Too Much Going On, and Nothing Really Matters
I really wanted to like this game. The bright, colorful world is a nice change of pace from the grimdark/industrial shooters of the world. The 90s-style attitude was fine and fit well with the aesthetic they were going for, but this game lost me in a couple pretty important ways.
Story and mission structure
Every story beat is essentially the same thing: do a bunch of pointless tasks to convince some people to help you. This is such a theme that the main character basically comes out and says this in one of the late-game chapters. Yes, fetch quests are a common structure in games, but the tasks are so contrived and the characters so one dimensional that the flimsiness of the excuses for combat don't work. It feels especially pointless when every single task you undertake is rendered immediately irrelevant by the story around it upon completion.
Combat and traversal
The traversal is pretty fun. Getting from point A to point B is the best part of the game and involves lots of dashing and flipping and grinding to a decent soundtrack. When this gets tied to combat is where it falls apart for me. You are frequently encouraged by the over-the-top announcer to keep moving all the time, and doing so definitely makes combat more survivable.
The first problem is that in order to stay in the combat area, that generally means grinding in circles while shooting people, or grinding back and forth while shooting people, or jumping up and down while shooting people. This motion requirement didn't make the lackluster shooting magically better for me. Adding irritation to this is the fact that a large number of enemies will target the surface you are on requiring you to constantly shift your attention back and forth between the traversal and the combat in a way that I assume is supposed to feel frenetic and exciting but just ends up feeling muddled and confused.
In addition a large number of the late game enemies are not actually better fought by keeping moving. Standing in one spot is the best way to handle some of them. Standing in one spot and occasionally dodging to the side was the smart approach to another.
The second big problem is the tower defense mission type. It has all the normal problems with combat combined with having to scramble between multiple points by somehow intuiting where the enemies are (since the minimap is not suited to keeping track of a large area), and using incredibly ineffective Orcs Must Die style traps that generally last about 5 seconds without you being there to defend your defenses.
The guns
I don't have a lot to say about this other than that they were surprisingly samey and unimpressive. For a feature that was touted so heavily by the developers, I would have expected them to be a lot more fun and feel very different. I feel the same way about Borderlands' "bazillion" guns too though, so my opinion is definitely not a common one.
Summing up
Did I mention that I wanted to like this game? I pushed myself through the last few hours trying hard to love it and not succeeding. Basically every point I had hoped would being a strength ended up being a liability. There are obviously a lot of people who enjoyed it and think it pulls off what it's attempting well and I wish I could have been one of them.
