After The Mummy: Demastered was a little bit of a disappointment, I was still in the mood for a Metroidvania, and Iconoclasts was another I'd picked up recently that I'd heard very good things about. It very much did not disappoint! I played on "Harder" difficulty (the hardest one isn't unlocked until you beat the game once), and it took me juuust over 10 hours playing on my 360 gamepad.
I got a very Timespinner meets Cave Story vibe from the narrative of the game. Like Timespinner, it has a very colorful art style to tell a quite serious story, but like Cave Story the audience is dropped into the world knowing nothing about it. Any lore of the world you want to know needs to be gained by talking to NPC's, reading messages, and going through the story, and it makes for a pretty engaging narrative in a rather unconventional take on the techno/fantasy setting. I really enjoyed the story, and I thought the main cast of characters were some of my favorites I've seen in a game with no VA due to how the game uses text (a bit like Ace Attorney, where font sizes, letter spacing, and automatically cycling dialogue boxes are used to get across different tones of voice/patterns of speech). Agent Black, for one, may be one of my new favorite villains in a game ever. Additionally, Robin is probably one of my favorite portrayals of a silent protagonist given that she is canonically quite non-verbal (she talks very seldomly, usually the player giving dialogue choices), and I thought the way she fits into the story as well as the way other characters treat her was done in a very charming fashion. This is definitely up there with Timespinner as one of my new favorite casts and favorite stories in a game that I was not expecting at all to blow me away so hard. Mechanically, this game plays great. The isn't a ton of weapon variety, but there is a fair amount of enemy variety and the situations they're put in makes them always engaging to fight with (and infrequently annoying to fight). You have your standard gun but then also a wrench that can be used to grapple onto points for platforming as well as to both hit enemies in melee and parry their attacks. Each gun you come across has a normal fire as well as a charged fire, and although some will overheat if you fire them too much, it will need to cool down once you unleash a charged attack. There isn't that much crazy movement to traverse as far as a Castlevania-esque backdash or double jump is concerned, but your normal running, ducking, and jumping are more than enough to make boss fights tense and exciting. The optional boss fights get pretty crazy, but the game lets you instantly retry a fight if you fail (generally, as some for some reason make you walk a ways back and some others start from the previous cutscene that initiates the fight), so even the more challenging bosses aren't terribly unforgiving. The level design is well done and the puzzles and combat fit into the environments well, but the game is a very linear Metroidvania. There is often very little exploring to do, and at several points in the story you have no choice but to go forward in the area you're in to complete the current story bit, and then you can come back a fair ways later when you've gotten some new gun/equipment to get a treasure chest you couldn't get to before. It's much more like Cave Story in that way in how it's more of a 2D Action Adventure Platformer and less of a Metroidvania. There are goodies hidden in past areas, sure, but they're fairly optional side-grades, and your maximum number of charms or max HP actually never increase by any means. This isn't a knock against the game, mind you. It's a freaking fantastic action adventure game, but if you go in expecting a more Super Metroid-like experience of recursive game design, you are likely going to be left wanting. The exploring there is to do is often entirely in the pursuit of schematics to make Tweaks as well as the materials to put them together. You get the ability to make and wear Tweaks quite early in the game, and they act as slight add-on to give you passives to slight activatable abilities. They range from nullifying a single hit you take to giving you a double jump, but they're optional, so there isn't any content actually gated behind them. The double jump, for example, isn't required to get anywhere: It just makes getting around that much faster. When you get hit, one of them (starting from the right and going left) will break, and you'll need to kill enemies or break environmental objects to get enough ivory cubes to replenish it. It's a neat system that rewards you for playing well, but given that you craft them at stations and equip them at save points, I will add here that I really wish that crafting stations and save points were more often closer together XP Verdict: Highly Recommended. This has more or less replaced Cave Story for me as my favorite game in this genre of more linear, action-focused Metroidvanias. It's a game with exemplary quality controls, combat, and writing, especially considering it came out of what seems to be a one-man indie studio, and I eagerly look forward to the next thing he makes (although if he's still a one-man team, I imagine it'll be a while X3).
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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