Serious Sam: I Hate Running Backwards (Xbox One) - First 20 Minutes of Gameplay
4Mini review: First things that stands out is lack of empowerment. None of the empowerment that Serious Sam or top-tier shmups have -- coming from a fan of both. You move too slow. You feel too weak. The opening screen has you enter a portal backwards. The purpose is to set the stage, but it immediately feels broken. Thought I would be able to use dual-stick multidirectional firing, which would have empowered my domination. Without it, you feel perpetually trapped. It has standard vertical scroll shmup controls matched with limitations of FPS games -- a broken match. Weapons are design for an FPS game not a shmup game, although this is a shmup not an FPS. The weapons have limited ammo. Awesome weapons like the minigun take time to spool up. None of them feel right in the shmup environment. I feel like they were going for something like Nuclear Throne or Enter The Gungeon, and I wanted something more like Thunder Force or Raiden. Likely my expectations were off, but even then the game should empower you. The first boss appears to crash the game when it loads. The game just feels bad. Lots of interruptions. And you cannot click "A" to skip the interruptions, you have to hold it down. From a developmental perspective, your "A" button melee attack is an excuse or "skip around" of poor design, because you cannot get into position to shoot the enemies. I pressed melee all the time. That lead to the design decision to disallow pressing "A" to skip interruptions. Gamers are likely hammering "A" and would accidentally skip the interruption. Even the interruptions are interruptions and are not great design choices. The melee is also the most powerful "weapon" with infinite ammo. Using it lots, which they had contingency design decisions for, ruins the game and is not what the game is about. They add insult to injury with the 'baby mode', as if it's you who sucks and not the game. It has "1 Unobtainable and 1 Discontinued achievements" according to TrueAchievements: https://www.trueachievements.com/game/I-Hate-Running-Backwards/achievements.
Matthew Doucette (Xonatron)
http://matthewdoucette.com/