So I played the Scott Pilgrim EX Demo today, and I have pretty mixed negative feelings about it, but that's more so about how the game is structured with some critiques about combat feel and movement.
Okay, first, let's get the bad things out the way; the inertia after you do dash is GOD awful. You Literally slide almost all the time in and out of everything when you dash, and there's no way to actually fully stop to a dash. Even cancelling into normals still carries over inertia. I don't know if they did this to balance out the dash so that you just can't dash vicariously into enemies without facing some sort of pushback, but it just feels really bad. Especially when you're trying to line up enemies together and you overextend your dash, making you go behind them and Miss entirely with your attacks. Sometimes it's so bad, that not even the basic light combo attack string fully connects after the dash momentum.
Next, Jumps also feel very floaty. Every time I jumped, I felt like I was jumping on the moon. Jumping is also pretty overlooked in my opinion, there's a lot of way to stall in the air and enemies don't really do much to counteract you.
And lastly, I think the breaking point for me is definitely how the game has this really weird backtracking open world format instead of a traditional level by level, staged sequence like in most beat em ups.
I've never been a fan of this style of format for 2D beat em ups; it really does feel like just like padded filler for people who don't care much about the combat or soloing the game 1cc.
Which sucks because I think the combat has a lot of good potential from what I played, which is probably the best part about the game. It's such an improvement from the previous game. Especially with how items work.
The potential with items alone Just opens this game up so much. The items do so much in a lot of scenarios that are really fun and engaging, and I wish there was more of that. For instance, you can use a yo-yo as an attack by sending it out regularly and stunlocking the enemy, throwing the yoyo again if they're far away, and then following up with a dash attack into combo. What's really cool is when you have a sequence and you can plot that out to your advantage; like the bomb section where you have to get rid of the vegans truck. Throw bombs at the truck, time your invul through bomb with super, destroy the truck within two sequences.
Also, Characters are LEGITIMATELY so different from one another and it's great. Lucas is a big brawler guy with good combo potential and big buttons, but is balanced out by his attacks being slow. You can't really go up to enemies and jab them to death cuz of how slow it is. Scott, although very stubby, has great ways for crowd control and great wall combos, as well as a good grapple combo.
Also, I definitely think tribute games has a much stronger sense of balancing out their juggles in this game. Shredder's Revenge, Rita, And even cosmic invasion had way too many easy. Wall bound juggles, along with absurdly broken launchers that just catapulted enemies into the air and were really fast. You really got to route out your combos/sequences in this game if you want to get better kills on tankier enemies.
It definitely feels like there's been a better balance between player and enemy characters. You don't really feel like you're just breezing through enemies, but it doesn't feel like you're being vortexed and sandwiched like in the previous game, because you did baby ***** damage At the start and could barely get enemies off of you.
I really did enjoy the core gameplay of the game, but the open world structure has me rubbed the wrong way and the feel of your basic movement being so slippery and floaty just doesn't feel good. I think I'm going to pass on this one.
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