Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark

Mixed reviews are well deserved. Progression in this tedious and not fun! You progress by collecting bones and there is limited amount of bones in each area, so you cant simply grind to progress ...that's not all. Typically in metroidvanias you unlock new abilities from defeated bosses, but not in this game, here bosses gives you nothing of value, go vacuum every corner of map and pray to find chest that drop bones instead of useless sub weapon or coins and pray its not locked behind some obstacle you cant bypass yet. Another example of terrible game design is stone doors (copy of spirit gates from Ori and Blind Forest) to open them you need 3 pieces of demon stone and what potentially locked there? abilities? coins? bones? HP/MP upgrades? NO! Absolutely useless Tiny Nest collectible that gives you... steam achievement, like what!?

A great follow-up to Demon Purge but now much more open akin to Metroidvanias. The game's combat felt very fair overall as bosses and enemies didn't have much in the way of surprises even in the hardest difficulty (Ultramaid), so I'd avoid if you want more of a challenge. Where I had the most fun was exploration since there were plenty of tools for traversal and discovering secrets. It was really cool to have a Sonic-esque power that helped skip through enemies or terrain, and made backtracking easier. My only nitpick would be that I found the inventory design a bit lacking in terms of sorting and presentation. This was really obvious when you wanted to upgrade a chosen sub-weapon.

overall a fun metroidvania, but the game lack bosses, the ost is repetitive; zones don't have their own theme, and also is a bit easy even with the max difficulty that it offers before beating the game once. It just feels that inti said "lets gonna make a 500km² map that's fun to explore and forget everything else" which is weird coming from these devs, it's still worth playing and the voice acting is amusing and flawless

It's a begrudging yes. The map is far too sprawling even with all the movement options you eventually get and there are some parts that are very obtuse to figure out in order to progress unless you mark the hell out of the map in order to remember where to go back to later. Dialogue is good and even on easy you are in for a tough battle sometimes.

It's a fine metroidvania. Nothing special, but far from being bad. Great characters and fun character interactions. One of the few times I actually wish there was more dialogue between characters and NPCs. Lots of opportunity for customization with the sub weapons and a pretty big map to explore.

Great fun! Recommend to anybody who likes metroidvanias like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, It can be a bit rough, but in my opinion that's part of the charm of these kinds of games, the world does not hold your hand, expects you to mess around and enjoy doing so. I understand that it's not for everyone, but the fact that this game sits at "Mixed" reviews is just criminal.