Metroidvanias are at their best when they offer a lot of different options in combat, in my opinion. My ideal version of this is the Bloodstained approach, in which every enemy you kill has an ability you can steal, and then you can mix and match them all as you want. Yes, I know this originated from Castlevania, but until Belmont’s Curse hits, we don’t have a more recent example from the series, and I’d be surprised to see those systems return anyway.
Clockwork Ambrosia’s main point of distinction is the gun customisation, and to me, that has more than enough potential to meet what I like. In essence, every gun you find in the game has a few different slots you can change up with different augments you find as you adventure about. Stick with the first gun as an example, it is a plasma shot with a charged variant a la Mega Man, but you can upgrade it with features like firing two shots instead of one, adding an additional shot if you’re firing more than one, doubling projectiles but having them spread out, and changing the properties of the charged shot too.
Things can get pretty absurd as you experiment with these, but frankly, it doesn’t happen soon enough. I like the system, and I like a lot of the results you can get to, but they’re uncovered far too slowly for my tastes. You end up sticking with one specific configuration for a couple of hours, and it just leads to combat often feeling a bit stale. It’s also hard to get excited about getting a new weapon when your current ones will have a lot more augments, meaning they’re just more fun to use for the most part.
The exploration is the other big part of a Metroidvania, and it’s a bit paint-by-numbers here. You have to beat a couple of bosses before you even get a short range dash, and that doesn’t really do much for exploration outside of making it slightly faster. The move you really want for that is the sprint, which activates when you’ve been running for a certain amount of time, making a lot of the platform challenges just twitch-reaction-bait rather than anything more thoughtful. It’s rarely bad, but it’s also rarely inspiring.
The visuals are incredibly charming though, looking a lot like a lost Game Boy Advance game, or at least the version of those games I have in my mind. The music can slap in places too, especially the double-kick pedal in the opening cut scene. The same is true of a lot of the enemy designs, with an early standout boss being a centaur robot wielding two spinning lances. It’s good stuff.
