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 clearly being some sort of immaterial apparition to be inside them in the first place – has apparently made physical contact with them.
That also has an effect on the platforming, as Tania levitates several inches above any surface, making it near impossible to tell whether you have touched down on a platform after an irritatingly floaty jump. The game doesn’t seem to know whether you have been successful or not either, seemingly flipping a coin to decide if you’ll land on a precipice or not. Dashing is dodgy too, the consistently naff collision detection seeing you hit by spinning blades, jabbing spears, and buzz-saws, despite your upmost attempts to dodge them successfully.
All these issues come to an unpleasant head with the spectacularly sharp difficulty spikes. Take an escape from a giant worm by way of an early game example. It’s one of those typical ‘run away from the unkillable baddy’ segments, seeing you dodge your way down a tunnel filled with moving platforms and deadly traps. Any sensible game would have revealed these new obstacles bit by bit, allowing the player to get used to them, to understand how to navigate them, before putting their newfound skills to the test in a time-trial situation. Not so in Awaken –Astral Blade, it just throws everything at you at once and says to hell with it.
This unbelievably poorly calibrated and sign-posted section cost me an hour of my life. Don’t let Awaken – Astral Blade rid you of any of your finite-time on this planet, give it a miss and play another Metroidvania instead.