I finally beat it! These levels on the average are actually quite a bit harder than I initially perceived them to be.
My favourite level I think is the third MM level (I love those icons by the way, looks absolutely like something from the Windows 98 era). The binary walls were really a clever idea. I like how they were introduced, with a chunk of them surrounding a point tile so that you have to think "there's gotta be a way into there, what is it?" And then how they're used in the rest of the level, not requiring you to know their "secret" but as a somewhat hidden quality-of-life improvement, I thought that was kinda cool.
Ammo in this level was a bit of an issue. Every time I reattempted the level, I came in with less ammo than last time. And then when I finally made it to the machine at the end:
I was able to beat the level some other time, with a lot of enemy dodging and conserving every possible shot, and then I was able to make it to the machine with 1 shot left.
I did find the secret point item in this level, by the way.
I also thought the stylistic variation for the final level was cool. You can clearly tell right from the start, this is it, the core of the virus, the most corrupted part of the system. This level was devilishly difficult though.
In the seventh Mortrix level, I accidentally found an exploit that allows you to skip the entire red key portion of the level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcqBn8ZXr5Y
It takes some precision to pull off, and is highly random whether the Maltimer decides to move the 2 pixels necessary to bump you. But I thought this was kind of funny.
The Tacks are extremely overpowered. Their high health and random behavior makes it impractical to shoot at them, but then they're so unpredictable that it's very hard to evade them. They can jump so high, they shoot so frequently, the shots being spawned higher makes them harder to avoid, and they can also just push you away. Any time I've come up against them, if I survived it was almost always due to pure luck.
I think the concept of a shooting enemy that pushes you, and that you can stand on, is a neat idea, but these guys are so incredibly dangerous that I always avoided them whenever possible. I feel like they could be really cool to play around with if they weren't quite so deadly.
Strangely it took me awhile to figure out I could shoot the Suerins, because of their visual resemblance to the Butler Robots from Keen 1.
I have mixed feelings about the frequent use of the lightswitch in this mod. Some levels I wasn't even able to win until I discovered the location of one.
My main gripe with it though is that turning the lights off makes the graphics not look quite as nice. I want to be able to see the new graphics as they are intended to look, and it's not as satisfying to have to beat the levels without being able to see all their unique visual things (such as the Mortrix machines) in full detail.
I'm sure it's technically possible to beat it without messing with the lights, maybe there's some weakness to the Tacks that I missed, but I wasn't able to do so.
Throughout the mod, I did find a few of the hidden points. I know I at least got the ones from Keen's Documents, Mortrix #3, and I think another one, maybe it was Mortrix #1? Sometime I'll probably do a replay and try to find all of them.
whoo 100th post