Never before have I played a game with such incredible core gameplay that's so disappointingly mediocre in its every other aspect.

Flying through levels like a girl-shaped ballistic missile, wizzing past obstacles while trying to maintain speed is fun, challenging and creates a sense of speed few games can truly match. The boss fights are hit or miss, but the snake and convoy bosses were fun mechanical challenges, on top of being great set pieces.

It also looks and sounds great. The character models are beautiful and the music and sound effects do a good job of keeping the tension high. Everything besides the aforementioned, however, served only to detract from the experience.

The map screen baffled me in the demo and works pretty much the same way here in the full game. The way it drags you out of the gameplay after every level to make you pick the next one kills the pacing stone dead. Just because it works for Slay the Spire, a much slower, more thoughtful game, does not mean it works for this game.

Incidentally, halfway through the game I discovered you can "draw" a path from whatever node you're on, all the way to the shard's final boss, to play them in a continuous string, which made me wonder what the map screen was even there for. Just generate a string of levels at the start of the shard, this screen is actively working against what makes the gameplay so great.

Next, the items don't feel impactful enough. The small selection of items in shops means there's not much in the way of build crafting, mostly just using whatever the game decides to hand you, with a Risk of Rain style rarity system that feels completely arbitrary. The items that trigger upon close calls were the only ones that were actively impacting my decision making. More of that would be lovely.

Finally, and most crushingly, the game's story is told in just about the worst way you can imagine. Every few levels on your first run through a shard (basically the game's "worlds"), it throws a stop sign in your face and presents a conversation between two characters. Someone clearly spent a lot of time on the lore/characters, but it should've been integrated into the gameplay somehow, not just thrown at you during level transitions. I felt nothing during the ending, which is just such a shame.

I could go on about these individual aspects, other annoyances, and how I'd suggest improving them, but in the end, I still think the gameplay carries the experience to a point where I recommend getting it, just not at full price. It could've been something truly special but it just doesn't hit in all the ways it maybe should've.