Aggelos 2 is a sequel to the 2018 hack-and-slash platforming adventure by WONDERBOY BOBI and PQube. Instead of a knight, this time you assume the role of an Aggelos, a member of the highest order of angels, chosen by the God Balro. Your quest  is to defend the otherwise peaceful kingdom of Lumen against an army of darkness.

An Interesting Premise & Simple to Control

Beginning the game you lose all of your gear and even your wings. So to ease you into the nature of the game, you need to locate your wings and your sword, and learn a couple of techniques to deal with the inevitable influx of baddies.

Controlling the game is a breeze. You have jump on your Cross button, sword attack on the Triangle, fireballs on the Square button, and back/exit on the Circle button. The directional pad or left analogue stick controls your movement, and the L button fires out your grappling hook once you have obtained it.

Double tapping X allows you to hover for as long as your upgradable stamina bar allows, and while in mid air, you can traverse the skies looking for secrets or higher up platforms, as well as blasting incoming enemies. Notably, you cannot hover under water.

Throughout the game you collect orbs, eggs and various trinkets to power yourself up. The orbs can be traded at shrines for temporary shields, or swapped at shops for items of interest, weapons or attack upgrades. I immediately upgraded myself to hold more orbs and attract orbs, to make collecting them easier going forward.

Eggs are to be banked in the small village area, and the result of those are yet more orbs. I found that quite underwhelming that the hunt for these eggs lead to nothing more than the exact same orbs I had already painstakingly been collecting.

The enemies at the beginning range from minuscule crabs to massive hulking dinosaurs, boulder throwing pink pig-men to hazardous electric eels and poison dart-firing urchins. As you progress, you meet tougher enemies variants such as more precise knife-throwing elves and poison-spewing mega-flora, eventually culminating in some rather interesting-to-wrangle boss battles, should you push through the maze-like levels.

16-bit Style With Explorative Enthusiasm

Visually, I adore this game. The SNES-like graphics take me back to a time where I was playing Jim Power, Fire & Ice, Bart Vs The Space Mutants, and, eventually, Super Mario World. The crisp graphics are simple yet extremely effective in rendering our hero in a world of beasts and magic, and I particularly like the use of shading a lighting to emphasize depth within the labyrinth you explore. 

Aggelos 2 is, at its core, a puzzle platforming metroidvania with a twist. The twist is that the developers are damned evil, and almost every puzzle element has something slightly out of reach, or slightly further than you anticipated, that causes you to plummet from one stressful situation into another. When I say stressful, I mean bullet-hell-esque scenarios with multiple enemies and plenty of multi-directional projectiles to avoid.

I enjoyed the explorative nature of the game, albeit bringing up the map ever 2 minutes to figure out where I was and which parts of the map weren't fleshed out yet. There is a beacon system, which is a neat idea, but honestly didn't help much in the grand scheme of things, and the map itself I found difficult to digest and remember, because it just kept growing and you have constant laborious backtracking to do.

I found a lot of this game frustrating, either because it was so repetitive, or because it felt so pointless to wade through just to get something underwhelming at the end of it. Even the initial puzzles which were minor fetch quests, weren't particularly exciting, and the scattered eggs were tricky to get in some places, but ultimately led to nothing of note.

There is nothing quite like figuring out a puzzle and then finding an item after that negates the whole point of the puzzle before it, and that is exactly what Aggelos 2 does about 20 minutes in. You figure out a jumping puzzle whereby you need to hit switches to swap between alternating red and blue protruding platforms, only to find a grapple hook.

Now, I get it. the item was gifted at the end of a "trial" as a prize for getting up there, but then the entire process of mastering that technique was quite pointless because it is never really used again, you just end up hovering around and spamming L1 to use your new-found tool throughout the entirety of the rest of the game instead.

Laborious Throughout But Rewarding at Points

Aggelos 2 is a game that isn't too challenging, but it will test your patience and ability to read a map. The difficulty spikes stem from being overrun with enemies in general, boss battles, and then fighting with the controls themselves. For example, in angel form you heal by pressing Circle, but in devil form that same button casts a speed-up spell, not a health buff, so your muscle memory is in high demand throughout the constant switching process.

Of the two, the angel form was by far my favourite, because the hadouken-style projectile made the game feel more like a shoot 'em up, and everything felt more precise. Gaining the devils abilities was an interesting morsel to obtain and does add a light/dark element to the game, with a definite erratic, aggressive, and more powerful edge to this second mode.

Like Ikaruga, for example, the angel absorbs one type of energy, the devil the other, and so swapping becomes necessary to progress through tricky areas and using both forms in tandem becomes its own conundrum. I liked collecting shards and doing the puzzles at first, but again, they felt  repetitive after a while.

I actually really enjoyed the boss battles, because they forced you to think about your inventory and techniques in order to defeat the screen-filling foes. The problem is reaching them within the map, because of the blocking bricks, or out of reach switches, or near-impossible to dodge projectiles or enemies. I died a lot in this game. But I forged through 99% of it to give it the benefit of the doubt. The 12-13 bosses are definitely worth battling through to!

I honestly found the overall story and most of the NPC dialogue quite trite and mundane. So much so that I ended up skipping a lot of the copious amounts of dialogue to save myself from the boredom and get back into the action. I do know that there are certain things some NPCs will direct you to towards, to it's best to pay attention for the most part, but skip through the fluff to get to the point.

At only £15.99, it's not a huge investment to try Aggelos 2, but I would suggest perhaps watching a gameplay trailer to get the general gist of what you will be getting into.

I think if this has released on the SNES back in the 90s I would have been blown away by every part of it. But today, with my gaming veteran cap on, it's a little too frustrating to navigate, and juice never quite feels worth the squeeze.