B.I.O.T.A. is a love letter to retro games. With its 8-Bit graphics and swappable colour palettes, (a whopping 54, 4-colour palettes), 8 unlockable playable characters and a great soundtrack. B.I.O.T.A. is a metroidvania made with passion.
The colour palettes are reminiscent of the game consoles of old, plus some unique ones and anyone who has played those will love the representative colour palette. Want some old school game boy colours? CGA? Or any of the 50 other unique colours? No problem, just pause the game and swap the palettes until you find the one that matches your mood at the time.
As I mentioned above, the soundtrack is great. The music is a fantastic chiptune-synthwave that has you nodding your head in rhythm. From the very first screen the music sets the tone, futuristic sci-fi space adventure, sign me up. I loved the soundtrack and even cranked it up a bit while playing and probably would pay for the soundtrack if it was available as an extra.
Now to the gameplay. The game is an 8-bit metroidvania with very tight controls though for some reason when I was playing, the button prompts on screen did not represent the buttons I needed to press on my PS5 controller, but I assume that was because of some Steam settings and not the game itself. Regardless of those controller issues the game is a very good metroidvania with some variation to the gameplay. I went back to check and yes, I just had to add the playstation controller to the list of controllers and buttons supported by Steam.
There are 8 playable characters to unlock and upgrade. Each character has a normal attack and a special attack. These attacks are different for each character, the normal attack varies from a pistol like attack to a rapid attack like assault rifles or even flame throwers (a classic in a sci-fi setting involving aliens), they have various damage output and speed, making the characters quite situational. That goes for the special attacks as well, which can be grenades or mines and other more outlandish weapons.
Enemies come in various shapes and sizes with attacks ranging from simply charging you, to dodging and jumping and shooting you. Then there are levels where you control different kinds of vehicles. You can control a submarine, mech and a starship. The submarine and mech sequences have the same gameplay as normal but, in a submarine, or a mech fighting a bit stronger and bigger enemies than normal while the starship sequences are reminiscent of StarFox or the Star Wars X-Wing and Tie Fighter series but in 8-Bit.
The story campaign has 2 different endings giving you an excuse to play it more than once and judging by the gameplay you would want to play it again. And for even more replayability there are time trials and target shooting game modes and an arcade mode.
In conclusion: B.I.O.T.A. is a solid metroidvania and if you like 8-Bit graphics with a smashing soundtrack, you can´t go very wrong with B.I.O.T.A.
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