As a kid who grew up during the eighties and spent countless hours in the arcades, I really thought it was a game for me. Watching the trailer, I thought I would meet again old friend, Rastan in primis. I saw the the game used the spears like the plungers in Quackshot : very promising... Enough to overcome the rather bad animations and the not-that-great graphic style. Sadly, "quoting", mimicking famous old games is not enough. Volgarr suffers from horrible jump mechanics : it has no air control, ok, but the level design can't handle it most of the time. You don't have to be skilled and precise, you have to deal with a deficient jump. Which is far different, and boring. And just like in the bad plateformers (the superfamicom G&G for example) they tried to mitigate it with the double jump, but it's useless. Next, the spear handling is atrocious as you can't use if you're close to a wall (why ?), it makes your character stupidly step forward (why ?), and you can't throw your spear crouched (why ? because it would jam the "step forward" gimmick ?). Absurd design decisions that make this game absolutely boring, and not worth the effort it asks you to put in. As for the hack'n'slash action, don't expect something as sharp as a Ghost'n'Goblins or a Shinobi, as the flow is inadequate for your clumsy character. Most of the game loop I experienced reduced itself to a "hit an enemy too low for your spear". A really bad game. And I've launched Ghouls'n'Ghost on my Saturn to check, and the difference is gigantic.
Be careful, this game is absolutely not what it seems. If you think you're going to play a turn-by-turn-dungeon crawler/tactical rpg "on your desktop for short coffee sessions" like the trailer and description lets you believe etc... you're going to be extremely disappointed. This is a very taxing puzzle game with the outer form of earlier said games : the games gives you a maze which must be cleaned of its monsters, with a game loop and game economics very tightly calculated. It could be ok but : - Very quickly, you have to play yourself arithmetically, with precise farming loops between bigger and smaller enemies, else you won't have the requested level to finish the maze boss. Very rigid. - the regenerating system, which restores you health / magic only through exploring the fog of war is NOT interesting, it's too much based on luck, too tightly calculated to be fun, and transforms you into a step accountant. Once again : if you explored not cautiously during your first steps, or not luckily, you're f*cked 15 mn later when trying to finish the last monsters. - Very quickly, the games won't let you clean a maze without using the "altars", the gods of which provide you with perks/partial boosts for a cost/partial debilitation of your character. Once again, you become an accountant of each move, each sword strike to see its effects according to the new rules the altar sets. Not funny, because systematic. - problem is the random nature of the playfields, heavily based on an arithmetic dispensing of resources/damage for the player lacks the precise puzzle design that the hand made levels propose. On the whole, it rigid to the point of not being funny.
but the pc version is still crippled with many problems. The March 2014 version is still unstable, crashing, with framerate collapsing between two stages to 1fps - forcing you to reload till the engine gets it right. And the launcher won't let me play the updated version. The Playstation 3 version I tried at a friend's is a much, much better experience.
