Ato

Really fantastic. I'd guess I'm around 1/2 to 3/4 through the game as of reviewing, and I've loved it so far. The movement is responsive and feels great, especially once you've unlocked several/all abilities. The boss fights tend toward a fair challenge on the difficulty I'm playing on, and many of the fights are inspired, varied, and really fun. The base parrying mechanic feels excellent. Timing is a *little* tight in some places, but it feels tuned very well dialed in. The art and music are beautiful, and the world is a joy to explore. I only have two complaints at this point. 1) The counter mechanic (I think it was in a hidden area?) uses a very strange combination of buttons, in down+square+triangle. If I could rebind it to L1 or something, I'd be using it all the time. Out of all the adjacent face buttons to combine, square+triangle is probably the most awkward to press, so I never even bother using it. Pretty dumb. 2) The animation that plays when you get a heart piece is around 7-8ish seconds long and stops you from moving entirely. It's a short amount of time, but when you're collecting so many of them, often within a minute of one another, it becomes tedious. This is pre…

An excellent metroidvania. Combat and Parkour are smooth – gameplay feels great. The story made me tear up, which means I was properly immersed, I think. Truly a hidden gem.

4.3★ Really easy to get into and love, it's more of a speedrunning game than a pure metroidvania as it is short and you don't need every power you can get, but that's also what makes it so unique and fun

It's great, support good games

I enjoyed Ato thoroughly and 100% reccomend it if you like hollow knight or metroidvanias with precision combat. For a game with an all time high of 19 concurrent players, I was not expecting to love Ato as much as I do. It is some of the most fun I've had with a metroidvania in a while and it is evident a lot of love and care went into making the game. I love how you can stagger bosses by chain dashing them right as they are about to strike. I also like the parry ability, however it is far too inconsistent to pull off the input for it mid fight so I would have used it way more if it were a seperate input. Lastly, it is a very boss-heavy game with few enemies between bosses, and the enemies you do find tend to be replicas of the bosses that take two swings to kill (However just running around is very fun so this isn't necessarily a complaint)

The demo is very clunky when it comes to jumping compared to the full game so if you are worried about that before buying it is fixed in the full game.