Year: 2019
Platform: PlayStation 4
Developer: Blowfish Studios
Genre: Action
Review Date: 3/1/26
Rating: ***

Tanya and Olga are sisters who have developed a strong bond and become superior fighters. The evil Queen Evangelyn Bramann of the totalitarian Beljantaur Kingdom discovers this and breaks that bond by kidnapping one of the sisters (whichever one you decide not to play). Now it's up to you to fight your way through sixteen levels of increasingly difficult bad guys and terrain to defeat the queen, save the world, and rescue your sister before something terrible happens to her.

It's a delightful old-school 16-bit action game similar to "Strider," where you're armed with a slashing melee attack, a dash, and a double jump. A handful of power-ups are gained along the way that drain your stamina, so you have to use those sparingly. On the easiest difficulty, the main enemies don't put up much of a fight, but they can overwhelm you if you're not careful. Boss battles can be tricky, but are mostly fair. You can save your progress between levels, but if you use a continue, you're forced back to the beginning of the level, which can be frustrating. As a result, I never made it past level 8, although with more practice I'm sure I could (I was VERY close).

The controls are good for the most part and the game includes a nice tutorial to introduce you to the various moves. Unfortunately, the wall jump is wonky and unintuitive, and jumping onto ladders is literally impossible. I was never able to pull it off, but I was thankful that I didn't have to as I was able to find alternate routes. However, from the playthroughs I've seen, that becomes necessary later in the game, so that would have been a showstopper for me.

The game looks great and features up to four levels of parallax scrolling. The 2D pixel art is beautiful, but the characters are tiny and have huge heads, giving them a strange chibi-like appearance. It's disturbingly cute, especially given how violent the game is, but even so, the characters lack personality and aren't expressive. The levels are visually interesting and nicely varied, and bullets are always easy to see, even when enemies sometimes aren't. The chiptune music is pleasant and appropriate sounding, but doesn't really stand out and isn't particularly memorable. The game has good, neutral, and bad endings, but it's hard to tell which is supposed to be the neutral ending vs. the bad ending, because they're both pretty awful.

With perseverance, you can probably finish the game in 2-3 hours, and while there are collectibles to pick up, the game favors speed over exploration and rewards you with bonus lives for finishing levels faster. I only spent a couple hours with it before getting frustrated and putting it away, but I'm a fan of the genre and could easily see giving it another go and at least getting a few more levels completed. Although I'm certain I wouldn't be able to survive the final platforming challenges towards the end.