Developer: Dark Pigeon Games
Publisher: ESDigital Games
Played on: PC
Release Date: October 22, 2024
Played with: Xbox Core
Paid: $0 (Key Provided for Review)
DISCLAIMER: There’s a rumour going around that Awaken – Astral Blade utilizes AI-generated “art” in one or more areas. While I am unable to confirm whether or not this is true, I will say that – as someone who values video games as an artistic medium, I am vehemently opposed to the use of AI-generated assets not just in games, but everywhere. They’re a lazy way of avoiding hiring real, talented artists, and they cheapen whatever they’re put into. If it turns out that Awaken does utilize AI-generated assets, this review should not be taken as me condoning their use. They have no place in this or any other creative medium.
It’s rarely a good sign when I can’t remember a game’s name. For the first couple of days I was playing Awaken – Astral Blade, I kept getting its name confused with everything from Astrea to Stellar Blade. The only thing that managed to stave off this thoroughly generic title was a joking innuendo I made with one of my friends (“I’ll awaken your astral blade 😉”), which isn’t exactly an early point in the game’s favour. Even having beaten it, I couldn’t tell you what the real meaning of the title is; I suppose the protagonist Tania wields a blade, but it’s not particularly astral in nature. Perhaps it’s just the nature of video games to have nonsense titles that don’t seem to mean anything. That being said, what really matters is if Awaken – Astral Blade is a more enjoyable and memorable experience than its title, and while I do have reservations, I think it manages to be a fairly competent action platformer.
The story doesn’t really help, though. While not bad, it’s at best forgettable and at worst confusing. A bionic girl named Tania is sent by her father, Dr. Herveus, to explore the Horace Islands in search of a missing research team. When it turns out that an excess of Karpas Energy is mutating the local wildlife, Tania begins to investigate further, uncovering long-buried secrets in the process. What follows is a narrative of alliances, betrayals, and revelations, but I found it generally difficult to track and get invested in. A primary culprit is that there’s multiple iterations of Tania, some of whom are decommissioned, while others are still active in one way or another. Since their only designations are a number or “Tania”, it’s easy to lose sight of who’s doing what and why. This isn’t helped by some points where dialogue boxes are mislabeled, thus actively misleading the player as to who’s talking. Awaken – Astral Blade would have really benefited from some sort of in-game character compendium to reference brief bios of the different actors and keep everyone straight. As it stands, the background and motivations of some characters still elude me. There are text logs hidden in the world that provide context on various historical events important to the narrative, but these only go so far in fleshing things out, and early on were more likely to overwhelm with unfamiliar terminology than inform.
There’s also some issues around the delivery of the story. For starters, while voice actors are involved in Awaken – Astral Blade, I couldn’t tell you how much of the game is actually supposed to be voiced. Certain scenes do have character dubbing (which notably occasionally differs from the text shown on-screen) while others don’t, and there were even a few instances where only half a line was spoken, leading me to wonder if the dubbing was bugged. What furthered that suspicion was the fact that almost all the text boxes in the game auto-advance; that is, after a certain amount of time, the next piece of text automatically appears. There’s no way to disable this in the menus that I could find, and it meant that there were times where I missed crucial bits of dialogue because the text advanced faster than I could read. Of course, this would make sense if the lines were dubbed, as the text boxes would then effectively act as subtitles. Since that doesn’t seem to be the case, it left me often rush-reading through dialogue exchanges in an attempt to absorb all the information before it disappeared, which of course wasn’t conducive to getting a good handle on what was going on. What’s especially weird is that there’s some scenes where the text doesn’t auto-advance, requiring player input to do so. I really don’t know what the intention is here; either give the player the ability to advance the dialogue when they’re ready, or provide voiceovers for it all and advance it as soon as the line read ends. The hybrid approach simply ended up feeling frustrating and uneven.
On the plus side, the gameplay in Awaken – Astral Blade is generally solid. As a hack and slash Metroidvania, it sees you exploring a large open world, fighting off enemies and unlocking new abilities that enable you to traverse previously inaccessible areas. The combat system starts pretty straightforward, with a few simple combos and a dodge, however slaying enemies rewards you with Aether that can be spent on passive upgrades, new combat skills such as a parry and perfect dodge, and later, weapon upgrades. Things really start opening up once you unlock more weapons, though. There are three total in the game, and Tania can switch between them on the fly, using finishing moves from different weapons depending on the directional inputs used during her combos. You can also swap between them to take advantage of their different attributes; for example, the default blade is quick and deals relatively light damage, while the scythe hits hard and can knock enemies back. While I tended to enjoy the sweeping slashes of the scythe and stuck with it for most of the game as my primary weapon, getting the feel of each weapon to truly master the combat system felt like it was rewarded, particularly after unlocking some later upgrades. Each weapon also has its own super move that can be used once Tania has amassed enough energy from hitting her foes, and choosing to unleash the right one depending on the situation can be an interesting choice.
