Aron's Adventure Reviews

good stuff

It's an unpolished broken mess of a game. Too many things are holding this game back from being a good experience for the player. Two big ones I encountered was the 5th sentinel trial where you are supposed to dive under the water to find the entrance to the next area. Who knew to look there?, since the game sure doesn't tell you. Seriously, the map markers are out on the lake, and things like this are left to you to figure out what to do next. Things that don't make any sense. The next one is unforgivable and is a clear indicator that Aron's Adventure should never have been released. In Chapter III, one part of the main quest tells you to talk to the mayor, and you go to the map marker location and he isn't even there. I thought it might be a bug, so I reloaded an earlier save, and there he is. Right where he's supposed to be, only you can't interact with him, so the dialogue can't happen and the next part of the main quest can't trigger. Nice one! This an unfinished game, and seriously needs some patchwork and updates. It has some pretty graphics and fun game play, don't get me wrong, but the broken quests and bad player experience overshadows it horribly. Hopefully the developer will fix these issues, but I doubt it.

An ambitious indie game, too ambitious. There's melee combat, ranged combat, stealth, skills to unlock and strengthen, gear to craft or loot, a stamina system, dozens of enemy types, platforming, side activities, a story... and pretty much none of it works well, even after two years of patches. As an example, let's take melee combat since that's what makes up most of the game (besides running around far too large and empty maps, that is): [list] [*]Animations and hitboxes are a mess: sometimes a big hammer will swing right through you and not count as a hit because you dodged a second or two before it, sometimes you'll get knocked down because an enemy begun a swing animation (but hasn't actually swung his weapon yet), sometimes an enemy will repeatedly smack you and your character will just stand there with no hit feedback, sometimes your big AoE ability will damage enemies a fair distance away and sometimes it won't damage enemies right next to the impact point. [*]Damage is inconsistent and generally way too high: enemies don't attack you when you're knocked down yet it's routine to be 100-0'd as one enemy knocks you down and another attack that already begun connects with your hitbox, it's fairly common to get killed so fast your health bar doesn't have time to update (and thus you'll see the game over message next to a mostly full health bar), and when you attack enemies the damage numbers that pop up seem to have little correlation with the actual amount of damage being dealt (it seems that some animations hit multiple times but only display a damage number for the first hit, or something like that). [*]There's a combo system, it selects your attack chain at random and only requires you to tap the attack button with the right timing: it doesn't get much use in practice as you'll almost never have time to commit to even 2-3 attacks in a row without getting killed, yet still manages to be a massive hindrance as it means every time you begin to attack you'll get one of a few attacks at random, each with its own range/speed/arc, so good luck familiarizing yourself with any weapon when you don't get to choose how you attack with it. [*]A lot of encounters are you vs many enemies, pretty much always more than 5 at once, sometimes even more than 10, which exacerbates the previous issues. [*]Stamina regenerates too fast and is too plentiful to matter. [/list] I could go on about how ranged combat trivializes 1v1s (especially boss fights), how stealth doesn't work when enemy groups are so numerous and generally have enemies facing every direction, how a story that uses "they killed my family" as motivation for three separate characters (including the protagonist and the main antagonist) is frankly laughable, but I think I made my point already. The one positive I have to point out is that the game was surprisingly softlock-proof in my experience: looking at other recent reviews that might have been luck, but I did not encounter a single piece of geometry I got stuck on without being able to free myself, nor a single quest that refused to progress for any reason (including a few I accidentally sequence-broke because I visited the quest location "too early", cool "open" level design you got there). In any case, that's faint praise at best.

Solid game, with an interesting story