Guardian

Despite not making a strong first impression, Guardian is a competent game in Metroidvania genre. Player assumes the role of Skye, an amnesiac enforcer of goddess Esara, tasked to collect 8 crystal shards in order to defeat Inos, a rival deity. From there, the story goes down a fairly predictable, but enjoyable path. Skye starts out incredibly weak, given only 4 HP and armed with a puny projectile weapon. This makes the game's difficulty primarily front-loaded, as for the first three worlds the game remains particularly stingy on upgrades. However, once the player starts to accumulate power-ups, things become a lot more tolerable. In structure, Guardian most closely resembles Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, where it has several large zones strung together by an overworld map, and to finish the game each area would need to be fully explored, requiring multiple visits. Each zone has at least two boss encounters, one yielding a new ability for the player, and the other, a useless crystal ...

In the few minutes that I played it, I could tell this game was far from finished.

This is a very nice game, a split-map metroidvania (i.e. something like Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia) with great music and an intriguing setting. It has a story premise/setting vaguely similar to that of Valdis Story: Abyssal City (whose soundtrack this game's music reminds me of), but a storytelling tone that's maybe a little more similar to Momodora III or Reverie under the Moonlight. The artwork for the sprites and (particularly) the backgrounds is beautiful, and the gameplay is reasonably fast-paced, making even backtracking pretty fun. As of right now (2019-01-22), the game still needs some polish (particularly with regards to some bugs, but maybe also rewording the script a little), but is definitely fully playable and enjoyable (and I can confirm that all the achievements work), thanks to the dev fixing bugs reported on the game's forum. (Disclosure: I bought this game on the Steam store when it was discounted.)

Better than I expected it to be! :) :) :)

This game has potential. Unfortunatly the bugs and glitches make for a frustrating play. For example: There are random points where you fire into an invisible barrier in front of you that prevents hitting the enemy. The Air Dash is a bit hit and miss. When fighting the first boss (three times) I got hammered. On the fourth attempt I thought it was going to go the same way then suddenly around a third of its health dissapeared and it died. The main character sprite can freeze or go into a random frame. I E going into a rolling frame even while stood still firing. If the Devs resolved these issuses then it could be a decent game, but as the game has been out for some time it doesn't look promising which is a shame!

The story about how I ended playing this game is a little gnarled, but I also find it too amateur.