izigame.me

The mobius machine is a metroidvania with great audio/visuals, genuinly fun boss fights & a sprawling map that is super open ended. So then how come i'm not recommending it? To say it frankly it gets boring/frustrating after the initial few hours. Combat is genuinly mind numbing & frustrating against the regular enemies, all environments feel the same, the exploration feels unrewarding & there's no real sense of direction or flow to the levels. This game made me do two things i normally don't do in a metroidvania, because i find them part of the core MV experience. First is skipping past regular enemies even in areas i haven't treaded yet, essentially ignoring combat. Secondly is looking up the map before the cleanup phase (thank god for Demajen <3). This second one especially is a cardinal MV sin normally as it takes away the fun of exploration. This happened about 8 hours in & i was just not motivated anymore to explore this HUGE map with unrewarding collectibles.
Said collectibles come as fragments where you have to find 3 individual pieces of the same upgrade before it becomes a usable blueprint. There's 10 different kinds of upgrades so the chance you'll have 3 of the same is not very common as most upgrades are unattainable initially (backtracking). However the issue is that the upgrades are so small that backtracking for it (painful in this game) is not worth it. The whole progression is so horrible in this game it takes all the joy out of exploration because it's just not rewarding. This is doubly true because the inherrent risk of exploration in losing HALF OFF YOUR CURRENCY. That's right this run and gun platformer has soulslike elements, which was missing to make it fun! /s. You need this lots of currency to use your blueprints and you can't just do it anywhere, no, you have to go to a workshop first! So there you are running around with a 'large' amount of currency, not really 'large' because most enemies drop anywhere between 1 to 5 :) You can't even spend it to lower the risk because you're lacking the blueprints.
This whole progression system is just thrash, you are constantly missing that one crucial fragment for an upgrade that barely makes a difference, so you're stuck carrying around all your currency only to risk losing half of it. Losing it is very easy as enemies do ludicrous amounts of damage (even when fully upgraded) and healing costs so much of your energy bar. A full energy bar can heal about half your health, and for it to fill up entirely you need to kill at least 10 enemies as they barely drop anything. That's right they only drop energy on death but to do that you have to literally shoot at them for 15 seconds or sometimes more... Everything & i mean EVERYTHING in this game is so damn fucking tanky it just makes it super boring. Regular enemies aren't even fun to fight, they got easy to dodge attacks and are just boring. However the devs know this so they put every enemy in the most annoying place possible like cramped hallways or even worse inside a building that you cannot see into because it's part of the foreground.
These only fade away if you enter the building but right as you do that the enemy explodes or strikes you in proper GOTCHA fashion. Some enemies even have a suprise ending where they run at you and explode for a 5th of your health. There's so many of these gotcha moments litered through the game, sometimes even right before a save point at the end of a grueling gauntlet section. So then you have to do ALL of it again only to risk losing your currency if you fail... Speaking of save points these are scattered so far apart that it sometimes feels like there aren't any at all. There's also the beloved (not) boss runbacks that are just horrible. The bosses aren't hard (except for two that were medium hard) but you can die quite fast. So doing these minutelong runbacks is just incredibly frustrating. To add insult to injury is that these save points do not even replenish your energy. Why?! Why is this simple convenience not granted? At the bare minimum you get your health back.
If you die during the aforemetioned bosses you drop your currency in the boss arena with no way to retrieve it other than facing the boss and winning. The game gives a 'hint' that you should go upgrade if you struggle with a boss. What a joke, to do that you have to make a long trip to a workshop as most often there isn't any near the boss but even if you do it's rare you'll have the blueprints to do so. You also take the risk of dying losing your currency, besides you only have half of it available anyways as the other half is sitting next to the boss. Said bosses also just appear out of nowhere, in most cases you fall into their arena because the bridge you've seen a 100 times elsewhere crumbled this time and put you face to face with the boss! Gotcha again ;) Now for me this wasn't an issue most of the time as i beat most bosses first try & actually had some fun doing so. Credit where it's due because the bosses are unique and very well designed, they even feel appropriatly tanky for once. I just wish everything else surrounding the combat wasn't so horrible because it could've been a fun game if they weren't dead set on making it as frustrating as possible.
Exploration is not exempt from this because like i mentioned the things you find don't feel rewarding and you have a constant fear of losing what you fought so hard for. But there's also the fact that there's a ridiculous amount of one way doors or general falls you can make, 'getting over it'-style. Moments where if you miss a jump, which is very easy given the lack of coyote jumping (a MUST have for any good MV), you will fall down deep & have to climb back up an entire section. This can sometimes take up a few minutes if you didn't drop down that one ladder. Apparantly both these falls and one way doors have been reduced since launch so i cannot imagine how frustrating it must have been back then. Level design would be solid if they didn't rely on these one way doors, falls and so many of the goddamn gotcha's... There's also just an overal massive lack of guiddance in this game. At the start you get your main objective which is coincedentally literally the game's end boss and the rest you'll just have to figure out.
And figure it out you must as the map is absolutely HUGE with no guiddance other than external. You don't even get the map for a zone until you find the mostly centralized map room. Initally i liked the feature as this adds to the feeling of being stranded on an alien world, but later on given the sheer number of paths available everywhere this became a nuissance. In general the map is so mazelike and labyrinthine that you don't remember where you can go or not. Yes, you can place map markers but there's just so many paths and they all look the same. Like literally the same. They had maybe a hundred assets for the game and just copy pasted them everywhere. No, recoloring a prop does not count for variety, it's just boring and repetitive. After a few hours in everything started to blend together, even fighting the same enemies again and again. Doing the same thing aimlessly for no real progression took all the fun out of the inital opening hours.
(1/3)
I'm running out of characters for this review, the remaining part is shorter but spread across two comments below as there's a character limit on those as well. Anyways thanks for listening to my TED talk on why this game is mid