Downward: Enhanced Edition

A Mirror's Edge-inspired first-person parkour platformer with vaguely Metroid-esque progression sounds like a good time, and I actually found Downward pretty fun for its first few hours despite an abundance of rough edges, but this is ultimately just too janky and unpolished to recommend except on deep discount, with controls that get increasingly unreliable as you acquire new abilities, and level design that gets increasingly convoluted and tedious to navigate with minimal direction (there's no map, only onscreen objective markers).

I don't think I can really recommend this to anyone. I was recommended this game cause I wanted a game similar to Metroid Prime. I heard that it has metroid like progression with Prince of Persia-esque parkour all in 1st person. Conceptually I should really like this game, and I really wanted to, but it hurts me to say it didn't really live up to my expectations. I will say graphically it's great for an indie game. It's also not too pricey either, I think I got it on sale for around a dollar, and the game is not too long. But the problems arise when it comes to the gameplay. The parkour is a bit too janky, and sometimes doesn't work when you want it to. The combat is not super engaging, just a lot of dodging and not much else, kinda chose to avoid it when I could. I found the voice acting a bit annoying, kinda gives me that "focus m" dialog, but at least it can be toggled off. Overall, I'd say you should skip this one.

This game is such huge disappointment. It starts really strong, it looks nice, it feels nice, it has a lot to explore and collect. And then everythning goes down. Wall jumping and climbing is so wonky that quite often you die/fall down not even knowing why. Fighting enemies is boring and their range is inconsistent. Boss is boring and annoying at the same time. Then you have some weird huge platforming level after boss that doesn't have savepoint. If you turn off game you need to do entire level from the begining. On that level you have wall jumping puzzle that seems to be impossible, there's just not enough momentum to jump 5-6 walls one after another. And bugs so many bugs, your mouse can stop working from time to time, tab key stops showing hud, selling items can give you infinite(max39999) currency so you don't need to collect anything, climbing sometimes stops working. Graphics has some problems too, it's technically not a bug but brightness, bloom or whatever is so intensive that quite often you don't see jumping/hooking elements also those things blink all the time so it's even worse to find them sometimes.

Good parkour game with some interesting mechanics. I found it to be quite forgiving in the open world section. The skyboxes used are great to look at and the graphics are decent maxed out. The story is fairly standard, I feel like this would be a great prologue for a story introducing this world, not the meat and bones of the world. The parkour challenge stages are really hard to get a gold medal on and requires perfect execution. This is an indie game so there's always going to be a few bugs which i'll jot down how I fixed: PS5 controller didnt work out of the box even though it says its supported, you can just swap to steam input. Only problem is you'll get steam controller/xbox style glyphs where it 'X' is 'A' etc. If you explore a lot there's a big chance you'll walk into some story areas and trigger dialog/cutscenes before you were meant to get there. For me I got into the sanctuary area like 2 worlds before I was meant to and the dialog was the next steps. I completed those 2 worlds and came back and nothing triggered. I had to look up what the next steps was and that dialog from a few hours ago told me the next step. Either look up the steps to progress if you're s…

From the moment the game launched it was clear that there was no actual effort put into it: every line of voiceover feels like a trope being force-fed to the player, it simply makes no sense and invokes no interest. It's all bright and flashy colors and no substance. Jumping is okay, but that's it, and even then it's highly glitchy. Do not recommend.

This is not a polished game. You will hit a variety of bugs over the course of this relatively short game. I also found the enemy fights to be boring since you just have to move around until it performs an attack that allows you to take them out. It's repetitive and doesn't require significant skill. Now with all the bad out of the way, this is a fun parkour game. I would have put this game down due to the jankiness if it wasn't for how fun it was to explore and parkour throughout the map. I found the controls to be pretty satisfying and the levels to be compelling to explore. There's also a lot of collectibles and currency that can be collected, which can be used to upgrade your character or a base. I didn't find a need to upgrade the base; but some of the character upgrades were worthwhile. Overall, I played it through to an ending and had my fill of it after about 5 hours. I'd recommend it if on sale.