Posted on: January 1, 2022
Sivek
Possesseur vérifiéJeux: 502 Avis: 6
Very good game that could've been great.
Astalon nails the aesthetic it's aiming for. Game looks great in the way a modern game aping retro-game sensibilities should. Gameplay-wise, controls are fine and level design is quite impressive as well. Difficulty is on point for the for the first 3/5 of the game before falling off hard due to the upgrade/rpg system at work. I don't like stats progression in these types of games because they rarely work well and it doesn't here either for the most part. There's also a fair bit of bonus content in alternate game modes and a boss rush. The game forces to use manual switch between characters and it's rather annoying, but before long you can freely switch between them during gameplay and it makes the enforced campire switching feel entirely pointless or more likely a vestigial element of the game. Campires feeling vestigial is something I'll touch on the next section, which is the probably the most disliked aspect of the game. Astalon uses a lot of mini-shortcuts in lieu of less and more significant ones, and this would work well if not for the game's big bugaboo, that being the death penalty. For whatever reason, you start at the beginning of the game whenever you die. Yes, there are elevator shortcuts but there aren't enough of them, or they aren't placed well enough to not be frustrating. The micro shortcuts only accomplish so much and the game runs into a serious problem when it's just simpler for the player to die and respawn at the beginning of the game rather than navigate through a dozen rooms to reach an elevator. That kind of thing is clearly a design problem. The game has campfire rooms that 100 percent feel like they were supposed to be checkpoints/warp points but aren't for whatever reason and only serve as save points. Simply making these room additional warp points would nudge this toward being a five-star review. In short, Astalon is a very good metroidvania that is hampered from being great by some questionable design decisions.
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