bayala - the game Reviews

This is another game that disappointed me a bit. I was drawn to it by its theme and style, and that worked really well. This is based on a German movie I have not seen, so I didn't know anything going into it, but the cutscenes and intro were enough to understand the setting and what's going on. Graphically it's pretty, cartoony but from what I've seen it matches the look of the movie. I like the character designs. The story is mixed. Sound's decent, I liked the music though it did get repetitive. Where this falls apart is the gameplay. It's a 3D platformer, with some combat, without any controller support. At all. I was able to put together a SteamInput mapping that was comfortable enough for me to use, but not everything was capable of being controlled by the controller. Mouse use was still required for efficient menuing and for the puzzle minigame. The general game flow is performing a series of quests and sidequests in a region, which are either go find this collectible or a smaller number of go fight these monsters. There are a few combat/exploration regions per area, but not enough to cover all the sidequests. It gets very repetitive. Once you complete the main quest goal for a region, you do an autoscroller like segment where you're riding on a horse (with one exception) trying to avoid obstacles. It's not always clear what the final quest that triggers the next horse travel sequence, so you may go before you're ready. There's a few minigames scattered in as well, I liked the puzzle game one but not the others. Movement is OK, but it takes far too long for your character to realize that she has wings and can actually use them. You eventually unlock a glide and a double jump, but they come far too late in the game. There is no true flight either. Game optimization is hideously bad. One later game area had so much stuttering and frame drops on my 7800X3D/7900GRE system that I don't even want to see how it handles on older or lower end hardware. Most combat areas were fine. The game is also incredibly buggy. A very common action you need to do is climb up on a ledge while holding onto it. Sometimes pressing W (mapped to up on the D-pad/left stick) simply would not climb up. You have to drop off and try again. This was incredibly frustrating in some areas. Another area of really janky controls came late game after you got some more movement. You will eventually get a double jump and a glide, if you enter into glide state you cannot do your double jump. This one late game area requires precise jumping and gliding to reach some moving blocks, and it's very easy to just lose the ability to do the double jump. Combat is fine, but some of the hitboxes don't make a lot of sense and there's very little enemy variety. It's not until almost halfway through the game that you get a SECOND enemy type. It's not always clear, especially with the most common enemy the ravens, what an attack even is that you have to avoid. It also falls into the trap a lot of 3D-ish platformers fall into where your shadow is almost invisible on certain backgrounds and there aren't many visual cues to see exactly where you are. I wish I could have liked it, but the issues and lack of communication and support from the developers makes this one that cannot be recommended.