Glo Phlox

Let me preface this a bit as I've never really written reviews before, so bear with me as I'm probably going to stumble through my explanations. I had the pleasure of playing a demo version of Glö Phlox at EGLX 2018, and given the experience I had there, I can confidently say the full release was worth the wait. Gameplay: True to its claim, Glö Phlox is indeed a twin-stick, bullet hell metroidvania. It is a fairly expansive yet simplistic world with tight controls that, in its own words, are "easy to learn and hard to master". When you aren't traversing the overworld through Cordette's Bloom Rush - which is your invuln-dash for the game - you're probably going to be fighting the myriad of enemies. Most of the game revolves around your dash and your crossbow, though it is important to note you cannot move and shoot at the same time. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but what this makes you do is learn the enemy mechanics first and learn your openings so you can capitalize on them to dish out damage with your crossbow. The fodder is easy enough to deal with, unless you're like me and you decide to try and dash passed all of them, only to pull too many and get swamped by the pr…

Played the game for an hour, loved the art style and game play, definitely recommend using a controller both ps4 and xbox controllers work smoothly with this game. It does get challenging at times but is definitely worth playing. for an indie game it is extremely well done!

Pretty good twin-stick metroidvania. There were a few bugs but nothing to keep me from finishing it.

Glo Phox is what I like to call, an ‘itch-scratcher’, the type of game that excels at ‘scratching an itch’ for a particular type of game. Itch scratchers aren’t necessarily the best at what they do, but will satisfy nonetheless. If you liked Hyper Light Drifter, and want something akin to that, this will scratch some of that itch, though it has more of a focus on ‘bullet hell’ style combat, and It’s significantly shorter than Hyper Light Drifter. My Hyper Light Drifter playthrough nearly reached 30 hours after hunting some achievements. Glo Phox only took 6 hours, and a significant portion of those 6 hours was wasted on a LOT of backtracking, combing through the world ‘trial-and-erroring’ to try and figure out how to progress. While I’d generally say it’s ‘a little rough around the edges’, it was mostly fun. The only major issue I have is that it fails quite badly in certain areas of communication, for example [spoiler] the game gives you two types of explosives, a bomb, and bomb arrows. Each explosive only explodes one type of stone block, while it’s clear that the bomb is intended to explode blocks when you get it, after getting the bomb arrows and attempting to use them to explo…

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This is an amazing indie twin stick shooter with a dark-souls esque story filled with mystery and intrigue. I hope we get a sequel where we see more of Cordette and Angelo.