Legends of the Universe - Cosmic Bounty

Legends of the Universe - Cosmic Bounty is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. It's an extremely badly made ripoff of Metroid (copyright Nintendo, 1986). To date, it's unclear whether Nintendo have taken any legal action against the "developer" to preserve their intellectual property rights. It's a very buggy (to the point of being unplayable) 2D retro pixel side scrolling "Metroidvania" platformer slapped together with GameMaker Studio, so the developer chose pretty much every way one could fail at game development and ran into them headfirst (again). It gets worse. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, …

I was enjoying the game alright until I hit a glitch that made a red key-card disappear right at the end of the game (92% complete) making it impossible to progress. I tried exciting various times to close the game out and go back to the location of where they key-card should be, but it's just gone.

Buggy mess. I got softlocked twice during the playthrough bc the dev didn't consider backtracking (and this is a metroidvania of all things) after each upgrade and certain keycards literally disappear, to the point the last boss door needs 3 but if you get 2 the first one gets sent to the shadow realm, so if you did this and saved before realizing that (like me), then congrats, you softlocked the game again and will have to replay all this mess again. I just went for the achievs but now I regret tbh. Avoid it.

Nice metroidvania in 8 bit style, a jump back in the nes era

Playable. The music was pretty silly. I needed something more in the production department to be able to get immersed.

This is a low budget Metroidvania that I found weirdly… fun. There’s a **lot** of room for improvement, but it definitely nailed some core components. The good - player upgrades. It very slowly and gradually upgrades your movement and combat abilities, almost imperceptibly, and by the end you are cruising through rooms. It did a great job of rewarding exploration in that way. I also liked the tile sets. Nice color and texture variety. Combat felt serviceable, and map design was good as well. But on the map… there are 12 “areas” like a typical Metroid game. But for some reason there’s no way to see an overview of them all, or know how anything actually connects. It’s very frustrating, because many times you have to go through multiple areas to find the next key upgrade. The level design- really basic. Most rooms are basically flat with a few enemies. There’s only a handful of times where platforming is a consideration, which is a missed opportunity. I hit a bad bug at the end where I needed to use a keycard to open a final door. The keycard somehow disappeared from my inventory. Luckily, restarting the game managed to open the door. For a discount, I think this was a fine 3 h…