Tube Review (I'm back): Archvale
You are a boy and you must save the world rebuild the gate to Archvale. The premise is simple and you are thrown right into a colourful world with a large array of weapons, trinkets and armors to help you on your quest. Seems pretty simple.
Ultimately this is what it boils down to for me. The game is simple in its presentation and doesn't overstay its welcome. There is a noticeable progression curve as you can kill enemies faster and unlock new parts of the map to continue your journey. This is not to say the game becomes easier, far from it. This is a bullet hell, through and through. Even the puzzle sequences are bullet hell!
The game does a good job at getting you comfortable with the bullet hell aspect of it. In the beginning you're punching a few slime that happened to be in your way, then suddenly there's bandits trying to attack you (and they know magic??) by the end of the game this has been ramped up to the extreme. There's hundreds of projectiles on screen, you know the enemy is there, you cannot see them. But you have powerful weapons. They die. Life is good.
To rebuild the gate, you need to find all seven fragments. These fragments are found in, you guessed it, seven different dungeons all themed differently with varying gameplay elements. One is a gauntlet, one is very platformer heavy while some include more traditional puzzle solving. These are by no means hard puzzles and the dungeons themselves usually doesn't take more than 10 minutes to complete. They are not there to distract you from the action.
And this is where one of my first complaints come in, maybe a bit unjustified. I would've loved to see them incorporate the bullet hell aspect into the puzzles more, as fast as you enter the dungeons it feels slowed down until you reach the boss room, I would have loved to see either some crazy mini bosses or maybe some puzzles that involve using the weapons you have.
Moving on from dungeons I want to highlight the balancing of the game. This is one of the strong points of the game in my opinion. You never feel too overpowered and the game always manages to keep you on your toes. There's no huge difficulty spike to see here, just the game preparing you for the big finale where you will have to use everything you have been taught along the way.
I will cut this review a bit short as I came back to it over a year after I played the game. Overall I recommend to play the game if you get it on a sale and you would enjoy a smaller adventure type game and you don't mind some light bullet hell elements. you can find the game on steam below.
Look forward to more content coming soon!