Love the animations. Got two complaints and two solutions. It is way too hard to avoid everything the game throws at you and the left-right struggle system is pretty bad. I have to borderline break my controller to escape holds. If you're going to use a struggle system, make it slower paced and make it a simon says sort of thing (game says press a, press a, game says press b, press b). The hard to avoid enemies could be fixed just by making max a little more nimble.
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I think the game does a really good job of being fair actually. Sure its hard, but there is always a solution, and usually multiple solutions, to each encounter.
I actually got bored of the game because I ran out of ideas for handicaps to make the game challenging. To start with, I essentially always play the game with a delayed start penalty, no special attack, no struggling, no moving forwards during i-frames, and no sliding. Even then, you can still reliably beat the game without any resets, it just takes time to master each mechanic and enemy. Once you start seeing the solutions to each encounter, you may realize that the game is far more forgiving than you'd expect!