Iron Diamond

very solid metroidvania! this was such a tiny gem (no pun intended), the map is so big and all the areas feel incredibly distinct. i really loved the platforming. some of the bosses were a little easy for my taste but tbf i was playing on normal difficulty so thats kinda on me. really enjoyed playing this!

10h metroidvania for a cheap price. Game really deserves the metroidvania title. It's a good game. Minus points for some crazy achievements instead of content based. The map could be a bit more easy to understand and each area should have a completion % so you know where to look for any missing items.

Mixed but positive. Fun for a couple bucks and a couple hours. Good variety of environments but the art itself has a very amateurish quality that feels cheap (which it is!). Similarly the music is immediately forgettable. Most of the character designs felt somewhat crude and lacking emotion. Comparing to the recent Minishoot Adventures, I think it's possible to get some mileage out of a simplified artistic style but Iron Diamond struggled to do so. The story is slight but fine. It's nothing complicated albeit the world of Kindara doesn't have a quality of realness. More of a playground feeling. There's a lot jammed into the game, which is a pro and a con. The map felt cluttered with markers and it was hard to keep track of where I still needed to go look for something. There are loads of items to collect, but perhaps too many - they started to not feel valuable when you collect 20, 30 or more damage buffs. I did enjoy using unique items to get special upgrades, that was a fun touch. Similarly the tremendous number of traversal abilities provided variety (double jump/break, down pogo/down break, wall climb, hang, super jump, fire/ice/lightning shot, etc), but I felt there were too many - some were used for only one or two puzzles. I would have preferred fewer abilities and more interesting use of them. The power jump was often difficult to control which resulted in running into spikes fairly frequently, and similarly the grappling hook felt very fiddly (it can only attach to certain hooks) compared to Ori's bash ability (which felt like the inspiration). All in all the traversal parts felt like a grab bag and not very curated. The game world is almost totally open, which is laudable, but I really found myself wanting more direction. It was easy to miss foundational feeling movements like the dash and the down strike and I spent time just running around the map in circles figuring out where I was supposed to go. In terms of bosses and difficulty, almost uniformly easy on the normal setting. The only bosses that gave me trouble were the first fight with the ape, the yeti, and the iron general - everyone else was a one shot. The yeti was the only boss I felt was mechanically flawed as he relied on the grappling mechanic, had a hard to locate hit box, and was frequently able to knock the player to the floor and keep them there. The balance felt off: you get a bunch of health upgrades and energy upgrades (although I think I missed an energy upgrade) and you can heal 2-3 health bars which each energy bar. Healing is instant, and your energy replenishes. This created a scenario where the best course of action was usually to face tank the boss as much as possible and then heal completely. The combo-strike system (particularly when you unlock faster attacks) allows you to rack up huge damage by button mashing, which felt cheap. The downstrike can also be performed in rapid succession by mashing the button. Because healing and melee were so strong, I never wanted to use energy for any of the ranged attacks - I think it would have worked better if healing and ranged used separate resources like the arrows in Islets. The platforming was okay, there were a couple jams where I really hated the spike traps (spikes generally reset your progress to the beginning of the platforming area). The punishment for failure was easy though with the healing system so that's nice. I didn't feel like the platforming was notably challenging, easier than say Guacamelee 1 (which this game reminded me of somewhat with its platforming and traversal unlocks). Played great on SteamDeck.