Guardian Reviews

In the few minutes that I played it, I could tell this game was far from finished.

Better than I expected it to be! :) :) :)

The story about how I ended playing this game is a little gnarled, but I also find it too amateur.

This game has potential. Unfortunatly the bugs and glitches make for a frustrating play. For example: There are random points where you fire into an invisible barrier in front of you that prevents hitting the enemy. The Air Dash is a bit hit and miss. When fighting the first boss (three times) I got hammered. On the fourth attempt I thought it was going to go the same way then suddenly around a third of its health dissapeared and it died. The main character sprite can freeze or go into a random frame. I E going into a rolling frame even while stood still firing. If the Devs resolved these issuses then it could be a decent game, but as the game has been out for some time it doesn't look promising which is a shame!

This is a very nice game, a split-map metroidvania (i.e. something like Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia) with great music and an intriguing setting. It has a story premise/setting vaguely similar to that of Valdis Story: Abyssal City (whose soundtrack this game's music reminds me of), but a storytelling tone that's maybe a little more similar to Momodora III or Reverie under the Moonlight. The artwork for the sprites and (particularly) the backgrounds is beautiful, and the gameplay is reasonably fast-paced, making even backtracking pretty fun. As of right now (2019-01-22), the game still needs some polish (particularly with regards to some bugs, but maybe also rewording the script a little), but is definitely fully playable and enjoyable (and I can confirm that all the achievements work), thanks to the dev fixing bugs reported on the game's forum. (Disclosure: I bought this game on the Steam store when it was discounted.)

Despite not making a strong first impression, Guardian is a competent game in Metroidvania genre. Player assumes the role of Skye, an amnesiac enforcer of goddess Esara, tasked to collect 8 crystal shards in order to defeat Inos, a rival deity. From there, the story goes down a fairly predictable, but enjoyable path. Skye starts out incredibly weak, given only 4 HP and armed with a puny projectile weapon. This makes the game's difficulty primarily front-loaded, as for the first three worlds the game remains particularly stingy on upgrades. However, once the player starts to accumulate power-ups, things become a lot more tolerable. In structure, Guardian most closely resembles Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, where it has several large zones strung together by an overworld map, and to finish the game each area would need to be fully explored, requiring multiple visits. Each zone has at least two boss encounters, one yielding a new ability for the player, and the other, a useless crystal shard to appease your deity. Infrequently, the game also resorts to the tried and true “kill all enemies in the room” method of progress gating, but thankfully, once cleared, those rooms remain empty henceforth. In order to facilitate exploration and provide reasons to revisit areas, the game uses “skeleton keys”. Each new door requires an ever-increasing number of them, but opening one will not take keys away from the player. This means that the number of keys, in actuality, is your “key level”. Other doors can be opened by special attacks and elemental magic. Magic, in particular, isn't all that useful in any other context, as for most of the game Skye can only cast it once or twice before needing to grind enemies to replenish her MP bar. Moreover, when used in combat the spells are weak and have inconvenient attack paths. In the beginning of my first run through the game I was frustrated beyond all reason, mostly because my player was so weak, I barely had a chance to try a new strategy before getting murdered, but as time went on and her health increased, I came to grips with the controls and oddities of game design. On my second playthrough I breathed through the early areas. After nearly 20 hours and two complete play-throughs I am finally done with Guardian. All in all, it's an enjoyable, if flawed, game. A lot of its downsides can be traced back to the developer's choice of middleware – Construct 2, the package one wants to use if they want that “made with sticks and duct tape” look and feel. In my two playthroughs I have twice been hit by progress-blocking bugs, but the developer has patched those up since. For all of its janky lack of polish, Guardian still has plenty of heart and a very earnest quality to it, not to mention decent presentation and plenty of content.