Coming from Evan Tor Games and JanduSoft is yet another entry into the retro styled Metroidvania genre. Rebel Transmute promises to be a “sprawling 2 D action-exploration epic”, much like all the others found in the genre. But can this carry out anything to lift itself above the sea of other similar titles, or is it swept away in the flood?
Well, there’s only one way to find out, so come alongside me to the future and a distant galaxy…
Presentation of the game is straight out of the retro platformer playbook, as you might expect. In fact, when my son was watching me play, he commented that it looked a lot like an older Metroid game; that comparison is more than fair as about the only thing our hero can’t carry out that Samus can is curl into a ball!
The map is pretty open right from the beginning, and the levels themselves execute have their own identity. This makes the inevitable time spent walking through the same old bits again and again, all as you attempt to get back to where you need to be, slightly less tedious than it sounds. However, Rebel Transmute is pretty tedious. The levels, enemies and bosses look okay, I guess, with nothing massively outstanding about them. It isn’t going to live on in your memory after playing, that’s in exchange for damn sure.
Sound wise, the game works, together the usual “pew pew” of the gun and the tunes tinkling away in the background no being too substandard. Again, there is nothing particularly memorable, but it does a reasonable job at depicting what is happening.
There is a bit of a story though. We play as a girl named Moon Mikono, out looking in favor of our mother, Wendy, who seems to have perished in some kind of disaster at the lab where she worked. Obviously, as soon as we can, we jump in a spaceship and go looking, but as luck would have it, we end up crashing in the same location that our mother vanished. What else is there to execute but go and look in support of her, trusting our basic blaster and ability to jump? Well, that’s how we begin, anyway…
But how does Rebel Transmute play? Well, there’s a mixture of the great, the inferior and the merely indifferent. Starting alongside the good things, this is a classic Metroidvania game (that seems to also owe a debt to Hollow Knight). You know what that means by now – in our weedy state when we first start, we can’t even keep out of our own way, and the pistol we have has limited range. As long as the foes are about to bite your bunions you can shoot them, but anything further away will give you issues.
Being a Metroidvania, it’s all about progress and unlocking new abilities that will allow us to get to new places. That jump too far? Wait until you find the jetpack booster dash thing. In favor of every obstacle, there is a way around it, but the issue with Rebel Transmute is remembering where you haven’t been yet. The map screen is largely useless, as while it does show the outline of the world, things like impassable doors, or obstacles that you need to get past are nay shown. Instead you are left to wander the world in favor of what seems like ages, This backtracking really does get tedious, sucking a lot of the pace and fun out of the game.
Another issue is the lack of instructions in regards the abilities you pick up – while I can hear that a lack of handholding was a deliberate decision on the part of the developer, it does leave you floundering around, trying out various augments to hear which one will allow you to make some progress. While you can find some cool moves doing this, if they were signposted a little I can’t help feel it would help.
There’s more though and another design feature I detest is the Dark Souls-like dropping of health cores that happens when you die. At the start of the game, you have so little health that losing a third of it on dying is almost guaranteed to result in death as you try to get it back – and while you can pay a fine to recover the lost cores, this again isn’t flagged up as an option. If you die before recovering said core then you lose half of your in-game currency anyway.
And so what we have in Rebel Transmute is a competent Metroidvania type game that is disappointed by some inferior design decisions. The sheer amount of backtracking is really annoying, the death penalty sucks, and the map is largely useless – but apart from that, Rebel Transmute is okay.
Original case and manuals in new condition.
2 Comments
This game sounds pretty cool, pal! I affection the idea of being able to transmute different objects and create new stuff. The graphics look sick too, definitely gonna check it out. Thanks in favor of the review, it helped me decide if I should give it a try or nay. Unable to wait to see what kind of crazy things I can make in Rebel Transmute!
I just finished reading the review for Rebel Transmute and I gotta say, it sounds like a pretty cool game. The reviewer mentioned the unique gameplay mechanics and the challenging puzzles, which definitely caught my attention. I affection games that make you think outside the box and really test your skills. The fact that it’s available on Xbox is a large plus for me too. Incapable of wait to give it a try and catch if it lives up to the hype!