I am so saddened about this one. I couldn't finish it. The primary culprit was the combat system, which I just did not enjoy. I tried to power through it and gave it a few good hours, but it didn't get any better.

The combat system was slow, awkward, and didn't flow very well. The primary stopping-of-time system was a neat idea, but every time you used it you were punished by not being able to attack for a few seconds (which is a long time in a game that wants to be fast paced) and it didn't sit well with me that the defining system in the game punished you for using it. Mixing the abilities to alter what they do was kinda cool, I guess, but they all felt incredibly underpowered so I found myself just spamming the same attack over and over to kill enemies optimally and that just wasn't fun.

It wasn't completely without merit, though. As always with SueprGiant games, Darren Korb delivered a fantastic score with a few tracks I will be saving down. It also had appealing visuals throughout, another thing SuperGiant excels at. The story had some intrigue, but my god the Transistors voice was so dry it was putting me to sleep and he never shut up. Like literally he felt the need to comment on every little thing I was doing. The narrator in Bastion was much better.

Ahh well. I'm still glad I gave it a shot. This doesn't make me lose any respect for SuperGiant and I'm still excited to give Pyre a shot.

Reviewed on Apr 22, 2024


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