all that. I think the main benefit of the rogue-like set up is that it forces you to master the tools at your disposal but I think that's achievable by other means, i.e. making it bastard hard. There's something horrible about getting to end of season, finally having a wicked ship...and then it's gone. The game looks really nice and I get that it's made by a small team but the lack of diversity in environments and missions really begins to grate. And it's a shame because purely in terms of gameplay and handling this is the best thing I've played this year (Rocket League a close 2nd).

I think part of what is currently missing as part of the conversation here is how your tactics change because of the consequences. Both Spelunky and Rogue Legacy gave consequence to death, but I would die enough that it didn't matter--except for the occasional great run. Depending on how you play, it might be every 5th, 10th or 50th run that feels really good. When I am playing Galak-z, more of my runs feel like great runs.

In 1-1 you can be crazy because death has no consequence. A death in 3-1 or 4-1 is much more serious since the Crash Coins matter more.

When you are in the first episode of the series you explore the entire map because you want pickups and blueprints. In the last episode, you do whatever it takes to get in and get out--running, hiding, shooting, stealth.

It does seem like a separate story mode could have been possible, and might have been awesome. It might have been a 4 - 10 hour story with crazy anime-nostalgia dripping from every moment. Instead we have a very satisfying, repeatable game to play and enjoy. For me, I will spend way more time with it the way it is than if it had scripted unlocks and more story.

I know this is a bit of an old thread, but I just wanted to jump in here and give my two cents.

I'm nearing the end of the second season, and I'm really enjoying the gameplay. I will say, though, that the drip-feed of basic abilities in the beginning of the game hampered it a lot for me. Not being able to strafe until the end of the season was a huge bummer, especially since it introduced enemies which require strafing to effectively deal with pretty early-on. That was a bit of a sore-spot for me, but now that all of those options have opened up, its wonderful.

My biggest gripe is that it seems to totally miss the tone and feeling of the space-mech nostalgia anime/Saturday morning cartoon that it's going for. None of the dialogue sounds like anything other than acceptably written banter and the voice acting is pretty unenoyable, and not in a nostalgic way. The character and ship design between missions is also... eh. It doesn't look so hot. Very vector-graphics-y, which is a shame, because the game in motion looks exactly like how you'd want it to.

I'll keep playing, though, and the interplay of all of the mechanics are hooking me pretty deep. I doubt it'll be my new Spelunky or FTL, but I could see myself spending a lot of time with this.

I bought this the other day for the PC and I am really liking it so far. I'm playing on arcade mode which I know wasn't in the original release for the PS4. I don't know if this makes the game easier overall or if the only difference is it saves your progress and abilities/upgrades after each episode. I have died yet believe it or not so I can't say for sure.

I'm mid way through the second season and I am still learning how to use the mech, but to be honest the mech only seems useful during stealth and eliminating enemies quickly after their shields have been take down. The mech also doesn't seem as useful when taking on more than one enemy at the same time. Kind of a bummer because I would much rather play as a mech then the space ship :)

Just beat the game on arcade mode, the difficulty definitely picks up in season 4. I think the best approach is play towards the upgrades you find/buy and try to agro the three different factions together. The sword upgrade on the mech is really really powerful if you can get it. Great game one of the best I have played in a while, it was tough but not overly difficult if you took your time and didn't run into battles.

This game was very near the top of my most anticipated list but for some reason (I don't know why exactly) the day they announced and demoed the mech, I completely lost interest and it totally fell of my radar.

Even this thread getting bumped, reminding me of the PC release, and seeing that it's only 12 bucks still isn't bringing back that feeling.

@professoress: You should really give it a try, to be honest I would say you could finish the game with only using the mech when you have to complete objectives. Like carrying items back to the warp point etc. Also, its not as difficult as people make it out to be it just requires patience.

Got the game on PC. Was having some fun until season 4, which nearly ruined the whole experience for me. The enemies just have too many hit points in season 4, it's downright laborious to kill them. It also makes your supposed super ship feel ridiculously week because you do so little damage. Does my mecha have a beam sword, or a freaking wet noodle? The latter seems more likely.

I can not imagine playing the game without arcade mode. I would have never gotten beyond season 3, but even so, I'm giving up in season 4. I'm just not having fun with the game anymore, and there's nothing new to see. The game already showed all it had to offer in season 2, and then just gets harder instead of more fun, really.

Global achievement stats seem to agree with my experience. Less than 10% of people that at least made it past the tutorial finished season 3 let alone 4. If you make a game that less than 10% of your player base finishes, I think ya done screwed up.