BIOTA – BIOTA Review – A Super Meat-roid-vania that fills the Contra?

BIOTA is an indie game that attempts the symbiosis between platform action and metroidvania crossbred with a little touch of die-and-retry lightened. We embody a team of mercenaries intervening on one of the asteroids of V-Corp while a mysterious infectious agent decimates the employees in charge of exploiting the ore which regulates intergalactic exchanges. Behind this classic pitch hides a title that mixes its inspirations rather well to offer gameplay that is both familiar and affordable.

The least we can say is that with its look in 4 colors, BIOTA will not leave anyone indifferent. The man behind the title has chosen to offer us around fifty palettes – inviting each player to renew the appearance of the title at their own pace to avoid both weariness and fashion missteps. some music chip tunes are very successful while others turning on loops that are a little too short tire quickly. The game is also adorned with one of the most successful CRT filters making the transition between the pixel perfect of an old gameboythe rendering of an “old terminal” or the CGA aspect of techno course screens.

The simple visuals are very readable without being simplistic and manage to give an identity to both the environments and the protagonists. You can initially choose between four characters before completing your team. The avatars are differentiated by their main and secondary weapons which evoke the great hours of Contra and are very uneven. Defensive techniques are much more effective, as avoiding taking damage is more profitable for progress than blasting enemies with a large radius. the gameplay is fluid, fast, you can cancel the opponent’s projectiles and smash everything with joy run and gun.

The progress aspect of metroidvania is very simple and only works on upgrades to your wallet. You encounter obstacles such as “no gasoline in the robot” and to buy gasoline sold for $320 in a hidden black market, you must have previously upgraded your wallet from $300 to $400. It’s fun to discover the objects in advance and come back to get them, however we are more on keys that open doors than on skills that change the gameplay to overcome obstacles.

The progression takes place in areas that are labyrinthine enough to confuse us, dangerous enough to kill us – sometimes all at once – but which we quickly learn to know on the fingertips by dint of surveying them. We die a lot in BIOTA, however there are two options to avoid the Game Over repeatedly: use the teleporter that takes you back to the base to heal, but forcing you to start the course again or save at any time.

The second option is sometimes on the verge of cheating and acts as a palliative to a difficulty that tries to join two opposites. On the one hand, we have the action passages in which the errors gradually lower our life bar and on the other the platforming passages during which the slightest error causes a Game Over. It is in my opinion an error of game design, the “die and retry” which brings us back to the beginning of the table becomes “die and starts all over again”, which is a bit awkward. An in-between such as allowing trials as long as there are still life points would undoubtedly have been welcome, although he would have drastically taken up the challenge.

This is not the only palliative that has been put in place. The game regularly varies its gameplay with automatic robot scrolling phases, underwater exploration phases or even shoot-em-up, which are all punctuated with save points so that you can cross them with your fingers in your nose. The most successful phase is in my opinion the time trial in which you have to discover an area and achieve an objective within a given time. This is where the mixture of exploration and die-and-retry is the most successful and it is very exhilarating.

The bosses are too few, and if the first are rather original in their mechanics, the following are a little too simple and classic, not to mention the last two which are either disappointing or irrelevant. I actually spent the last one with a cheat-code. Although the story is not the priority of the game, it starts well, but ends in water and this is finally the main criticism that we could make to the game, an inequality between certain very solid passages while others deserve further refinement.

Despite some wanderings, BIOTA is a friendly and pleasant experience, which mixes a metroidvania short and not too complex, action / exploration aspects well implemented with mechanics that are renewed and platform passages not so hard, but too intransigent compared to the rest. Depending on whether or not you use manual saving, it will take between four and eight hours to see the end of this title sold for less than €10, which makes it a perfect candidate for players who do not want to invest. in more ambitious and complex titles.

Tested by Oulanbator on PC via a press version provided by the publisher.