Yael_at

It is a side-scrolling A-RPG, and fun in it's way. The character designs and setting are... atypical, so I'm curious to find out more. The gameplay loop so far is refreshingly simple, no distracting bells and whistles. I don't quite get why it gets a 6.4 average review rating at the time of writing. Only detraction is that the aiming system really feels, like it was designed with mouse and keyboard in mind; Most notably teleport abilities don't mix well with gamepad controls and aiming support. I was considering to buy the PC version for comparison, but I'll wait for a sale for that.

The reference-laden humor of the game is what makes it stand out, and what makes it worthwhile in itself, and really the main origin of my 9/10 score. The gameplay is okay. It feels a bit dated for a 2016 title never mind a 2019 rerelease, but it is fun once you figure out how to combine various attach patterns of your own vs the attach patterns of enemies. There seems to be a bug on the Switch version that causes the compass to work backwards (compared to let's plays from the PC version). When you rotate the camera clock-wise, you'd expect the compass needle to move counter-clockwise. Instead it rotates in the same direction, which combines unfavorably with the overworld map issues described below: Some design weaknesses: (a) Loading times. Even when played from internal memory, a change of scene takes around 4-5 seconds. As long as the story is flowing, that's barely noticable, but once you have to travel the overworld map it turns the on-map encounters into an annoying chore, since each encounters requires two loading sequences, while the fight usually takes only 10-20 seconds. The map-encounters should have been either cut or optimized for faster loading. (But mostly you can just run away from the encounters, since they are visibible entities on the map.) (b) Mana/health system. Mana regenerates slowly and health even more so. Potions are on a 30 second cooldown. While this discourages a boring "farm resources, chug potions" playstyle, it encourages idling after each fight to regenerate health and mana, and let the cooldowns expire. At least, recovery and cooldown expiration should be vastly accelerated after leaving combat to avoid this. Again however, the effect is barely noticable for story encounters, and only becomes egregious for the short overworld-map fights. (c) The ability tree contains a fire ability, that ads a "wall of flame" effect to the evasion move. Sadly it also adds mana consumption and cannot be toggled off, though with better equipment it increasingly becomes less relevant. I have seen similar effects in Saints Row 3/4, where some upgrades could either overly trivialize the combat (invulnerability, infinite ammo, no reloading) or make some tasks hard to impossible (tornado while sprinting in SR4). (d) Very minor complaint: There is no level-up notification. By the time I even noticed, that the game has given me points to distribute on the ability tree, I already had 16 of them. Possibility caused by portable mode, where the experience bar is barely noticeable. Though I play the game in portable mode mostly myself, I recommend against it to give the environments a better chance to shine, than what the small builtin screen can provide.

An enjoyable side scrolling parkour game. Beautiful art, gorgeous music, and good controls. It's a nice touch that the player-character sings along to the background music while gliding. Issues mentioned by other reviews (bugs, finicky controls) I cannot reproduce. *edit* Or at least until I played through several chapters. Later, I came to a point where trying to enter the next level causes a crash of the game, making progress impossible. Currently hoping for a reply on reddit, then I'll try the devs. It is occasionally frustrating when getting stuck between two checkpoints, at which point it really helps, that the Switch lends itself to short sessions, that can be paused indefinitely at any time. With the PC-version I probably would have tried to play in longer sessions, would have gotten frustrated, and given up on the game. When really stuck, or if you want parkour without (with less) dying, the "Assist Mode" allows significantly lowering difficulty: Continuing the level at the farthest checkpoint (not relevant on the Switch?), lowering the speed of the game, longer gliding, invulnerability to the thorns in the levels or multiple hits before dying from them are some of the options. At least on the Switch I didn't notice any bugs or issues with the controls as reported by user krzysiu99 one year ago. Same for some of the professional reviews. Among the parkour-style games I've played, this game feels more on the easier side, with instant respawn and mostly consistently short distances between checkpoints. Maybe the game has been patched?

Obtained one or two years ago with a GameStar magazine and liked it very much. The flight passages feel great, in a relaxing manner. So, when I saw it at 9,99€, I repurchased for the Switch. Compared to other "free flight" games it has the advantage of steering the exploration with a simple story. Sadly, the indoor passages don't quite live up to the good feeling of the outdoor, and it feels like the game could have expanded more on the outdoor world building. But that's mostly nitpicking on my side. On the switch it slightly suffers from the joy cons, which are markedly less precise than an XBox one controller (especially for camera controls), and I think it is locked to a lower frame rate than on PC. But those are general weaknesses of the platform appearing in all games, so it shouldn't be help against the game I guess.