Mastema: Out of Hell

I've just requested a refund for this game as I'm really disappointed with it. First, I'll say that the artwork and overall style/atmosphere is quite good. I like the 80's DOS/arcade vibe and the music fits well. Character designs are cool, as are the monsters. Aside from that I didn't really find the gameplay enjoyable. I was expecting a difficult platformer, something like Slain or Spelunky or anything like that. Instead it felt a bit more like Sonic the Hedgehog. In the levels you're just running around collecting these crystals (god knows why) and that's not really a fun or interesting game mechanic. The biggest thing that frustrated me was the fact that you cannot attack your enemies. You can find occasional powerups which allow you to attack, but generally you're just trying to avoid them or jump over them. Unless I'm missing something, it just seems extremely odd that you don't have some sort of basic pea-shooter or simple melee default attack. Also when you die, you immedia...

An otherwise great game ruined by poor controls. Good graphics and sound, but the controls really let this game down. Jumping is just a little too tight and you can't make even the simplest jumps unless you are almost pixel perfect. Not being able to jump into a block if you are standing right up against it, despite the character clearly jumping high enough means you get trapped by enemies or miss easy jumps.

Mastema: What the Hell.... This game has perfect catch of 90s SNES style and taste. However some weird decisions stopped it to become a better game, what a pity. Good: - Really nice SNES style art and character design, especially watching the cutscene is nostalgic - 16 bit style music and sound effect - Cheap and have trading cards Bad: - Control is having bug and cause player fails the stage unfairly due to this. Such as the sword sometime stopped shooting for no reason, or player has reached the pixel perfect point to jump from edge and jump button stopped responding, then you watch yourself fall into a deep abyss. Sometime you cannot jump over a short platform if you sticked too close of it - The Crystal mechanic make no sense. It's like Super Mario Bros. that you collect 100 Crystal for 1up, but if you die when collected 50 Crystal, next life you lose all of them and start from 0 Crystal. Means you need to collect 100 Crystal in single life for 1up - Some area in a level just no...

First of all I like the 80's DOS/arcade vibe and the music fits well. Character designs are cool, as are the monsters.. The gameplay on the other side is awful , the jumping mechanic is very bad and sometimes i even fail to do some simple jumps because you have to be pixel perfect every time . Also at every stage you have to collect some useless "coins" You cant attack your enemies , only when the player picks some pick ups and they are temporary , mostly you run from the enemies... The game was cheap and had a good vibe but the gameplay is very bad

a good game, with bad realisation style, pixel graphics, retro feelings... all those are in good shape, but... movement, jumping... that`s a really weak part of Mastema, so i can`t recommend it

Just from playing a few stages I can already say that considering how cheap this game was, its pretty damn enjoyable. The presentation is fantastic, and I'm glad to see that this doesn't suffer from the usual indie platformer flaw of using nostalgia as an excuse for less then stellar graphics or music. While the character sprite is small and simplistic, his animation is very fluid and reminiscent of games like Prince of Persia where the character animations were based off of motion captured movements. The enemies are all very classically ghoulish and creative, and their death sounds/animation is quite awesome. On that note, make sure you don't die because the main character's death scream may destroy your speakers. Just more incentive to stay alive right? The music is pretty neat. Its almost like some crazy Halloween themed keygen music. Back on the topic of the character, I'll never get tired of that running animation between each stage, or the cool close up shots of him upon comp...

Well, just like pretty much everyone else says, this is a title that nails looks and sound aspect of games of yesteryear, but is ultimately ruined by unresponsive controls and weird gameplay choices. First major problem is the jumping - you can clearly see the sprite of your character making contact with a ledge only to discover that you missed it and die. The second problem is that after dying you lose your only weapon and have to finish remaining levels of a stage by before-mentioned crappy jumping, unable even to obtain specials from destructible containers. Maybe it's an example of author not understanding the medium he tried to copy, or perhaps that was an attempt to artificially raise difficulty, but just results in frustration. And I value my time too much to put up with that when there's a whole world of emulation of pristine retro titles just few clicks away. Refunded.

Wow, I feel like this is a peice of gaming history or something. I didn't think it would be that cool, I just was thinking some cheezy retro stuff. This actually feels like amiga, like shadow of the beast or something, something so old school. The sprite work is AMAZING, thats actually why I bought the game was just for the retro graphics but it really does feel like the real thing. The diamond shaped pick ups, the music, the art.. I read a review and someone was complaining about the death noise. It's purposely that loud, you aren't supposed to enjoy dying the main character's life is one of pain and agony so when he dies he lets out a scream, I think it's perfect. all of it. I hope the community catches on to this game, I almost missed it and found it by accident. This is a real project of love, not a 5 minute slapped togeather retro-poop like some others on steam i have tried. I'm starting to think by the reviews I'm seeing nobody actually played amiga games. If you are expecting ...

The design is great and I love the feel of the game. Unfortunately he jump mechanics are very clunky making it far more difficult than it should be. Other than that it's pretty nice.

Not bad for a cheap game. The jumping mechanics seemed flawed in this game, causeing needless deaths. It does have some cool kill animations.