UFO 50

[Drathnoxis]

Rail Heist - It's alright. It's very trial and error based as you don't get a good mode where you can see the whole train to plan out what you are going to do, and guard positions are going to vary depending on what you do, so there isn't really much you can do but play a lever over and over until you've hammered out exactly what to do and can execute it perfectly. There are also 3 bonus objectives per level, but mercifully you only need to complete 2/3rds of them to get the cherry.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Rock on! Island - A little tower defense game where you need to survive 10+ waves. Once again the cherry condition ruins it. You need to play each stage perfect or it doesn't count and the stages are really slow, so it takes a long time to replay them. Most of the time if you make it through the first two rounds while roasting some chickens you'll be stacked for the rest of the level, but making it through those 2 rounds can be really tough sometimes. The worst part is that the exact timing of when you start throwing your weapon can make a huge difference between perfect success and failure and if you are out of sync by a quarter of a second you'll take a hit, so it's essentially random chance.

The final level took me twice as long as it should have because, despite being invincible by round 10/20 and cakewalking through the rest of it just filling every square with archers I accidentally select 'give up' on round 19 and had to start over. I don't know why give up doesn't give a second confirmation like 'go back to map' does. Oh well, it's over now.

The tutorial is also easy to miss. I found it after my first failure of level 1, but I could imagine someone might not think that they could actually enter the starting tile for a while.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Overbold - A fun concept, but I feel like the hitboxes are just a tiny bit too large. I can't tell you how many times I died because 2 pixels of my shadow touched lava or an explosion touched the air above my head. I hate, hate, hate the blue projectile shooting bird things. Not only do they take a ton of shots, but they randomly fire projectiles with no tell. It's too dangerous to get close and place a bomb so if you have a bunch spawn early on before you are upgraded enough it's pretty much game over. I had fun with this one though, I kept pushing myself further and further until I could do the first stage for a 600-700 prize. The cherry condition wasn't much harder than beating the game normally.

Hyper Contender - Clunky controls, slow movement, attacks that constantly knock you around and stun you, just feels bad. Not very difficult, though. Half the characters are bad, but you only need to win with 4 to get the cherry.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Block Koala - A block pushing puzzle game. Honestly, not much to say about it. It's a perfectly competent puzzle game. Not crushingly difficult, not overwhelmingly easy. Varies mechanics enough over its 50 levels to keep the puzzles fresh. Nice QoL features like being able to undo moves and create restart points, but slow movement speed.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Campanella 2 - This game was maliciously designed. Like Campanella you have to fly an unwieldy and sluggish space ship through many narrow corridors, which the merest graze will cause you to take damage, and fight fast moving and projectile shooting enemies with a minuscule melee attack. Unlike Campanella you also have to make it through 8 stages on a single life with extremely limited health refills and contend with 2D sidescrolling platformer segments.

First you should not have limited fuel when exploring the level is essential to getting the true ending, and the levels are random sprawling mazes. If you don't find the upgrade that gives you fuel for killing enemies in the first couple levels you are guaranteed to be unable to get the cherry, and it's pure luck. You are only allowed 9 small fuel refills before further exploration is shut off. Sometimes a red door will have an NPC that gives you a bunch of fuel, but you can't know this before entering and 80% of the time this will only happen when you are nearly full. Most of my lengthy playtime was spent on the first two levels because I wouldn't find the shop, or the sage, before running out of fuel, or I would take a bit of damage and feel it better to restart.

Second the health bar is aggressively small and every mistake is permanent. Enemies deal 25%-50% of your starting health bar with every hit and there is no free health recovery anywhere in the game. You always have a choice between upgrades and a +5 health refill, so you are losing power if you are taking damage. Sometimes an extra shop will spawn that just sells health, but it's rare and random chance. You can upgrade your max health, but it's kind of a sidegrade because the health refill still only refills +5.

Lastly the developers hate you and I'm just going to list all the ways in point form:
-There is an item in the game that does absolutely nothing according to the Wiki. An NPC reccomends you to get this item.

-On the second level you can get a key instead of an upgrade, this unlocks a door on certain levels most of which aren't useful, one of which locks you out of the true ending, and one of which has a really good item for free. Not worth taking at all as RNG dictates which levels you need to go to to get the cherry.

-There is a compass upgrade that will point you to doors. Out of spite this only shows you blue and green doors, despite red doors being more plentiful and essential to the true ending.

-After 4 seconds an enemy will spawn on the 2D sidescrolling stages that you can't kill and will shoot you with multiple hard to dodge projectiles. This enemy moves slowly and there isn't any reason to dawdle in levels, so the only purpouse this serves is to kill you at the start of a level when the game spawns you in front of a difficult situation that needs a bit of time to resolve.

-You can leave your spaceship on the overworld. This can make it very easy to jump to your death if you accidentally touch down while flying through narrow corridors.

-You die in one hit while on foot in the overworld. This is despite the fact that you share a health bar while in your ship and in the 2D sidescrolling sections.

It's possible the game may have been fun if I was just collecting the stars and going quickly from level to level, but as usual, the cherry condition makes the game extremely tedious.