I gave this game a couple of tries, but I found it difficult to the point of not being fun - and this is coming from someone who rarely takes issue with a game's challenge. The basic movement is extremely satisfying, as is the combat against the different enemy types, but the design of this game keeps on punishing you the worse you do. I'm not sure if there's something I'm missing, and if it was just one or two things I wouldn't mind, but I was constantly replaying sections I'd already beaten because of:
- The arenas being so flat makes it much easier to throw yourself off the edge accidentally. Most beyblade-like games have bowl arenas where the edges are much harder to climb unless you get knocked, giving you a safety margin against accidentally ending yourself with a bad move.
- Not having guaranteed retries. The 50/50 continue/main menu (instead of something like two retries per stage or something) feels like an absolutely sadistic choice - if I'm playing poorly enough to need a retry, the last thing I'm going to want to do is to risk getting booted back to the main menu. This feels like an idea taken out of a challenge mode, where players have already mastered a gameplay loop and are looking to show off their skills, and added to the default mode, and I'd like to know where it came from because I feel like I'm missing the intent here.
- The dash is a really cool move, but your only defense also being a dash means that the rebound from grazing an enemy on the side, a miss on the edge (which is where you need to be to knock out enemies), or the first boss knocking you into the air before a dash, means near-guaranteed doom.
- The first boss doesn't seem to have a cap on the number of red enemies it can spawn in the later phase, nor does it seem to ever slow down when there are more enemies out. So stopping to clean the enemies feels unproductive because more keep on appearing while you're in the middle of it.
- The boss also has a really long health bar for the amount of attack variety it has, and the damage dealt felt wildly inconsistent between hits.
- The cloverleaf arena being very small compared to the player's movespeed making the flat arena problem even worse.
- In a game about building momentum to slam into things really hard, the jumping enemies that appear in the cloverleaf arena force you to not slam into things and completely break the flow IMO.
- It's possible for the return to main menu to pop up just where you were about to click to try and save yourself with an airdash.
- All of this combined had me playing extremely safe and passively, which is kind of the opposite of what I'd expect from a game with this aesthetic and concept.
All that said, this game has style. Others have said this, but the visuals are striking, the sound design is *chefs kiss*, the UI is beautiful, and it all fits together in such a "00's radical" sort of way. I really wanted to like this one, because I found everything but the gameplay absolutely top-notch :(