Archvale Reviews

Good, want more

really fun game. wish there was a harder sequel.

i went the wrong way and still progressed and the weapons are all so cool, 9/10 dont play on hard mode its not worth

it is a really fun bullet hell game. but i still can't beat the final boss on hard mode.

Please do not play this game on hard mode this is a warning. Seriously I cannot recommend the game if you intend on playing it on the hardest difficulty it's just not fun enough for all of the suffering. Skill issue warning out of the way, the game is pretty fun outside of the very last bit of the journey with lots of weapon variety and some interesting builds. The environments and enemies are pretty well done, making exploring the entire map a rewarding endeavor. If you plan on playing this game on easy or medium difficulty AND ONLY ON THOSE TWO, I would recommend this, as though it's pretty short, it's fun and challenging. Here is my experience playing the game on hard difficulty, it took me 23 hours to beat and the last 10 were all spent on the final boss because you get 3 shot when there's a million projectiles on screen and the devs were very very stingy when giving the player immunity frames. I found that while the rest of the world bosses and dungeons were pretty difficult, you could at least always get an upgrade to help lessen the challenge, but when there is no further progression besides the final boss, you'll be stuck fighting it for hours, barely able to alleviate the pain (There is a mage build that deals WAY too much damage and that can really help). I wish the challenge was satisfying and fair, but it isn't enough, so the only reason I put up with the final boss was because I wanted to 100% my first game, which isn't very hard to do in this game. I know I really only talked about the last hurtle in the game, but it's just a really glaring issue that, if tweaked to be better balanced on the hard difficulty, would allow me to undoubtedly recommend this game with instead a minor warning about the hard difficulty.

Archvale is an incredibly shallow game that fails as both an RPG and a bullet-hell game, and I don't think it should be at the $15 price point. As a bullet-hell: many fights are simply too chaotic. Enemies and bullets move too fast, and there's just too much on screen (and too much that happens off-screen that can come at you fast). This works ok on easy and normal difficulties as the RPG elements allow you to take a hit, but it doesn't feel like you're getting better at the game -- your character just gets strong enough to deal with all the randomness. By end game you're focusing more on killing before things can cause damage than on dodging. On hard mode, the game is just too difficult in an unfun way. The bullet-hell challenges where you must avoid taking a single hit don't feel great due to the speed of the projectiles; I was able to get them eventually, but it felt more like I got lucky than that I got good. As an RPG: inventory management is terrible. Progression is all over the place. Most of the items and badges are useless and immediately outclassed. There must be over 100 weapons, but you'll only end up using and upgrading 5ish of them. Same story with armor. There's tons of close range weapons, but they're basically outclassed by long range weapons due to enemy and bullet speed. Areas are repetitive and clearly padded out. Map and dungeon layouts are uninteresting, and dungeons don't have anything like puzzles besides a few annoying platforming challenges. Platforming feels terrible due to the extremely strict dash timing windows; you need to memorize button presses in advance instead of reacting since the window for mid-air dash feels like literally a few frames. Storyline and character development are basically non-existent, besides a few lines of disconnected dialogue. Rooms don't have any significant atmosphere or story embedded in them and are just generic tiles, often repeated. The most interesting part of the game is the bosses. They're still a bit too random and fast to reasonably no-hit, but they were significantly more engaging than the overworld fights. But, you'll spend about 0.1% of your time fighting bosses and around 80% of your time in chaotic overworld/dungeon fights. Overall, the core game loop wears out its welcome quickly, and the game just doesn't have anything fun or interesting in it beyond that. I'd skip it.