Iconoclasts is a delightful metroidvania that reminded me of a bunch of neat feelings plucked from other games combined together to create this stylish and interesting adventure platformer. Going around with your giant wrench, you fight enemies, solve puzzles and collect things while advancing a riveting story with pretty interesting characters and foes to defeat. I had a good time with it! I found some of the puzzles a bit fiddly and the upgrade system to be too thin, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
From the get go this game gave me Cave Story vibes; the way certain story beats unfolded, how some boss fights occurred and even on the mechanical side of things where taking damage disables some of your upgrades and you have to collect resources from enemies to get them back up - a bit similar to the weapon experience system. I also had The World Ends With You vibes with the colorful cast of characters with their quirks and interesting personalities. The vibe of the world with the pixel art and some of the environments gave me a hint of Metroid Fusion as well.
On the mechanics side, you control robin by moving, jumping (you can ground-pound, somehow), firing one of multiple types of weapons (with a charge attack that leaves you unable to shoot for a while) and using a wrench to attack enemies, solve puzzles and move around. This can get a bit hectic, especially when enemies are immune to everything but one form of attack or during some of the game’s boss fights when you need to do a specific sequence of things while avoiding attacks, but it never was so overwhelming that I couldn’t progress. The game is fairly generous with its checkpoints anyways.
The ‘metroidvania’ part of the game comes into play with the various crafting materials and recipes you can find around the map. I’ve overall found these things a bit disappointing because it didn’t feel rewarding enough. You get some resources and craft upgrades with marginal effects - such as increasing your movement speed, wrench power, time you can breathe underwater, etc - and then you equip three of them. Getting hit disables the rightmost equipped upgrade you have and you need to defeat enemies to enable it again. The upgrades are so slight, maybe I would’ve made them all permanent - not forcing you to pick three - and would’ve left the ‘protects you against damage’ upgrades with the current system of breaking them and repairing them after a while. As things were, I wasn’t too keen on exploring and finding these resources.
Most of the puzzles involve moving things around with explosives and getting blocks in specific places (or riding them) to get where you need or to unlock new passages. The theory of what you needed to do was simple enough in most places, but the execution could get finicky with the explosives being physics-based and rolling around and not always getting where you needed them to go. Besides a few puzzles which were really annoying, most were fine, however. Iconoclasts also likes its minigames, which gives the world personality and charm and even if I had to restart some a few times - either because I didn’t understand them at first or just plainly failed - the game does not punish you, so you can retry pretty quickly.
I really liked Iconoclasts! It wasn’t perfect but it was a funny little adventure with lots of love and polish. I kinda wish some of the mechanics were deeper and some of the systems were a bit simpler to use, but overall a great game! Try it out!
