izigame.me

I'm going to give this game a bit more time personally, but at present I'm not recommending it.
There are so many really great games in the Metroidvania space nowadays. The competition for your time in this genre is fierce.
Rusty Rabbit is.... well it's borderline ok so far. Not terrible, but not great. Honestly... it's dull and boring. And that's the TLDR; this game, at least for the first hour or two is a complete snooze fest.
- The dialogue is so slow and plodding, and there is so much of it. They really wanted to give Rusty a "tired old man" feel, and the voice actor pulls that off but.... it's at glacial pace. They honestly did too good of a job, because Rusty is not only not lovable or relatable, he is downright uninteresting and sluggish. You have to hear some of the lines to understand, but I can assure you that within an hour of playing you will be clicking 'A' to fast forward the dialogue so you can just read it in the text box and move on. Eventually you'll stop reading it entirely as well, because it is really dull and boring most of the time.
- I love a good story, and there is a very interesting world buried in this game... but most of your time is not spent learning about that. Most of the dialogue is really inane and boring, and not worth the time it took to read or listen to it. So much rambling about things that are just not interesting at all. The world itself is some kind of post-human post-apocalyptic world. There are hints that give tiny snippets of some of that history, and actually those are super interesting.... but those are very few and far between. It's too bad, really, because if they had spent more of the time delving into that story this would be a whole different game. But instead, we get to go through 7 pages of dialogue reading about how Rusty feels about car tires. It's really disappointing they didn't recognize how dull the dialogue in this game is.
- The "lovable" characters that the game promises are not so much. They are actually quite annoying, if I'm honest. Most of them have voices that will get on your nerves, and their lines are really also not that interesting. I have fast forwarded something like 90% of the conversation in this game so far, and that's crazy because I'm someone who loves narrative. But this game just doesn't do it correctly, and all of their voice acting goes to waste because it's either too slow to listen to or too high pitched and juvenile.
- Navigation has been non-existent. The game has a great map, don't get me wrong... I love a good Metroidvania map. But there just isn't much to it... you kind of just stick to the main path with the occasional offshoot. It has fast travel points and all, which is good... so I mean they weren't completely in the dark. But there just isn't much interest there other than plodding forward. Occasionally you'll run into a fork where one direction has a locked door, and in the other direction about 2 mins away is the key. That's about as complex as it gets.
- The platforming and combat are poor to mid. Everything is slow and clunky. That might be intentional, because you are kind of driving what appears to be a slow and clunky mech suit... but it doesn't make for good game play. You really don't feel like any of the platforming is rewarding. Even wall jumping is just kind of boring. Combat is button mash X so far, although I haven't opened up the supposed additional weapons. Drilling through junk is mash X. Then maybe jump once or twice, run into more junk and mash X. Repeat, repeat, repeat ad nauseum.
Maybe the game develops over time, but here's the problem with that. Why on earth would I stick around to find out how long that takes? I don't care if a game develops later on. If it isn't fun now, it's not worth playing. Games need to hook you in some way, and keep you interested. That's really where this one falls flat.... nothing is interesting, from the dialogue to the characters to the action.
- Back at base you can craft weapons and stuff with the junk you find... but again it's not that interesting. There's not really a crafting or research tech tree that I can see. You just find blueprints and you either have the junk or you don't. You can buy bits and pieces you need from the shop, or you can just keep searching for more.
- Leveling is not the greatest design. You get xp for killing enemies, but you also get xp for destroying the junk blocks. The problem is there's a lot of them and they are only like 1xp each, so you end up spending a lot of time just jumping around and digging them all out to get xp. It's not challenging, it's just a chore. There is a skill tree, so I'll give them that. It has the usual types of skills you would expect to find.
- Graphically and artistically, I'll give it a 7/10. It's fine, but nothing you will remember long after. There was clearly work put into it, but it feels uninspired, and really doesn't elicit anything from you. The color palette is basic, the geometry of the world is all square blocks, the enemy model art is ok but simple, and the animations are just ok.
As I mentioned at the beginning, if I can manage to stay awake I may potentially give the game a bit more time just to see if things open up or become more interesting. At present, however, I'm really not going to recommend this one, especially given how many other really incredible Metroidvania's are available nowadays.