Islets review

writen 2025-03-06

Islets is a linearvania I played in 2025-03. I played on hard and for 100% completion, took about 10 hours. My final opinion is very high.

Combat

Combat is a bit simplified compared to its peers. There's no equipment system, no healing, and not many different abilities. There's a basic melee attack, a basic ranged attack which gets 1 ammo refilled each time you land a melee attack, an invulnerable dodge roll that only works on the ground, a groundpound and charged attack you can unlock later. There are 2 alternate modes for your ranged ability, but they're mostly for platforming use; more about them later.

I don't think being simplified is necessary bad, though. Not every game needs an equipment system or healing, and I'd rather have 4 good abilities than 20 abilities I can't remember and don't use. But I do think there are some flaws here. The dogde roll being invulnerable makes positioning less important, and I find that disappointing since positioning is more interesting than timing alone. There are not enough hitboxes crowding the screen for an invulnerable roll to be necessary. And I think the ground pound is overpowered, since it also has generous invincibility frames and can be spammed.

Airship

There's also a second game mode for combat: the airship. Most of the game takes place on land, but you have an airship for navigating between worlds, and some bosses are fought in the airship. This duality reminds me of Cuphead. I'm not a fan of having two separate game modes for combat, but at least each mode is good on its own.

The airship has fewer abilities. It just has a basic auto-aiming hold-to-shoot gun and eventually a short range teleport. But I really like a quirk of the airship's gun, which is that it deals more damage the closer you are. This is cool because it adds something to think about besides dodging while you slowly whittle down the boss, and something that often conflicts with immdiate safety, creating interesting decisions.

Enemy design

Normal enemies are plagued by a problem I've seen in many similar games: having too little health. Some of them have interesting designs, but they die so quickly that I didn't get to engage with them as much as I wish.

Islets is also inconsistent when it comes to contact damage: some enemies have it, some don't, I didn't notice a pattern.

There are what I call "arena rooms" which lock when you enter until you kill all the enemies, but sadly every one of these is a total joke. It usually took me about 5 seconds to explode all the enemies with little or no damage.

The bosses are really good, maybe the best of any game I've played. They all have a good variety of moves and often their dangers overlap, which creates a wider range of possibilities than just using one attack and a time and resetting before the next one. Some have really cool dynamic arenas with moving platforms and hazards. The final boss combines elements from previous bosses, which I always love.

Difficulty

Playing on hard, I still found normal enemies were rarely a threat. Most of the bosses were pretty challenging, though in late game I noticed I was getting overpowered when the 2nd and 3rd last bosses felt too easy, so I resolved to not upgrade my character any more, and I am very happy with that decision. The final boss was epic but, honestly, I still would've liked a bit more resistance.

Platforming

Islets has some of the standard platforming abilities: double jump and wall climb, but it also has a unique ability that I really like: a type of arrow you can shoot that leaves a cloudy trail you can stand on. It's like you can place your own platforms. I really liked figuring out how to chain this to gain height indefinitely. The cloud trail arrow also theoretically has use in combat, but because you have to switch modes between this and the damage arrow (instead of having them bound to separate buttons), I found it too inconvenient to use much in combat.

There's also a type of arrow that just lets you teleport a short distance forward while standing on the ground, much like the airship's teleport, but I never found this useful outside of some gates that require it to get through.

As for the pure platforming challenges, I found most of them disappointingly easy because they revolve around a type of floating object that you can lunge toward by attacking and it refills your double jump, and you can activate these from super far away and you don't even have to be facing the right direction. Sometimes you can literally complete a platforming challenge by just mashing the attack button.

There are some harder ones in late game, but I really like how Islets handles damage from platforming hazards. Unlike most other metroidvanias, they never respawn you, they just deal damage. This makes it easy to brute force through a platforming challenge if you have some health to spare, but I like that because it makes them work more like fights: you don't have to do them perfectly to be allowed to proceed, your health is a mistake budget you can spend in either combat or platforming.

Exploration

I have one major frustration with exploration, which is the prevalence of one-way passages. Often I'd come to a fork, explore one branch, but then find I can't go back the same way, and the fastest way to get back is to go through several screens to get to a teleporter to warp somewhere several screens away from the original fork.

Other than that, the map doesn't let you place markers or anything, so it can be hard to remember if you left a path open because you were exploring a different branch first or because you couldn't pass. But this didn't frustrate me too much in Islets, I think because the map isn't as big as most metroidvanias, and it lets you zoom in to see the actual shape of rooms, which makes them more recognizable.

A feature I really appreciate, and that I hadn't seen in any other game like this, is that you can warp back to your save point from the pause menu. In other metroidvanias it's common for speedrunners to quit and reload to warp there, but Islets streamlines that process and makes it feel like part of the game rather than an exploit.

Progression

Upgrades are mostly findable items that offer a choice between 3 options, like "+1 hp, +1 melee damage, or +2 arrow capacity". I'm not sure how the game decides which ones to offer you, but I guess it's random. There's also a grindable money that can be used to buy hp, melee or arrow damage, and often one of the 3 choices will be some money.

Islets is pretty lenient with death; it doesn't undo anything, not even money you've picked up. It's basically just like teleporting to your save point.

Story

The story is lighthearted, with not much lore but lots of cute and funny characters. I really like the progression they get; an inexperienced and cowardly warrior gets inspired by your example and becomes brave, an arrogant rival becomes less antagonistic, etc. The ending is wholesome and beautiful and I cried.