Considering this is the product of a single man dev team, it's an incredibly impressive accomplishment. I greatly appreciate the aesthetic, while it is intentionally simple and derivative, the color palettes are pleasant and make each area feel unique, and the enemy designs are instantly recognizable once you've seen them, and contrast well against the levels, so there's never any confusion. The level design is solid as well, with winding paths that create interesting enemy encounters and traversal. The combat is simple, consisting of a medium ranged laser weapon, a close range melee, and a dodge roll, but is made much more interesting by the bullet-hell style enemy attacks and clever combinations of enemy types. At times it does feel similar to the Fromsoft titles it obviously takes inspiration from, frantically trying to outmaneuver a group of enemies while avoiding pitfalls and landing attacks of your own. Unfortunately, those times are few and far in-between, as the experience is marred slightly by somewhat janky controls, poor balancing, and a general lack of difficulty.
The movement feels very constrained and tank-like, as the player character only moves at one speed: slow. You will be rolling constantly just to move faster, especially in some of the larger levels. The camera also presents a challenge at times, seeming to swing around wildly, most often when using a save-point, or entering a door to a new area, and occasionally while dodge rolling near walls or other level geometry. It's not a long game, but dozens of times I went through a door, the camera swung around to a weird angle, and I unintentionally walked back through the same door. The game also seems to have little or no input buffering, which results in damaging the combat experience somewhat. If you roll and then attempt to melee attack, it will always target the direction you rolled, meaning if you want to roll through an enemy and then attack back toward them, you have to wait a solid beat holding the direction you want to attack before you can execute it. This applies to healing as well, the healing item activates quickly, but it can't be buffered during any other action, like rolling or attacking. Not a deal breaker by any means, but certainly makes the game feel less smooth and intuitive.
The combat balancing could use some tweaking as well. I imagine the intent for the design is that the ranged attack, which locks on automatically, is meant to deal low but reliable damage, while the melee attack, a considerably slower move, deals more damage, and can be charged for a lunging strike that deals even more damage. However, during the course of two playthroughs I never really found a use for the melee attack at all. The animation for even the quickest version of the attack is incredibly slow, trapping me in one spot while it goes off in the wrong direction, which seemed to happen frequently, I believe as a result of the aforementioned lack of input buffering. I expected the attack to respond immediately while changing direction, but it always felt more like I had to carefully line it up, often resulting in the window to use it passing. Which could make for an interesting relationship with the attack/retreat rhythm of combat, if it weren't for the ranged attack. The laser deals plenty of damage, fires very quickly compared to melee, and locks on automatically, so you never have to worry about the weird positioning, just keep the camera pointed at the enemy you wish to target. Or, more often than not, just roll in circles around a group of enemies while keeping it pointed in their general direction, and they'll all be dealt with shortly. Certain enemies have shields that block lasers, presumably to prevent this play-style, but even they have openings, and sometimes the shields just seemed to glitch out and do nothing. Even bosses are pretty trivial, lock-on with shift so you don't even have to deal with the camera, hold the ranged attack button, and occasionally dodge. The choices made in combat design are not bad, in fact the ideas they seem to be going for could make for an interesting experience, but it feels like it needs a good bit more play-testing before it reaches it's potential.
The balancing of the combat is a large reason why the game is incredibly easy, but it also can be attributed to the linearity of the levels and the enemy design. For most of the game's short playtime, the player's next goal is pretty well sign-posted, which is not inherently a bad thing, it's good I usually knew where to go, though I did find it a little disappointing that I never really had to figure anything out. The level design is good, especially the first time through, but unlike a Fromsoft title that might have shortcuts, area connections, and other switchbacks, the levels here are entirely linear, and never require any real thinking. Even more important to the lack of difficulty is how the enemies are implemented. Each enemy has unique attack patterns, but they're mostly pretty slow and predictable, a single enemy never poses any threat. In combination they can force a player into a more defensive play-style, but this is also entirely optional. The majority of enemies (all but 3, maybe?) have no hit-box on their actual body, meaning the player can just roll into them and away, making running around and away from enemies pretty trivial. And since enemies provide no resources of any kind to the player, there isn't a real incentive to killing them, besides the obvious intrinsic motivation, of course. I played my first time through offline, and since steam requires a recorded playtime to leave a review, I played through the game a second time to meet that, only fighting when it was required, at certain locked doors and bosses, and the whole run took less than 30 minutes.
It cannot be overstated how impressive this project is considering it was accomplished by a single person. Game design and development is hard, and Renegade Sector has made something incredibly cool and admirable in this title. With practice and polish, and maybe a small team to share the load, I expect it's a developer we're going to be hearing about again. They're certainly one I'm going to keep an eye on.