Smelter

• Genre: Platforming Action / RTS
• Time Played: 20 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's about right, but the difficulty of replaying sections definitely increased the time by a significant margin.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Pleased, my only disappointment is due to the structure of the game you only get a short time with all your abilities.
• Why I played: I started playing Smelter almost two years ago, just a couple levels(which I ended up replaying anyway). I needed some more linear action platforming after They Always Run, but maybe something that mixed it up a bit, so Smelter was pretty perfect follow up.
• Recommend to others: Smelter is an extremely difficult game, maybe not at first, but around the middle point the difficulty jumps way up. So it's hard to recommend. I would probably recommend it to everyone if it were just a bit easier. I feel just like 15% more leeway when it came to most challenges in the game would have made the game a significantly smoother experience.

Everywhere I looked I saw Smelter compared to Actraiser, and I have only played a little bit of Actraiser, but if I recall there is a little bit more managing of your city/world, and the action platforming stuff is far less fun. It is clearly trying to be a similar game though, Actraiser you have an Angel, this game you have a demon, and I think there is some heaven/hell stuff in Actraiser, in this game you specifically are playing Eve, is in, Adam and Eve.

Smelter is more like Mega Man in it's platforming sequences and a very basic RTS with a commander unit you play as in it's overworld. When you fly around in the overworld as Smelter you can shoot and heal your locations and it really requires you to actively participate. It's simple, but still challenging.

With the Mega Man comparison, obviously I liked it quite a bit. It's not quite as tight as most Mega Man games or styled game. I think the biggest problem is it feels just a little unpolished. It could be a little tighter and some of the hitboxes for direct contact with enemies feel a little to large. It's definitely not pixel-perfect, which I feel these style games do best with. 

You get three different forms which basically act the same as changing armors in Mega Man X or ZX games. Each has it's own attack, defense ability and movement ability and as you play you get upgrades and modifiers to them. My complaint about missing out on some is depending on your chosen order for the last areas of the game, means you might miss out on some powers when they could have been pretty useful, but I guess that's how these kinda games usually go. It just feels different since the levels are so long and difficult. The game is really tough.

Besides the overworld and platforming there were also challenge stages which were generally extremely difficult and the boss fights were all pretty unique and many had interesting gimmicks. There was also a little bit of a shoot 'em up section which I think was a cool idea and wish they would have done a few more sections with since they had the element change for shooting as Smelter and could have played with that more, they could have done a scrolling bit too, but oh well, the game does a pretty good job at mixing up what it has to keep it interesting.

But I liked it a lot and won't soon forget it.