This one was hyped up quite a bit, and I was not disappointed.
It's an Enygmatic shooter through and through. That's basically a developed subgenre now. There's a distinct visual identity, a certain feel, gameplay elements and map designs that come up every time. And they always make for very interesting SBIG Jam entries.
Is it the magnum opus, the culmination of nearly a decade of stepping stones? I don't know, maybe. What I can say is that it does feel like a celebration of all of its predecessors, not just the original and reboot Out Of Order but everything in between.
There's a fair bit of jank around the edges- enemies stuck in one spot, hotkeys that reset on level load, a hard to drive car, weird animations and cutscenes with extra appendages. I don't think any of it really takes away from the game, not in this jam. The core shooting mechanics are solid. There's a fair few things I can think of that would be nice-to-haves, but not much gameplay- or presentation-wise that really takes away from the experience (hold that thought, I'm being very specific with that wording).
The difficulty is kind of all over the place, though. Enemies with near-perfect aim and great use of cover are hard in general, but the shotgun and spec ops guys are absolutely brutal, especially before you get the dynamic nullifier. The final boss, by contrast, felt anticlimactic. I already had rockets saved from the first encounter, and that took me 70% of the way. I was actually kind of surprised when the closing narrations
I think the worst part is that it's a pretty long, quite involved game that feels like it's about to fall apart at any moment with no way to recover. There's no save system, checkpoints, or chapter select as far as I can tell, so a softlock means potentially starting all over again. The occasional load stutter and framerate dip did not help the feeling, either.
I was not expecting to see so many shout-outs to my own games, and definitely not such a long and heartfelt message at the end. I've looked forward to your entries every year, always find your postmortems interesting, and though I'm retiring from jamming I do plan to poke my head in the door and see what people have come up with next year.