| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Platformer; reg=UC] |
| | | What feels like a still-early-in-development Castlevania-like platformer that hit Free to Play on Steam, "Rise of the Eternal."
The Steam description says the game is running in Unreal Engine 5, and this is apparently still a debug-type build; various keys toggle developer tools, for instance ";" and "'" toggle info displays and the ability to pan the view to see more of the stage.
This might also be why the game is cranking my CPU fan even with nothing going on in the game; it's taking 50% CPU on a machine that doesn't drop a frame in SF6.
There is no controller support; I mapped the action keys to my DualSense with Steam Input:
Triple attack: Q
Double attack: E
Move/jump: WASD or arrow keys
ESC: menu
The movement is sharp except that while you do have movement control during a jump, it's very hard to cancel the jump's forward momentum, so short jumps are way too hard to do reliably--and there are a few short jumps here that, when missed, send you falling all the way back to the start of a stage.
The AI and combat is extremely rudimentary; the hit boxes and timings are out of whack, your character's attack animations are far to slow and long, and you can just hopscotch over nearly all of the enemies; besides them the only other things in the stages are health items scattered around.
The sprites and backgrounds are pretty darn gorgeous, though, and blessedly unmarred by flashing FX and screen shake--so I can actually play this without having to worry about getting a migraine. ^ _^ The subdued music creates a fitting ambiance.
Lovely pixel art and I'm a big fan of the scaled-up pixels for big monsters.
I'd love to see a fully developed game along these lines; hopefully the developer keeps at it. |
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| | | | Had to trim out a couple chunks in stage 4 due to a music copyright claim. : PP |
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| | | | ^ That edit cut out the final boss take-down so I tried YouTube's newly phrased offending music removal tool, which is no longer referred to as experimental and prone to failure--and it worked! Might make the commentary and game sfx a little clipped and lower quality, but not really obviously so, I don't think. So, that's good to know, well done there YouTube. |
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