[Extreme Demon] Napalm by Marwec
Yeah, I said Lotus would be my last extreme this week but this level was a lot easier than I thought it would be so I decided to beat this in between my two final exams😭.
Also, I managed to fluke this from 11 which is by far the greatest fluke I've ever pulled, which means I really only spent a total of about ~1hr 40m beating this level which is also by far the fastest I've beaten an extreme, less time than I've spent recently on some low-end insane demons. And it's not like I've improved that much, because Lotus, which is in the same category as this level on the NLW extreme difficulty tierlist, took me 4.5 hours and more than double the attempts for a longer level. I just have no idea how people think this is as hard as it is, and I have no idea why this isn't even in the lowest tier of the NLW. It's all flow gameplay, isn't it?
Anyway, despite my luck and speed on this level compared to other extremes, this wasn't really my favorite, mainly due to some 2.2 bugs and two sections in particular that felt way less consistent than the rest. I'll just get into it.
Predrop (0-13): Honestly was a bit annoying but I just attribute that to me not having much practice here yet, there isn't really anything especially difficult about this section, just some timings to memorize and adjust to. I will say though that some of the glow usage from 7-13 was kind of annoying because it obscured some of the gameplay.
Drop 1 (13-45): The gameplay from 13-31 is fantastic, besides maybe a few very small awkward clicks I really have no complaints here. It's fast-paced and hard (especially past Optex) but very fun and very fair in my opinion. Whenever I died I understood why, and eventually, this did get quite consistent. Then, at 31, you have the first of two parts that ruin the level for me. This ship section sucks, and solely because Vapen decided to do a thing where the spikes and saws flashed in and out, meaning I literally couldn't see anything. In Lotus at least, Vapen made the important spikes visible and even the invisible spikes you could see enough to generally know where to go, but here, I genuinely could not see jack, and dying here made me pretty annoyed. Truth be told, this is not a very difficult ship section, but it just annoyed the hell out of me and definitely ruined the consistency a bit. The wave at 38 is alright, it's pretty easy to hit one of the spikes and it's hard to follow the miniwave but this part did get pretty consistent and it mostly feels natural to play. I do wish creators would stop putting spikes on walls though, especially when they pulse in and out. It always annoys me to death. Then you have a pretty easy cube, followed by the section of the level that ruins this for me...
Drop 2 (45-80): The duals from 45-59 are honestly kind of a nightmare. There are some really annoying slope bugs here because for some reason there are an excessive number of tiny invisible slopes that apparently didn't really affect gameplay in 2.1. The first is at the wave dual at 47, where you can randomly fall through the ceiling as the miniwave and die, so I had to try to not get the miniwave to touch the ceiling if I could, which nearly killed me this attempt since I went way overboard. Then, at 50, you have to hit the black orb at 50 pretty late to avoid a random spider slope bug and the next click you can also sometimes randomly die as the spider to, and I have no clue why. Also, outside the bugs, this section in general just feels very janky, you need to memorize a lot of specific timings, and a lot of the inputs just feel super awkward. I really did not like this section at all. That being said, I did eventually get somewhat consistent, it's not 100% random. After this, you have a pretty easy cube transition although the yellow orb at 61 is easy to screw up, followed by another very cool corridor section with great gameplay. I think my only complaint here would be the ship at 66 which is slightly awkward with the corridor moving down on you. The rest flows super well, and this section is generally just not very difficult.
End (85-100): Not very hard but kind of easy to choke. The first UFO is extremely easy, I don't even remember dying here in practice. You then have a tricky cube with a lot of timings, but it flows pretty well after practice, so I was fine with it. Then you have a final ship section which is not hard but it's hard to see where you're going sometimes, so it's also easy to die here. Then GG.
So overall, I thought this was an alright level, which could be significantly improved if it just fixed two sections. I'd definitely recommend this as a first extreme though... given that I can't believe it is one.
Gameplay: 5.4/7
Deco: 2.6/3
Total: 8.0/10
Personal Difficulty: Difficult insane demon (4F)