I didn't expect much from this game and it matched up to that.
Presentation wise the game is great. The graphics are good for an early SNES title with good sprite work and discernible environmental obstacles and backgrounds. The enemies are also varied in each world, but sometimes their patterns are had to get at first. It doesn't help that they occassionally change to. The audio is probably the best part, with music that seems ripped off of an epic.
Gameplay is decent, but the controls made me despise it. You control like a tank in this game. To change where you look you need to move in that direction for 2-3 seconds. The jumping is okay, but you have no way of forcing yourself back on the ground (ie cancelling it, speeding it up) so some specific sections can get frustrating. The boss fights aren't even that great either, ranging from OK at best to frustrating at worst, tending towards the latter. But on the bright side, the final boss fight was good, being challenging yet fair. The rest feel cheap. Their patterns are easy to get but you rarely have any way of hitting them. They simply brute-force their way past you, chipping away your health. It doesn't help the jumping is so slow that you have to stay still while doing it to avoid getting hit. But in the normal moments the gameplay is good with some fun platforming and decent room for exploration. It's unfortunate that the magic spells are really only useful as a clutch rather than being something that can add a little depth to the game.
The sim mode was neat but I didn't get the appeal of it. It was very basic to me and just felt more like padding to the actual meat of the game which is the sidescrolling. It feels more like a gimmick of genre-bending than anything else.
There's some novelty to be found in that it blends two distinct genres, but apart from that I don't find ActRaiser enjoyable.
Presentation wise the game is great. The graphics are good for an early SNES title with good sprite work and discernible environmental obstacles and backgrounds. The enemies are also varied in each world, but sometimes their patterns are had to get at first. It doesn't help that they occassionally change to. The audio is probably the best part, with music that seems ripped off of an epic.
Gameplay is decent, but the controls made me despise it. You control like a tank in this game. To change where you look you need to move in that direction for 2-3 seconds. The jumping is okay, but you have no way of forcing yourself back on the ground (ie cancelling it, speeding it up) so some specific sections can get frustrating. The boss fights aren't even that great either, ranging from OK at best to frustrating at worst, tending towards the latter. But on the bright side, the final boss fight was good, being challenging yet fair. The rest feel cheap. Their patterns are easy to get but you rarely have any way of hitting them. They simply brute-force their way past you, chipping away your health. It doesn't help the jumping is so slow that you have to stay still while doing it to avoid getting hit. But in the normal moments the gameplay is good with some fun platforming and decent room for exploration. It's unfortunate that the magic spells are really only useful as a clutch rather than being something that can add a little depth to the game.
The sim mode was neat but I didn't get the appeal of it. It was very basic to me and just felt more like padding to the actual meat of the game which is the sidescrolling. It feels more like a gimmick of genre-bending than anything else.
There's some novelty to be found in that it blends two distinct genres, but apart from that I don't find ActRaiser enjoyable.
2 Comments
I got this a bit late, but you do bring up points on the intention of the "complexity". I guess it makes more sense now, but I still feel it could have been fleshed out more. Thanks for the compliment on this review, it's a bit against the grain at the least.
mellorine
3 years ago
It's probably for this reason that the simulation part is pretty basic; you're never in direct control of how people build within the lands they have access to because the humans do that, not the god.
I didn't like the platforming at all, personally - you hit the nail on everything that I found to be fatal flaws. I think it was for how the two pieces meet that I stayed around... after being attracted by its legendary soundtrack (I started writing this comment because I didn't see that you wrote about it at first and wanted to point out the injustice of ignoring it!).
I know comments on Backloggd are kind of pointless because you never get notified for them, but if you ever read this, I think this was a fair review of the game!