Awaken – Astral Blade Review
The story of Awaken – Astral Blade is a nonsensical never-ending stream of proper nouns. Karpas Energy, Jacha, Royal Altars, Enginery Swords, and Energy Burst Points – it’s all completely incomprehensive and renders the dialogue a confusing chore to tap the skip button through. Sadly, when it comes to the gameplay of this Metroidvania, things don’t get much better.
Karpas Energy is running wild across the interconnected 2D environments of the Horace Islands, corrupting the animals into hideous mutated beasts. It’s up to Bionic girl Tania to explore levels, kill enormous bosses, and find obscure power-ups hidden all over the place. So, your standard Metroidvania then. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I love a good Metroidvania. Problem is, when it comes to Awaken – Astral Blade, it fails to achieve any of the basic fundamentals of the genre.
Take the level design itself. Rather than an expansive world that becomes accessible as you gain new abilities and has you returning to areas with a fresh perspective on them, the Horace Islands feel oddly linear. Sure, you can briefly diverge from the path and find a power-up of two but your soon ferried back to the correct route. There’s little sense of exploration or discovery, instead this is predominately a tedious plod from A to B and back again.
Combat is similarly limp and lacks impact. Tania wails away with her Enginery Sword but rarely is the impression given that she’s hitting anything. Instead, the visual and audio response to your attacks is messy and indistinct, resulting in it being difficult to tell what is going on. The same is true of enemies, where it’s often impossible to ascertain if a boss will connect with an attack or not. It’s a regular frustration when you’re unwittingly struck having clearly avoided the blow, which is only exacerbated by the poor character collision detection. All too often Tania ends up inside enemies whilst you try to attack them, resulting in health loss because she – despite
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