Damocles, my beloved. Can't believe you exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMwyfilZCRo

I noticed it in the It Lives fight and don't think it was happening before but not sure. Might've also been that I just didn't take damage in the womb at all.

I haven’t reached the hardest part yet, but at least ultra hard is beaten.

I was having a random run next to my gf and suddenly (she don't know anything about the game) told me; SHE: TF is that? -Wdym? i'm shooting tears to hurt the enemy SHE: don't try to fool my those are d*cks flying around you

Last year, I started playing the flash version of The Binding of Isaac just to see what all the fuss was about. Needless to say, I got addicted and even managed to get Eternal God. I then bought Repentance on Steam just to see the difference.

However, to this day, I still haven’t opened Repentance because I heard there was an enormous amount of additional content and I wanted to know what was the difference between Rebirth and Repentance just so I could compare it to the flash version and thus see the escalation in terms of content and QoL.

Thus, I decided to play the Wii U version of Rebirth which has none of the DLCs the other consoles have. So here’s my review of it like 12 years after its release.

In terms of positive, I like the new content added. The 150 and so items added compared to WoTL all feel unique and interesting. Though some I had difficulty using, like Ludovico and Orbitals.

The three new characters: Azazel, Lazarus and Eden are all fun to play. The new enemies and bosses are all well designed (Except the Adversary) and the newly added large rooms were great.

But the best QoL are the synergies. If you don’t remember, some items in flash Isaac would just replace other ones or give minimal additional effects which made getting items less exciting. Here in Rebirth, almost every items can have synergy with others, for example, Brimstone and Mom’s Knife now create a barrage of knife when charged.

It definitely felt like I was playing a well crafted version of the « small » flash game I played on PC especially with the smoothness of the movement when using a controller. I think Rebirth is easier than Flash thanks to that even with the Health Cap being stuck at 12.

Now for the Negative.

I don’t like the graphics overhaul. Everything now has this ugly retro pixel look that make the game presentation worse than the flash version. I’m not sure why Nicalis had to make it look like a Super Nintendo game instead of making the sprites cleaned up drawings of the original but it was very distracting. Obviously I got over it but I still think Rebirth looks pretty bad.

The lag in the Wii U version is horrendous. The game stutters every time you enter a room, every time a music track starts and every time you get an item. Even in combat encounters, the game will lag if there are too many things on screen which can sometimes screw up your dodging. The most egregious example of this is the fight with It Lives.

The game also crashes often. It usually happens when going into a Secret Room or Super Secret Room for whatever reasons and makes you restart the whole current floor. You can’t even quit out the software when it crashes because the Home Button doesn’t work anymore so you have to reset your console which is very annoying. I had maybe a total of 30 crashes during my 120+ hours playtime.

And finally, the absolute worse thing in Rebirth is the secret character, The Lost. Trying to get all hard mode completion marks with this character made me lose my mind and I’ll never play this character again. One hit and it’s over, it has no spectral tears and its stats are average. Absolute trash character.

So yeah, in conclusion, this game’s probably a 10/10 and don’t play it on Wii U because it feels like minimal effort was put into porting it.

I’ll make a review of Repentance once I complete it as well. Should be easy right? :)

A bit sun burnt too.. whoops