Speaking of Metroid/vania's, I finished
Forma.8 yesterday. I'm super torn on how much I liked this one. I played it on Wii U, but I could see this coming to Switch in the future since it's already on a bunch of platforms.
This one comes from
Mixed Bag, a game studio from Italy, probably best known for their Star Fox-esque space shooter Futuridium. I picked this up because the
NWR review was rather positive. However, in my opinion the game is... well... a bit of a mixed bag (sorry).
You play as a space probe that looks like the Owlship from Watchmen, which gets stranded on a giant planet. Full of cavernous places, mysterious locations, with hints of past civilisations and so forth. It really adheres pretty close to the Metroid formula in terms of architecture and worldbuilding without a single written word.
Structurally it's also similar, you can go in a bunch of direction usually, there's tons of secrets, but also power ups you need to unlock before you access certain blocked off paths.
Visually it's a real stunner. It looks very distinct from Futuridium mostly, proving the developers have more than one ace up their sleeves. This one is right up there with the DrinkBox Studios games like Severed and Guacamelee; Forma.8 shares a similar cartoony vibe and even shares some of the colour-pallette. That's commendable in my book, because it makes Forma.8 into
one of the best looking indies on Wii U.
The sound department also pulls some real weight here. A moody,oppressive vibe hangs over most of it. If you restore health the flowers you do so with make a satisfying jingle, boss battle encounters have blood-pumping bassy synth themes, again top notch stuff.
However... It ain't all fantastic, sadly.Metroidy games are notoriously difficult to pull off if you don't get the map right, and the map here is really rather useless. Rooms are absolutely MASSIVE, your ship is tiny, and the map just displays what sector you're in. Not even your location within the block, and definitely not all the winding paths within them either.
Since nothing has names and many of the areas look somewhat similar you're going to get absolutely lost and trek back and forth past the same areas many times.
The hints here are also very sparse and often just super obtuse. There's some real headscratching puzzles for which hints are placed all the way across the map. There's a few warp portals to help you out, but even those are unreliable sometimes - I got super far into an area, found a portal near a mysterious domed structure and it sent me back a thousand miles... AND IT WAS A ONE-WAY PORTAL. Why??? Had to trek all the way back there.
Speaking of backtracking, what's a defining feature of Metroid? SPEED. You zip past rooms with relative ease and many powerups are designed to increase mobility, or at least demolish everything in your path with barely a second thought. Not so in Forma.8, your probe is pretty slow and floaty. Those imprecise controls are mostly fine, but almost every enemy can tank at least one hit, even the smallest critters.
There's thousands of them constantly getting up in yo grill when you're just trying to find where the damn cave exit was again. This game does interesting things, but the combat is pretty annoying and it makes traversal quite harrowing (not in a good way).
Another basic element they really messed up: damage indicators on boss battles. There's a bunch of bosses and there's usually a trick you need to figure out to beat them. However, just wailing on them with the bombs or shield zap often makes them flash, giving you the impression you're doing damage. No boss healthbars means I dropped 50 bombs into a grid robot's face before thinking "okay maybe this ain't it."
Give us some feedback here! Just have it make a metallic clink indicating our efforts are pointless against its armour or something!
That's the overall experience: mesmerising and it keeps you curious, but also very frustrating. Maybe I'm too dumb for its puzzles, some of which are really neat, but I was close to giving up several times. For indication: HowLongToBeat.com said this game would be 5½ hours. It took me around 10 and I just passed the 50% completion mark.
I was really excited for Forma.8 so maybe my expectations were too high, but unfortunately I can't give this a full recommendation for everyone. If you want a hard, beautiful Metroid game, get this. It's a really mysterious world, and you won't be able to solve all its puzzles, so it succeeds in making you feel really tiny in a hostile giant universe.
However it really overstays its welcome, extensive backtracking is caused by confusing layouts and a crappy map. Tonally it also doesn't always jive, since the game feels pretty relaxing/smooth/slow-paced, but they'll pile on the enemies turning it into a weird stressful experience.
Rating:
8/10 in its best moments,
5/10 during its worst. Come sit on the fence with me!