Made the boss invinicible enough?!
Your WAY overuse of invincible frames for the final boss on hard gets you a 4/10. Nothing is more frustrating than a boss that has moments of invincibility when you ATTACK ITS BACKSIDE as is misses you. Very disappointed.
Dissapointing.
The controls suck, the art style is good, but can't be seen because the game runs like shit, it's buggy, and a whole host of other problems (getting knocked back 200 feet into pits, turning like a bike with a warped wheel, etc.). However, every single problem in the levels is present in the last boss, so you don't have look through everything in the event you decide to fix up your SCRAP HEAP of a production.
The controls really need to be fixed. Why can't you change direction or attack in a different direction while in midair? It's been a pretty standard feature in platformers since the SNES days. Also, the lack of any friction when landing or attacking is annoying as hell. As Vandheer Lorde, I commonly killed myself because my skills would launch me off the edge due to the lack of any friction or real character control. Also, why would you play as Vandheer Lorde in the final fight, but be chasing him as the other character throughout the entire game? It's just confusing.
If it weren't for these flaws, the game would be pretty damn great. I really like the Armed with Wings art and movement style and I loved the last games, despite some of the same flaws. Maybe it has just been a while since I've played one, but this game just seems borderline unplayable in some parts because of the lack of control.
So somehow it's not fun
I wanted to like this game. I really did. I loved Armed with Wings 3 and I was excited to play this game. But it just wasn't fun. In normal mode it was okay, but it just didn't feel as smooth and polish as Armed with Wings 3. Then I got to hard mode which really killed the game for me. I didn't feel hard in the way a good hard mode should, carefully built to reward good play and quick decision making. To me it felt hard because it felt like no one had test played it for obvious problems. I found myself in situations where I was being stun locked to death by the small flying enemies that breath fire whenever I jumped, which made it nearly impossible to escape enemy combos. The only way I could get past the large battles against both ground and air enemies was to artificially raise my special by juggling an enemy against a wall and using my ultimate to clear out the flyers. I admit I'm not the best player at these types of games, but the whole hard mode felt broken. Not to mention the specials felt weak bordering useless at times, and when i really need to take advantage of them I was getting stun locked to quickly to build up my special meter. Fighting Vandheer Lorde was what finally made me quite. I beat him twice, but the game glitched on me and dumped back at the start each time. After that every time I got close to killing him he won using cheap tricks, either spamming his special moves and not giving me any opportunities to attack him, or getting a lucky shot the knocked me off the the side of the arena. Finally I had enough, I wanted to finish it and see the hard mode ending, but
I just wasn't willing to waste any more time on a game that frankly I had come to hate.
I can see looking in the comments that most people don't agree with me, and frankly there is a lot I liked. The graphics were beautiful and the battle animations lovely. I loved the music and seeing what happened after the lone warrior chased after Vandheer Lorde was nice. But the hard mode took the fun out of it for me when it stopped feeling challanging in favour of broken. I love the series and I look forward to seeing what you make next, but this entry just didn't do it for me.