Delta Manifold

Extreme budget Metroid Prime. I didn't hate it, but I just found it too lacking to recommend. The game has an almost incomplete and messy feeling. Level design is mostly haphazard and maze-like. The map is a 3D mesh, like Prime games have, but it doesn't mark where you have and haven't been, and there are no 'rooms' - it's just one big map model. Environmental detail is a bit inconsistent and most of it doesn't get me excited to explore it, but some of it is kinda cool. Enemy AI is almost always just running at you while shooting - very basic and not extremely fun to fight. There are many smaller things that make it feel like it lacks polish and quality of life features and mechanics. For e.g., some enemies just freeze when killed, making it hard to tell when you defeat them, but other enemies burn up, making their demise immediately apparent. There are small bits of charm and a few moments when I got an upgrade that gave me a little bit of that Prime feeling. I also like the spark detection feature, because it'd be a nightmare tracking down sparks without it, but also because it lets you know one is near but doesn't totally give away the location, so it still feels rewarding whe…

neat small first person metroid-like

Erm chat, this might be peak

Poor man's Metroid Prime.

I think I like it better than Secrets Under Eco...but I intended to give that game a fair shake. I don't really want to waste my time, or my money, on something I'm not going to enjoy. The gameplay is decent, and it's nice to see Metroid Prime-style scanning again. Music sounded pretty good (when it wasn't cutting in and out randomly), and I thought the sound design was pretty decent. Level design...I'm not too sure, but it at least didn't feel [i]terribly[/i] intolerable. Enemy design, especially on the more organic creatures was really bad - it looked like someone just did a single pass on them using Blender's Skin Modifier - I've used this before, and it's a powerful tool to get a basic shape down, but you have to do further work to make them look great. Some of these maybe had extra details on them, but it was otherwise very...uncannily smooth. Once again, we encounter a problem with lighting, textures, and rendering making things too dark to see. It can be an intentional thing, of course, but that must be counteracted by effective tools for the player to use. You do have a flashlight, but it has a very narrow beam, if you shine it too close, it flares up brightly, and it al…

Pretty decent, if not simple, exploration shooter. It's rather easy to get lost and miss some passages, but there are multiple pathways to lead you to the next upgrade or artifact. Dying to enemies almost never happens, it's always the environmental hazards that kill you, but there's no penalty for dying aside from being sent back to the last save point. It'll amuse you for a while trying to find all the sparks, but I gave up searching at about 1,020/1,200. I got the feeling the ease with which you can escape the level boundaries late in the game isn't necessary for finding anything cool.