Metal Unit

This game is honestly a lot of fun to play! The core gameplay mechanics are well designed and controls are tight. The rouge-lite mechanics do a good job of encouraging you to try all the weapons and abilities in the game, since your access to starting weapons after a death are tied to how many weapons you've mastered in game. The music is also really good! The story though... It's a bit of a mess, so I wouldn't really recommend playing this game for the story.

Metal Ujnit mixes roguelite, platform and action. While it's a mechanically sound game, it stays sadly on the surface. The story: weird monsters have invaded Earth after a catastrophe, aliens came to help. You are Joanna, pilot of Metal Unit 11 and your sisters Hana and Yuna are in trouble with the monsters. To battle the horrors and rescue your comrades, you'll have to conquer 4 areas with randomly generated rooms, discover treasuress, upgrade yourself and triumph over strong bosses. Last zone is a boss rush. Once conquered, an area can be revisited at will to farm for items, secrets and materials, with a different boss at the end. There are many secrets and the first three areas also have an extra dungeon providing special gear and skins. You have 6 slots, plus one on your companion robot (unlocked by upgrading), which allows you to combine various guns, melee weapons, armors, suoper powers and assists to turn yourself into a war machine. When you die, you lose all money and weapons (those you have mastered are saved at your base and the more mastery pointsd you have, the higher the grade of your armory and after each chapter you'll unlock a level in a safe to preserve items you might need for crafting later. After beating the game you'll also unlock NG+ (with increasing reruns as in Dark Souls) and a challenge mode. The game plays nice and the combos feel good, if a little stiff at times, but after a while it turns quite repetitive and empty once you're done. Some things burned me out: first, the fact it's actually quite a short game, even when doing farming runs in the 3 first regions. Second, the ending felt bad and left me very unsatisfied. Third, some bosses and the challenge mode are very frustrating and the rewards don't feel worth it. The pixel visuals and music are great though, the sum is decent, but in the end it could benefit from an expansion to tie things up better and extra regions to explore. Give it a shot on discount.

The combat mechanics and overall basic feedback feel great and visceral. However, the game is mainly a roguelite, which actively works against it. Generated levels are really basic, the progress is painfully slow, and failure during even initial runs feels like a matter of "I need to grind more to pass this" rather than "I made some mistakes, I need to try again". So as a whole package the game quickly loses its undeniable charm. This unfortunate conclusion is strengthened by a bunch of minor issues with the game. Sometimes the screen is too noisy, boss' design (at least the first dragon one) feels arbitrary and too punishing if the Player doesn't have a luck for certain drops in the run, and the accompanying roguelite mechanics are too time consuming due to cumbersome UI navigation and unclear descriptions. The story bits are too intrusive and pad the gametime too much even if they actively get skipped.