One downside to combat is that aerial options are relatively limited. The combo strings are much shorter, and options like Energy Burst (a technique that performs a scaled-down super move at the end of a combo) aren’t possible. This wouldn’t be a problem except that lots of enemies (particularly the bosses) require aerial combat, either due to flying around or simply having weak points that are elevated enough to not be reachable by your standard attacks. This led to some encounters feeling more repetitive than I would have liked, as the combat was basically: jump, slash a couple of times, maybe dodge, and then land on the ground and repeat. Something that could have varied this up more was the parry system, but I found it to be more trouble than it was worth. For one thing, you can only parry on the ground, so it doesn’t do anything to vary up airborne combat, and too often I’d find myself stuck in the air with my only option being to dodge if I didn’t want to get hit. Additionally, the timing to successfully parry is incredibly tight, and if you’re too early or late, you’ll take the full force of the attack. Since enemies don’t have tracking on their attacks, it’s more beneficial to simply dodge out of the way; if you’re a bit early, you’ll still avoid the attack.
Regarding the boss fights, in addition to often relying on the unsatisfying air combat, they also love moving out of range of Tania’s attacks while still being able to hit her. One particularly egregious fight against a screen-filling colossus inexplicably puts boundary walls on either side of the arena that prevent Tania from going too far in either direction, all while the boss constantly keeps its weak points outside these areas. Several deaths here came down to me destroying every weak point except for one of the extremities, then trying and failing to dodge attack after attack while waiting for the boss to bring that weak point back into an area where I could hit it. It didn’t help that they had several attacks that came out so fast they were nearly impossible to dodge, so getting through required more than a little luck and felt like a war of attrition. That said, not all the fights were like this, and I think they generally started to feel better later in the game as the combat system opened up more and health upgrades I found in the world meant that I could survive a stray hit or three.
Speaking of exploring the world, Awaken – Astral Blade does a good job making it a smooth experience. I do think the map tagging system is a bit lacking, as there’s only a handful of icons you can use, and none of them directly correspond to things in the game world. This makes it difficult to decide how to mark areas you want to return to later. That aside, though, actually getting around the Horace Islands works pretty well. The platforming isn’t the tightest, but usually your only punishment for falling is having to climb back up to where you were again. Even in areas with bottomless pits, you only lose a small amount of health and get reset to the last solid ground you were on if you fall in, which is a blessing considering there’s a decent amount of platforming that requires taking blind leaps of faith.
Awaken adopts a Souls-like structure to its enemy respawning, in which you can clear out an area and the enemies will only respawn once you rest at a designated safe zone. This means if there’s a tough platforming challenge with some enemies getting in the way, it’s always an option to take some time dispatching your foes first before getting to the task at hand. There’s also a fast travel system that gets introduced pretty much at the perfect time. Just as I received some new skills that would be useful for previously-missed secrets and got the itch to do some backtracking, I unlocked the ability to fast travel between rest areas, saving me a ton of time and headache in exploring further. Lastly, there are collectible cats that can be found scattered throughout the islands, and collecting enough unlocks features like warping to rest points from anywhere, revealing secrets on the map, and more. One thing that’s oddly gated behind this, though, is changing the difficulty setting. Otherwise, the only time you can modify the difficulty is when you start a new save file or if you die to the same boss repeatedly; in the latter case, the game will pop up an option to make things easier. It’s appreciated, but I wish there was also an option to change the difficulty back in the menus instead of having to warp to the cat shrine to reset things each time.
In addition to the main quest, there are also a handful of side quests that can be pursued, though unfortunately doing so is easier said than done. In contrast to the main missions, which show where you need to go on the map even if you haven’t been there yet, side quest markers usually only show where the quest giver is. Considering that almost all the side quests are fetch quests for a number of items, it can be extremely overwhelming to have the game say, “Yup, figure out where in this massive world those four flowers could possibly be. Good luck!” To add insult to injury, one of the quests seems to be bugged. I had to find some missing researchers, but upon finding the last one, the screen started glitching out and I couldn’t interact with them. I’m genuinely not sure if this was intentional or not, because the glitches only affected the game and not the UI, but it sure seemed like it wasn’t supposed to happen.
That wasn’t the only bug I encountered in my time with Awaken – Astral Blade. Some audio glitches occurred at one point, causing the music to lock up and loop the same second over and over, and after one boss fight, the boss’ health bar got stuck on the screen and didn’t disappear until I fast traveled. There were also a few instances of the game completely freezing for several seconds, though it did eventually recover, and there were no full crashes. On the bright side, the developers seem to be relatively active in squashing the game’s bugs; a patch a week after release fixed some issues I was having with one of my controllers, as well as some other visual issues, so there’s hope that things might get cleaned up more in the future.
Awaken – Astral Blade is a new entry in a rather crowded genre, which makes it tough to recommend when it’s got its fair share of issues. However, I can’t deny that after a bit of a slow start, I really started to get into a groove with it. Exploring the world and finding upgrades can be pretty satisfying, and it smooths out the game’s difficulty to where I was arguably having an easier time with bosses in the late game than I was early on. I can see it being quite challenging for players who neglect to explore as many of the Horace Islands’ nooks and crannies, but I appreciate that it actually felt like my persistence was rewarded. There’s even a second ending for those who wish to seek it out, though I found that the hint to get it was too vague for me to be interested in pursuing it at this time. Plus, since I was more in it for the gameplay than the narrative anyway, I didn’t have a burning desire to see the alternate way Tania’s story could have ended. One shouldn’t take that to mean that I wasn’t invested in my time with Awaken – Astral Blade, though, and while it isn’t perfect by any stretch, it does enough good that I can still recommend it to fans of the genre craving something new to sink time into.
7/10
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