FAR FROM DEAD

A soldier takes a quiet moment to have a smoke, but that calm doesn’t last long. In this game, it’s pretty much the only peaceful moment you’ll get. The real goal is to defeat seven bosses, though thankfully you don’t have to beat them all in one go. If you decide to step away, you’ll return to a simple hub map where you can replay earlier fights or try your luck against the next boss whenever you’re ready. The gameplay revolves around moving, shooting, and dodging at just the right moment. You can jump, which also lets you perform wall jumps, and you have a dash that works only while you’re on the ground. If you want to make things a bit easier on your fingers, there’s also an auto fire option. Turning it on lets you focus more on learning the bosses’ attack patterns and figuring out how to dodge them rather than constantly pressing the shoot button. To keep things in line with modern boss fight design, each boss has a health bar divided into segments. Every time you remove a section, the fight ramps up. Attack patterns speed up, extra projectiles appear, and the screen becomes more chaotic, making everything much harder to avoid. Most fights follow a familiar structure, but the…

This game is pretty cool and I am enjoying it a lot, but there are things that keep it from being a classic imo. First off, I love the look and feel of the game. The pixel art is fantastic, and the controls are tight & responsive. Each boss has a completely different feel to them, and with the exception of one, they are super fun to learn. I will probably come back and finish all of the challenges/achievements at some point since the game itself is pretty short, but my playtime includes the first two bosses that are included in the demo since the save files are integrated with the full release. The major problem I have with the game is the ultra irritating music. I ended up putting it on mute and I noticed that I immediately started playing better. Something about the tones and notes were hitting my brain in a bad way, and actually causing me to rage out. Fortunately, each sound volume is on a slider so you can still have the other sound effects going if you turn the music off. And out of personal preference, there is one boss that I did not enjoy fighting. There are large gaps of his fight where you are forced to move up to the top of the screen and dodge some bullet hel…