Status Chovus Dec 4, 2022
Beat during free trial. At first I was very turned off by the dialogue, as the 2 main characters came off as flighty, vapid, and sickeningly upbeat. Most of the stuff they said was inane, and this continued for pretty much the entire game. The overall story was decent, and there were a few things that got a chuckle out …
Beat during free trial. At first I was very turned off by the dialogue, as the 2 main characters came off as flighty, vapid, and sickeningly upbeat. Most of the stuff they said was inane, and this continued for pretty much the entire game. The overall story was decent, and there were a few things that got a chuckle out of me, but the majority of the dialogue felt like a waste of time. I read all of the codex entries as I found them, and those hurt my brain. It was not difficult to tell that this game was not made by native English speakers, and they really should have spent less money on the voice acting to fix the awful writing in the codex. Despite all of this, the gameplay was solid. It started out simple enough, with new moves being learned at a very comfortable pace. The 2 different stances and enemies that only took good damage from their respective stance were reminiscent of Recore, while the plot and setting reminded me of Primal. Throw in a child’s understanding of the Dungeons and Dragons material vs elemental planes. I preferred the mental stance for its twin stick shooter controls. I mostly used the right stick attack because it allowed me to strafe while shooting. The X attack was a fast volley with higher dps, but I had to stand still or move towards the enemy. I found the slight cooldown between shooting after a full volley made it useful to alternate between the 2 buttons. The RB blast wave was good for knocking back enemies, destroying projectiles, and doing point blank damage; I really needed to use it during the boss fights that had a time limit to deplete a health bar before it restored. The LB stationary shield was great to hide behind and snipe, and the tornado was decent area damage over time. The game forced mastery of both stances, and I found the physical combat to be clunky and annoying to the point that I focused my equipped runes on improving physical damage, health and defense so I did not get my ass kicked so hard. The right stick attack was very weird; it seemed more like a power attack with the second hit being a long range charge that I found extremely difficult to use. The basic X attack locked me in place and was not fun to use. The whirlwind was the best move in the game; spin to win! The jump attack was good too, and could be used to avoid damage with proper timing. My overall tactic was to spend as much time in mental form as possible, shooting and kiting enemies around. I only switched to physical as needed to do a whirlwind + exploding shield combo, then a jump, then back to mental.
I made a mix of conqueror and defender story choices to the point where I stayed close to neutral for the entire game. On the earth world, I decided to help the little monsters rationalizing that removing their incentive to attack the rock people would save the most lives. On the wind world, I refused to help sabotage the elites because that would have killed a lot of bird people just to improve the lives of the bottom lizard people. On the water world I refused to do the genocide plan, again because it would have wiped out all the fish and jellyfish people. At the end I decided to save Earth and screw over the elemental worlds, because humans first. I think the final boss bugged out on me because I was completely immune to damage during his final phase. After the ending, I loaded the save at the end to see the other ending; both endings were good in their own ways. This boss was a decent challenge with no immunity bug to help me. Most of my runes improved health and defense to make me as tanky as possible. I had runes that improved whirlwind, and a mix of attack boosting runes. The most difficult boss was the wind world guy because of the time limit to deplete his health bar once he went into a vulnerable state; this was the only point in the game where I changed my rune loadout mid combat to maximize dps. Most of the times I got game over were from damn npc escorts getting killed. There were a couple of times where I chose combat over puzzles. I was not a fan of the puzzle and platforming sections, but at least they were not difficult.
This game had decent combat and story marred by dumbass writing and significant lack of polish. A couple of times I had a bug which caused me to always attack to the left, which had to be fixed with a reset, and there were a few other non game breaking bugs. Still it was a fun little game, with top quality voice acting and music.
6.0/10