Coridden Review – A unique and highly-enjoyable co-op adventure

thesixthaxis.com:

People often talk about the ways that they channel and embody their inner animals. You’ve got people giving into their lizard brain impulses, showing they’ve got that dog in them, or mum’s looking out for their kids with the fierceness of a mother bear – just with more complaining to the manager and less claws. Coridden pulls that inside-out, putting the animal on the outside and the human on the inside.

Now, Coridden is not a perfect game, but it is one I think nearly everyone should play. I’m going to get my complaints out of the way first. The camera can be unhelpful at times; there is a little bit of jank and clipping in some exploration sections; and while the art direction is lovely, it’s lacks polish in some areas. I’m now going to spend the rest of this review raving about this game.

Coridden is an action RPG in which you can shift between a human form and a beastly one. You unlock new beast forms as you go, drawing them from the creatures that you defeat in battle, and each family of beasts has its own skill tree, along with a secondary one you can give it to gain more skills.

Your human form also has four classes to choose from, each of which has three skill trees, and then a custom class that lets you mix and match as you please. This game is, quite simply, an absolute dream for anybody that likes replaying games and mucking around with different character builds.

You can also weave in any combination of melee attacks, ranged attacks, special abilities, and transformations that you want as long as you’ve got energy for it. Better yet, your human and beast forms have separate energy bars, so you’re meant to constantly shift between them in combat to never actually have to stop fighting. There’s no worrying about stamina here: just become a weird little beast with a tractor beam for a tail and keep throwing down until you need to swap back to your human form and shoot fireballs or turn invisible.

In any other game, that would be the main focus, and while it’s a