I'm not sure how I originally found out about this game, but I liked what I saw and have been following the developers on Facebook. I generally liked the aesthetic, the upside-down-world aspect (which kind of reminded me of Battle of Olympus) and the gameplay that looked like an interesting take on Mega Man.

Overall, I've been happy with the game. It controls quite well, even in the upside-down-segments (which I tend to have a lot of trouble with it games). The level design is interesting -- it is obviously planned out, but also has kind of a random-feeling quality to it. Some levels are fairly straightforward left-to-right affairs, while others require some backtracking. I've enjoyed the weapon system too -- you get new abilities by beating bosses and can switch on the fly, ala Mega Man. Unlike Mega Man, there's no weapon charge meter, so you can use them to your heart's content. I've actually found the 4 I've found to be different enough to be worth switching between fairly consistently, it's not just a matter of picking the right thing for a boss.

On that point, the bosses have all been pretty cool. They have patterns, but there is a lot of variety in those patterns. So I've found them to be challenging and largely fair. I am stuck on one boss now, but I know with some time I'll overcome it. This is made a lot less frustrating because while the game is difficult, it does have checkpoints -- I can keep retrying a boss easily, the main loss is that my score resets to zero (my impression is that this also affects the ending?).

There are some things I don't love about it. The early stages, in particular, have some fairly busy backgrounds that are of a similar tone to the foreground -- so I've had a hard time differentiating between things. This was especially hard for me in a forest area where I was dealing with spiders jumping in and out of the underground world because I could barely tell where they were. I was glad to find this to be less of an issue later in the game.

There are also situations where you just feel overwhelmed with enemies. It's certainly possible to overcome them, but having 10 clouds shooting icicles at you while dodging two other things is a bit much. That said, the fact that enemies don't instantly respawn offscreen makes this a LOT more managable than it would have been in the NES days. In fact, they don't respawn at all: there are a couple of achievements revolving around killing every monster in the stages.

In the end though, I've enjoyed what I've played of the game and think it's a good example of its genre. The main game looks to be about 90 to 120 minutes if you blast through it, but there are items to collect and other modes that round out the package. So I feel like it's worth the $10. Looking forward to finishing it and checking out the New Game+ option.