Smelter

I went into Smelter with the spreadsheet brain fully engaged, hunting for the strategy layer to justify the price of admission. What I found was something more lopsided than I expected, but also more charming - and that distinction matters a lot for where this game lands in your backlog. The core loop is a two-mode rotation. In Classic Mode you control Smelter himself on a top-down overworld that reads like a Mode 7 SNES map, directing your Zirm troops by building houses, barracks, and food-producing apple trees to sustain your army. Smelter flies around in a twin-stick shooter fashion, blasting enemies while his forces auto-skirmish from fortifications you place. The strategy ceiling here is genuinely low. You are not making the kind of decisions I want to be making. Build enough of the right structures, keep your Zirm soldiers fed, and the overworld sections rarely push back hard enough to feel like real resource management. Reviewers across the board flag the RTS layer as shallow, and they are correct: it is closer to a light tower-defense breather than anything that will challenge a genre veteran. One recurring frustration is that the tutorial over-tutorializes the strategy sections while simultaneously leaving gaps that can cause progress to stall entirely without a save reload. The platforming is a completely different conversation. Once Eve fuses with Smelter and drops into the 2D side-scrolling stages, the game wakes up. Each of the four regions - the Rumbly Lands, Gurabi, Eremagu, and Nutoro - operates as its own ability sandbox. Gurabi gives you earth-and-gravity punching combos with a rock shield counter. Eremagu strips those away and replaces them with lightning skills: you can phase through wires as an electric spark and make yourself incorporeal to bypass barriers. Nutoro brings long-range shooting with the unstable blaster set. Critically, when you enter a new region you start that element's skill tree from scratch, so you are not just accumulating power - you are relearning your kit. That design choice keeps the 12-15 hour runtime feeling fresh across all twelve levels. The hidden Trial stages scattered through each area are the highlight: short gauntlets with hard constraints (no damage taken, no enemy contact, time limits) that reward Trials Tokens for spending at overworld forges to unlock further abilities. The platforming controls are tight and callback comparisons to Mega Man X are accurate and flattering. Late-game difficulty spikes, particularly in the final dungeon with its timed chases and multi-phase bosses, will test even experienced action-platformer players, though modern checkpoints at boss entrances prevent the worst frustration. Presentation is quietly strong. The hand-drawn pixel art holds up well, the overworld segments especially. The soundtrack pulls from Mega Man X energy in the action stages and drifts toward classic ActRaiser territory in the overhead sections, with contributions from composer Manami Matsumae of Mega Man series fame. Story is self-aware nonsense told with breezy dialogue that moves fast and does not overstay its welcome. The game ships with Classic Mode (the full hybrid experience), an Action Mode that lets you skip the strategy entirely and let the AI handle Zirm expansion, and a Boss Rush Mode if you just want the fight reel. From a strategy-and-sim standpoint, Action Mode almost feels like the developers knew the RTS side was the weaker leg. If you are a pure strategy buyer, the depth is not here. But if you have any tolerance for 16-bit action-platforming and you grew up with ActRaiser or Mega Man X, Smelter earns its runtime through the side-scrolling half alone. The genre hybrid wobbles, but it does not collapse.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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