Caltrops - Steam





	[quote name="Lurker 23094"]The beginning is delightful, but after the first 2 stages, you'll soon realize that the difficulty curve is basically flat. I did that Mega Man X binge a few months ago, so I'd like to think that I know what's up. Music: The music is excellent! For the first few levels. Then it drops from bombastic, 8-bit ballads to fairly generic dungeon medleys. Death: The clever little death gimmick is that you drop about 10-20% of your gold upon death. This spawns 3 floating bags that you have to recover if you want to get all of your money back (getting all three gives you back everything). Good, fine, that's fun. Unfortunately, there's no reason to fret about gold since by the time you've passed the halfway point, you'll have bought everything. This means that for the second half of the game, the death penalty is essentially null and void unless you're adamant about going for the 50k gold achievement (still not hard). On top of this, the health system is COMPLETELY fucked. It takes about 20 solid hits for you to die at max health. This, compounded with the fact that there's full health pickups all over the place; full health and mana potions are available for free from the start and are constantly refilled mid-level; and checkpoints every 3-4 screens, means death is never really an issue. Oh sure, you can play with the risk/reward system and bust open the checkpoints for gold at the cost of disabling said checkpoint, but by the time you get to a really hairpulling, death-prone section, you won't need any more gold! Difficulty: Now here's the thing. All of the above death complaints apply solely to normal mode. On hard, half of the checkpoints have been removed, you take double damage, and almost all of the health pickups have been replaced by booby traps. It would be PERFECT, but you can only access hard after pushing through the whole game, so you HAVE to enter with all of your upgrades from normal and there's no way to pick hard mode form the get go. I fucking hate this new trend of hiding a well-balanced game behind a mess of casual friendly mechanics. Dark Souls 2, Transistor, Bastion, Patrick Stewart's Castlevania, Binding of Isaac Rebirth, and Outland all have a problem with the default (and only initial choice) difficulty being waaaaaaaaaay to easy. It's not enough to make them unplayable, but for me there's not nearly as much joy as Heavy Bullets or Crypt of the Necrodancer where the game says, "Fuck you, LEARN," from level 1. I suspect it really started to kick off with Super Meatboy's philosophy of small, bite-sized challenges. I'm sure that for speedrunners and achievement whores, none of this is really a problem since normal mode is just training for a no-deaths, no-checkpoints, no-magic, 60-minute run, but for me, the whole thing was just underwhelming, which is a shame because almost EVERY aspect of the game is charming.[/quote]