BIOTA Is Good, Mindless Fun For A Metroidvania

thegamer.com:

BIOTA is the culmination of the Metroidvania games that were meticulously crafted over the years: you get to shoot a lot of alien fiends, smash a lot of barrels, and buy a lot of upgrades. Enemies are squishy enough to explode into fleshy bits when they’re shot at, making them exceedingly ripe for and satisfying as target practice for your guns. Then there’s the trawling through the maps, the act of exploring every inch of the level until every secret and exit lay uncovered. Its aesthetics, too, is clearly retro, drenched in 4-colour pixel splendour, with the option to choose from a variety of colour schemes, whatever strikes your fancy. In other words, BIOTA hews very much closely to Metroidvania tradition.

To answer the most immediate question you may have: is the game fun? The answer is a resounding yes; there’s a sweet, comfortable routine to the busywork of BIOTA. Aliens are plentiful but never quite overwhelming in their numbers; combat delivers the right amount of challenge versus accessibility; and upgrades are attainable as long as you keep grinding. You can even choose how you wish to complete the levels. Rather than offer a litany of weapons to pick up, four supersoldiers, each armed with their own distinctive weapon, are at your disposal, free for the picking: sniper rifle, shotgun, submachine gun, and something that resembles a pistol that spits out gobs of bullets. Then there’s the tale behind BIOTA, which is mostly set dressing; after a while I simply stopped paying attention to whatever it’s saying in favour of just quickly diving back to the run-and-gun action (plus, the font makes the text pretty taxing to read anyway).

Related: The Best Metroidvania Games For Beginners

In fact, one of the most familiar