Delta-Gal Review

Delta-Gal is an indie game made by Arthuir Vyater. The game is currently in its early demo stages, with no new builds having been publicly released since this demo from October 2020. However, Vyater’s Twitter proves that the game is still being worked on, with very recent posts showing some new stuff. Delta-Gal is available on itch.io, a link to the game will be at the bottom of this post.

Sprinting through Town.

Delta-Gal is a 3d action game that takes heavy inspiration from Megaman Legends. I have never played Megaman Legends, so I'm not comparing this to that, which is honestly better in my opinion, because I prefer indies to stand out on their own, instead of having me just going, ‘Yes! This game is just like this other game!’. You control Delta-Gal, a robotic girl with a pretty cool design. You dash around and shoot your way through these Metroidvania-like areas, defeating bosses, and finding new abilities, or items to progress. The demo is very short and can be beaten in 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing, but it is challenging, and will likely take multiple attempts to get through one area on your first run. 

The controls are fine in some parts but are a pain in others. I used a Dualshock 4 to play this, so all control references will be with that in mind, but the game does support other controllers and the keyboard. You move using the left thumbstick and control the camera using the right thumbstick. The camera works well, it feels a bit old school to me, but I don't have issues with it. You do have to manually control the camera all the time, it never locks on to anything, which isn’t a huge deal for me but can be annoying to some. The controls take an interesting turn now because the face buttons are hardly ever used, outside of the cross button. The cross button is used to interact with NPCs and to open doors. Besides that, almost everything else is done with the shoulder buttons, using L2 to jump, R1 to shoot, and R2 to dash. Shooting works well, there’s a crosshair, and also a bit of an auto-lock, so I never had to struggle to shoot any enemy. What is a struggle is the dash move. See after dashing on the ground or in the air, if you continue to hold the trigger down, you will start to sprint. This doesn’t work well at all. Sometimes it works, and other times you will just keep dashing. I think it has something to do with camera movement, but I'm not too sure, and it’s still annoying regardless. I would wish for this to be tweaked. One other thing, if you push L1 while dashing, you can slide.

There are also a few other minor controls and functionalities that I'd like to bring up. Firstly there is an inventory used to apply upgrades. This is a nice concept but isn’t fleshed out well in this demo, seeing as there is only one free upgrade to find. There is also a grapple hook that is found halfway through the demo, and lets you swing around. I like this mechanic because you have free control of what direction you swing, and how far you can swing. There is also a sword that you can find somewhere. Pressing the square button uses the sword, and it’s like a spinning attack. It’s pretty strong, but I didn’t use it very much. The last thing I need to mention is that there is a store in the city where you can buy upgrades and items. You buy these using Bits, which are dropped by enemies.

Fighting in the Junkyard.

Now that the long bit about explaining the controls is done, what do I think about the game? I liked the game for the most part, I was having a blast for most of it. Even when doing a 2nd run to capture footage, I was having fun speeding through it. The platforming is great, the combat feels good, and the difficulty is mostly fair. But, there is one major issue. Everything I said up above about the controls, I explained them better than the game does. There are control hints throughout which do help, but there are times, especially later on, that you are left on your own to figure it out. On one hand, you can say that the game is not trying to hold your hand, which is fair, but it becomes a problem when game mechanics are not explained to you at all. The Bits are never explained to you, and you are never told that the shop exists. The shop is positioned in a spot in town where you never need to go, and can easily miss. I know this because I didn’t know the shop existed until I saw footage of it on YouTube, while I was writing this review. It can be argued that I should’ve explored more, and in fact, the sword is also something I missed. However, what makes the sword different is that it's in an area you can only get to with the grapple hook, and you were encouraged to explore a bit after collecting that item. The shop should’ve been placed in a more obvious spot where you couldn’t miss it, maybe next to the forest’s entrance. The shop is also bad anyway because everything in there is too expensive to get without farming. I had 25 Bits at the end of my first run, but the upgrades cost 30 Bits each, and another 60 to expand your blaster arm so you can even equip those upgrades. Enemies either need to drop more Bits, or the prices need to be cheaper because you have to farm to buy anything. Vyater, if you are reading this, which I very much doubt you are, please consider those two things for a future demo.  

Here is the Gear shop.

The graphics in the game seem to be based around the Sega Dreamcast, but I instantly thought the game looked like a PS1 game. This is probably due to the Megaman Legends similarities, both having vibrant-looking environments and characters with a lot of expressions. This game does look great, and its visuals made me smile. The music is also really good, I liked the town theme, and junkyard theme the most. The NPCS also have a lot of charm, and a lot of them made me smile, but I’ll leave those for you to discover. 

I know I was very critical earlier, but I did really enjoy playing this. If you love Megaman Legends or retro 3d action games, you should play this. Just keep in mind the issues I mentioned, and even refer back here if you get struck. I hope we see a new demo for this game this year, or even next week if my luck with Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers remains. But with that, I am Travis, and have a great day!

Click here to view the itch.io page for Delta Gal, and click here for a gameplay video of Delta Gal.