A top tier twin-stick metroidvania, in spite of its engine. The very first thing you see when you open up BioGun is that it's made using the Construct 3 engine. The second thing you see when you open up BioGun is a warning from its developer that you need to close all your browsers because the Construct 3 engine doesn't like them. I am a professional software developer of 13+ years, and this is known in the industry as A Bad Sign. It is so bad, in fact, that the most recent update from the game's developer says that they are stopping mainline development on the game, including bugfixes, due to the engine taking days to work through all the errors to actually produce a new version. I get the impression that this dev team is made up of: 1 extremely skilled gameplay designer 1 quite competent furry artist 1 above average soundtrack producer 0 career coders And they all got together and picked the engine that most looked like the Javascript they had been playing with on the side, and made a game. And in spite of that, this game Absolutely Rocks. The controls feel *great*, from literally minute 1 of gameplay. Movement, aiming, and firing are instantly enjoyable, and only get more so as the game progresses. The Metroidvania elements are all very well done, with many new additions to the genre, such as: Map rooms now require up to 3 Map Tokens, with each progressive token you insert, giving you progressively more map data. This progression isn't linear, it doesn't go "all rooms, all save stations, all secrets". Instead, you get some of each category with each token, and it branches out further with rooms, and fills in more tokens in existing rooms, as you go. It feels really organic and makes every map reveal exciting like Christmas. "What presents I gonna get this time?!" is a great feeling to have in a game. The map tokens themselves are, of course, hidden behind various combats, puzzles, and secrets, but you can also straight up buy an unlimited number of them from any shop, for a high but not insane price. You can also *sell* them to a special shop in exchange for your money back, or for a re-spec of your health/energy. This is brilliant, as it means if you can't solve that one stupid puzzle, or beat that one stupid enemy, or find that one stupid secret, you aren't permanently locked out of discovering the rest of the game, or re-speccing your character. Dying doesn't make you lose money, but it does lock you out of healing until you gain some energy back. You do leave a special powerup that gives you infinite energy for a bit, wherever you died, which helps you out with bosses. There are *many* bosses. I've lost count, and they very frequently have really excellent designs. I don't want to spoil anything, but there's some really clever concepts here, and all of them feel approachable and solvable. The scanning system is brilliant, having it give health bars to bosses is a great touch, and having the corpses of all bosses be available for scanning after you defeat them is a must-have. When you use a save point, the player character does a cute little dance, to give you something in-universe to look at, in case you have a slow system that takes a while to save. This is standard fare in games with fixed save locations. BioGun does one better, and changes that animation gradually, over the course of the entire main quest of the game, to show An Important Character Progression (no spoilers). This is unbelievably smart. It keeps you emotionally entangled with the story, and turns a boring, mechanical, non-diegetic moment that has to happen all the time, into a diegetic and integrated storytelling beat that can happen as many times as it needs to. There is only one big issue I take with the game's design. At a certain point, you get locked into an area to fight a boss, and you *cannot* leave that area until you defeat this boss. This is also one of the most difficult bosses in the entire game. I beat it, but man, do they need to make the save spot right before this boss into a fast travel location. Also because it's way out of the way, so if you want to go back there to scan stuff, it's a pain to get to. I understand why they didn't, because you're supposed to use the item the boss gives you to get back to the main map, as a gate to ensure the player knows how to use that item. This seems like an elegant game design, but you need that gate to only close after you beat the boss, not after you start the boss. And now to the many, many small issues I take with the game, 100% of which are attributable to the Obviously Problematic engine they picked. My controller regularly doesn't work, on boot, unless I disconnect and reconnect it. I can sometimes clip through floors that are supposed to only allow upward progression. There's a certain pipe that when you exit it, the game incorrectly thinks that you've been crushed and warps you back to the room entrance, about 50% of the time. The scan menu sometimes scrolls itself off the screen for no reason. Controller buttons sometimes get stuck on for no reason. The map only has digital movement and it feels bad. One of the boss transitions just wouldn't occur until I restarted the game and tried again, soft-locking me in the arena. Horizontally moving platforms tend to eat jump inputs in one specific area. None of these bugs are game breaking. None of them really interfered with my enjoyment of the game past about 10 seconds of "ugh, that's obnoxious". But they're worth noting in a review. Also, by all means, hire a furry artist to do the art for your game. They produce large quantities of consistently styled art on a regular cadence. However, if you do hire a furry artist to do the art for your game, please remember to hire *another* artist to draw the one actual human person in your game. If you don't, you end up with Doc X, whose cheekbones are uhhhhhhhhhh
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