For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Abathor, from Tesura Games and Jandusoft.
The look of the game is very nostalgic for me. i grew up playing the SEGA Master System and Mega Drive so i saw this and instantly thought of Golden Axe. The screenshots on the eShop did look interesting as the pixel art looked beyond what those systems could output.
Before we get to start, we're greeted with a bare bones home screen that mentions that this is a demo, has a very basic settings page, and allows us to view the credits. But there's no link to the eShop, not even a QR Code. there's a lot of wasted space that could've been filled with stuff that could help sell the game.
But when you do start the demo, there's a very cool character select screen. i wasn't expecting that screen to show you the moves of the character. you see, when you click on a character a gif/video starts playing showing what buttons on the controller do what in the game. it's a simple concept but it really works and i hope other games do something similar.
With our character selected we start at 1-1 and the first thing you notice is how animated the background is. the rolling waves look fantastic. our ship has a bear skin sail that also looks stunning. i appreciate that the devs didn't go all in on the 16 bit style, they've taken the best bits of style from it and modernised it so it doesn't feel dated and stilted. there's lots of little animations everywhere.
It's not just the look of the game, but the soundtrack too. each stage has it's own theme, as does the credit screen and the home menu. the music on 1-1 really made me think of music from the Mega Drive era. But i do have a complaint in that there's not enough of it! it was really noticeable when the music looped and i felt that it happened too quickly.
But my biggest complaint has to be how the controls interact with the game. it's not all bad, i found them to be very responsive. each character also controls a little different from each other. It's just that the critical part of the gameplay, the attacking, just didn't feel right. all the characters i played as had to get too close to the enemy so inevitably i ended up taking damage whether i was attacking, dodging, or parrying. i found it difficult to judge distance, occasionally this was a jump but more often than not i underestimated the reach of my attack. it was frustrating but, perhaps more importantly it wasn't satisfying to attack.
Another example of this was how many hits it took to defeat enemies. with our main weapon i could understand if it was only that that took numerous hits. but every item we picked up seemed to be underpowered to the point where i didn't really want to use them. they did provide range, but if they're no more powered than i am, they weren't special or cool. the same goes to the special attacks did. none of them felt any more powerful than a standard attack. this is probably why i felt more comfortable using the character which didn't have an attacking special, rather she employed a parry which slightly stunned an enemy long enough for me to get all the hits in to defeat it. I highly recommend #Sais as the character everyone should try first.
Abathor does a lot right and i really did have fun playing it. but I can't ignore that the combat just wasn't satisfying. Using Sais did help and maybe i would be able to endure a while longer using her. but that's not exactly a great endorsement of the game. So it's great there's a demo that allows us to try all the characters. hopefully there'll be one that'll make playing the game fine enough. So i do recommend you check out the demo, but maybe wait and see with the reviews if the combat is fixed, or at the very least modified.
