The first few areas are pretty easy. It gets significantly harder later on.
I'm near the end of the game, I believe, and while I think I like it, I also find it... annoying. The moveset is really fun and it feels great when you're able to string it all together to do cool things. But too much of the game is designed around killing you very fast and making you replay segments. Very limited i-frames, high damage, MM1-style spikes. It feels like IWBTG-lite sometimes, in the sense that you need to play a long segment several times to find all the apples that are going to kill you unexpectedly. I'd have to replay to confirm this, but it feels like it doesn't really subscribe to the Mega Man school of level design where they throw concepts at you gently before ramping them up; instead, many of the obstacles are lethal the first time you see them. I'd rather a game let me use its cool moveset without having to completely learn the stage first.
There's also a lot that the game doesn't communicate very well. The different between the SP version and charge version of some of your abilities is a mystery. The sprint attack is also really finicky -- there are clearly segments where you're supposed to be chaining dash attacks together, but it's easy to lose it entirely if there's a break in your momentum while airborne (very easy to do when you're also trying to avoid damage), which usually means that you're just going to fall into a pit. But I have no idea what the tolerance is, because sometimes it does work even if I delay in the air. Also, the timing also seems really strict in a way that doesn't feel intuitive. Sometimes I was able to dash through enemies with active damaging hitboxes, but other times I wasn't, and I haven't been able to find any clear reason for why. Parry is cool, but the risk seems too high for the reward, especially since some enemies are super tedious to fight if you don't use it but will kill you in 2-3 hits if you make any mistakes.
