I’m about four hours in, and I’m genuinely surprised. This feels like a AA version of God of War—but with even better platforming and puzzles.

The only thing holding it back is the combat. It’s not bad, but it lacks polish and flow. The main issue is that the developers went with a sort of animation-commit system. You can cancel attacks in a small window, but once you're about 15% into the animation, you're locked in. That leads to a lot of frustrating moments because the enemies are relentless, and the game constantly throws multiple foes at you. They really should’ve just copied God of War’s combat approach and toned down enemy aggression—the damage they do on Normal is way too high.

My advice? Just play on the lowest difficulty and enjoy the ride. So far, the story is intriguing, the voice acting ranges from good to great, the puzzles start out easy but ramp up nicely, the graphics are incredible, and the platforming is solid and actually gives you more control than the last two GoW games.

I really hope this game does well enough to get a sequel, because if their first effort is this strong, they could improve so much in the next one.

Coming totally fresh into the series I have to say I enjoyed what I played. It's definitely not an amazing game, by any means, but it's good throughout, despite some issues.
This is a 2-D platformer that succeeds in bringing in some Metroidvania elements, to a certain extent.

Pros:
- Self-aware humor.
- Good level design.
- Colorful graphics and vivid animations.
- Lots of power-ups and transformations to play with.
- Soundtrack is catchy and memorable (for the most part).
- Doesn't overstay its welcome (around 7-7:30 hours, which is perfect for this type of game).

Cons:
- No map to see which places you've already explored in a specific level.
- Way too much backtracking.
- Obscure objectives.
- Some transformations are redundant, serving purpose for only few specific locations.
- Last stage has a rather big difficulty spike with poor checkpoint placement.
- Last boss fight is painfully slow and annoying,

Overall, the game is bigger than the sum of its parts. I did enjoy it and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good platformer with some solid exploration elements.
It's a shame the last stage and boss weren't so good as it left me with a bitter taste, though.

7/10