izigame.me

Having now spent a decent amount of time with it, I can confidently say I do not recommend purchasing or playing 30XX.
First, the good: art is pretty and colorful. Stage mechanics, when not incredibly frustrating, can be interesting and used in unique ways (like the cloud jump pads or even the water platform switches). The weapon and power selection and mechanics around them are also fun, and probably the most expressive the game gets. You can feel overpowered in terms of both your DPS and mobility, and both feel quite fun. The controls do a decent job of emulating Mega Man X style gamefeel while also being slightly too floaty to really have impact.
The bad: basically everything else. From a sheer gameplay perspective, as either a Mega Man-like or a rogue-like/lite/whatever, 30XX is a miserable experience. If I wasn't a huge fan of the source material it's emulating I'm not sure I would have given it more than a few runs, and even after having played it to completion probably around 7 or 8 times I don't think at any point I felt 'happy' when I finished a run--more like 'relieved'.
The level design in this game is flat out malicious. I'm not sure I've ever seen a platformer or rogue-ish thing more committed to just throwing piles of garbage and projectile spam at you and saying 'deal with it'. The closest I can think of is Binding of Isaac, and that's a game where you're so encouraged to build an overpowered death cannon that most rooms don't pose a challenge by late game because of your sheer room clearing speed. 30XX has no such design benefit, and in fact even when you manage to scrape together a broken feeling movement build with extra jumps and air mobility, it then feels like the later levels are designed not only to remove you of that joy but also require cheese to even get past in a non-lethal manner.
It's really hard to describe everything 30XX does wrong level design wise in a short fashion, since there are so many egregious bits sticking out, but the two main issues are the length/sloggishness of the end-game and the way that late-game/intensity level generation is both confusing and misery-generating. Instead of a level following, say, a pathing structure that efficiently leads you from left to right, it will instead criss-cross and curve over itself, making you guess whether you're supposed to be heading up, right, left, or down. This is theoretically not a bad thing, as different directional pathing means more variety in movement and level orientation, but this is never clearly communicated to the player. So many times in playing a level I'm left with a 'where do I go feeling', and the sense that even by moving forward I'm somehow going in a direction the game has not predicted me to go. So many chunk generations have random bits sticking out that seem like they could lead to promising secrets, but are instead completely empty. And many end-game chunk stacks leave me feeling completely lost as to which direction to proceed, eventually just damage boosting my way through everything and holding a direction hoping it'll eventually lead to the exit.
I'm not sure if there's anything that could be good enough in the early game or raw handling to make the late-game stuff justifiable. On top of the chunk generation hating you in every possible fashion, the level mechanics and gimmicks that are initially inviting and innovative become mandatory, frequently leading to situations where you're not even sure how to interact with said gimmick to proceed, all while being pelted by non-stop projectiles and damage beams and other 'non-enemy' hazards that you therefore can't eliminate, only pray to avoid. I have spent thousands of hours playing precision platformers, and while if I was to slow down to my absolute limit and approach these screens as such, there's a remote possibility I could navigate them without damage, that does not properly represent the feel of the rest of this game, nor does it seem inviting or satisfying. Going from a highly mobile enemy murder machine to a clumsy paper doll being pelted by indestructable recurring lasers feels miserable.
Again, maybe more of this would be forgiveable if the rest of the games skeleton was somehow fantastic, but it isn't. The rogue-style progression system is one of the worst I've ever seen, with almost every run leaving me with over 100 meta-currency points but not a single thing I wanted to spend them on. 24 hours in I still haven't finished the tree, but it doesn't matter, because it's almost nothing but tiny passive bonuses or features I'll never use in the first place. +5 extra nuts? +10? An ability to go straight to the end game, without farming for powers to make getting through it's torrent of misery actually bearable? No thank you.
End-game difficulty is represented almost entirely by a Hades style heat system, now called 'entropy', and it is in my opinion one of the best representations of why this style of difficulty balancing is not as simple as just changing numbers and calling it a day. The default experience of this game is by its end so miserable that just the notion of changing things like healing percentage or enemy health/damage numbers sounds like the worst punishment imaginable... and there are like 4 levels of these things each. Make spikes insta-kill you, make it so you can't switch equipment, the list goes on. The devs seem to have no idea of how to meaningfully balance risk and reward, as exemplified by the 'challenge' guy who sometimes shows up at the start of levels. He'll offer you a risk in exchange for an end-level reward, but they're never proportional. "No healing during level but full heal at the end" is a great example--in what planet is that ever a good idea? I could almost always farm myself to full healthy via the enemies on the way to the boss. The only way this makes sense is if you're so terrible at the boss that you need a full heal afterwards... but then what were your chances of getting through the boss anyway? Especially if you have to go through the entire preceding level without healing?
Item variety is incredibly limited, build variety the same, and overall this is just... an awful shell of an experience. Despite it theoretically being a way to play an infinite amount of Mega Man, I can't see myself coming back to it unless it's specifically to play with a friend... and even then, their experience was just as miserable as mine, so what's the point?
I forgot to mention specifically how bad the literal end-game is: two mini-bosses, the first with two phases, the second with three. Then MORE level, then a bunch of challenges, THEN the final boss, with THREE phases, and then a Super Metroid style escape sequence which is so monotonous and pointless an homage that the devs actually included a 'skip' portal, since there's seemingly no reward for doing it and it's literally only there as a Super Metroid reference anyway. I hate this part the most.
I hate the gravity flipping usage that feels both puzzle and maze-like by late game. I hate how if I save my favorite stages for last they become mutated monstrosities that pervert everything I liked about the level design gimmicks into something barely playable. I hate how random sections of certain areas will require unique/gimmicky movement mechanics, like the dirt-diving, that are unintuitive, feel awful to execute, and don't appear anywhere else in the game. I hate the sheer number of vertical ascent and descent sections that, even with the right-thumb camera (not available on default PCs binds as far as I'm aware) feel like you're blind-diving into a pit or enemy 9/10 times. I hate how boss patterns become projectile cluster-spams by end-game. I hate how mediocre the items and rewards feel. Overall, I just don't like this game.