I’m all the time onboard for Metroid-likes with hand-drawn characters. Curse of the Sea Rats is releasing subsequent yr, and includes a solid of playable people become rats by a pirate witch. Is {that a} witch who’s a pirate or a pirate who’s a witch? Possibly she’s equally each? The sport’s demo is forthcoming and I bought to test it out early. Whereas I like the character artwork and the storytelling appears promising, I really feel just like the gameplay might use some extra work. It’s not fairly there for me, which I discovered stunning.
Curse of the Sea Rats begins with our 4 heroes being taken to trial for treason towards the British Empire aboard a ship. However the ship is attacked by Flora Burn, the aforementioned pirate witch, who turns everybody onboard into an enormous rat. Afterward, she kidnaps the captain’s son and flees. The captain makes a take care of the 4 prisoners — in the event that they rescue his son from the witch (or pirate), they’ll be pardoned for his or her crimes and let out. The story is totally voiced and all 4 characters get distinctive dialogue. Metroid-likes often don’t get full voice performing, so this can be a welcome addition.
All 4 characters have totally different movesets and ability timber. You’ve bought an American man, a Native American girl, a person from Barbados, and a Japanese girl. The latter three appear a little too caricatured, full with accents. It’s a bit cringe-inducing, to be trustworthy. The sport then begins and also you’re tasked with monitoring down the captain’s son.
Don’t drop it
Curse of the Sea Rats is performed on a 2D aircraft and the environments are modeled in 3D. The characters are all hand-drawn vectors they usually look completely glorious. It’s undoubtedly some good work. The vector artwork, sadly, seems to be significantly better than the backgrounds, which is a bit jarring.
Characters all have a default strike alongside air, crouch, uppercut, and down air assaults. In addition they all have a particular, plus defensive choices. The Native American girl, Buffalo Calf (no, I’m not kidding), has a bizarre dodge that she makes use of whereas rooted in place. The Japanese girl, Akane, will get a parry. All characters stage on the identical time, so you’ll be able to swap between them as you want with out worrying about being under-leveled. However the motion and fight are surprisingly inflexible and unresponsive. The characters don’t really feel cellular in any respect and every part is stiff.
The demo consists of a few bosses, a fats rat (named Fatso) and an enormous crab commanded by a smaller crab. They exacerbate the issues, with bizarre hitboxes and movesets that appear at odds with the participant characters’ capabilities. I play loads of video games like this and the gameplay simply utterly misses the mark for me. It doesn’t assist that you simply drop half of your foreign money while you die and should go decide it up. I actually want folks would cease shoehorning in Souls-like parts the place they’re not wanted. Nonetheless, the total recreation might very effectively provide a significantly better time than this demo appeared to point.