More Indie Metroid - Transmute [demo] (2021-10-11)
0I’ve been eyeballing this game for a while ever since seeing some gifs for it on Twitter. Transmute’s an upcoming metroid-like game (Search Action is my preferred term). Overall it’s pretty solid - controls well, has interesting terrain/enemies to navigate through, etc I’m looking forward to seeing how the game fares at release.
The sounds seem a bit temp. The firing sound (and the overall presentation of the basic shot) are so similar to Environmental Station Alpha. Some of the rest of the sounds are either nonexistent or super subtle (it’s really hard to tell if you’re damaging enemies). The room transition effect sounds more like a notification or menu sound that I should be paying attention to, and I think the game would be much better off by getting rid of it entirely.
The pacing of the demo overall is a bit slow - while you get items and abilities early on, it takes a while before you get anything especially cool to use. I wonder if the demo reflects the intended pacing for the final game. One of the earlier upgrades you get allows you to shoot some blocks to make them traversable, but I didn’t see a lot of interesting uses for it in the demo.
The boss fight music in particular wasn’t really my thing - there’s a couple of sharp notes that it plays that are really grating, and I think the style of the track overall doesn’t really jive with doing sci-fi stuff on a strange planet (and what little I could understand of the story so far doesn’t lend very well to that either).
I want to see more insight into the story/world sooner (and perhaps either an explanation for, or the main character’s reaction to a bunch of weird stuff like taking brain scans from [dead?] NPCs in vats and why the player respawns in a similar vat).
Transmute will be available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1191660/Transmute
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