Backlog Beatdown: Dusting off Dust: An Elysian Tale

Dust: An Elysian Tale has the coincidence of being both a game that tempted me away from No Game New Year a few months into it and was given way free with Xbox Games with Gold a couple of months later. I saw TotalBiscuit’s first impressions review and I wanted to give it a try, then when I got it for free I forgot about it for a long time.

However, last week I thought I’d give it a go. And what a delightful game it is! It is at its heart a platform game with RPG elements, and makes no apology for it. It’s got good graphics, excellent gameplay and a great story. It’s seriously like the best Super Nintendo game I never played.

The art style certainly looks ‘cartoony,’ but is as good as any 6^th-gen game might have been if they’d bothered with 2D platformers. You play as Dust, an anthropomorphic rabbit-like creature that has all the hall-markings of a troubled hero but still manages to sneak in a sense of humour. You’re joined on your quest to save the world and remember who you are by your sword Ahrah which talks to you, and an irritating flying creature called Fidget. You meet a cast of NPCs that are a mixture of anthropomorphic rabbits, bears and toads. You battle a range of enemies that breaks out from the usual mix of ‘like Tolkien, but…’ The visuals are gorgeous, the backgrounds are amazing and the character models are really well put together.

This game really does kick ass...

In terms of gameplay, the controls are fluid and responsive, but its trump card is the brilliant combat system. There are three ways to attack[1]: You can press X to attack with your sword and develop a combo using a combination of X and Y, use Y to create a ‘Dust storm’ which allows a short amount of flight and slightly damages the enemies, or you can use B to have Fidget cast a spell. The real fun comes into combining the effects of the different attacks. For example, in the early stages of the game, pressing B will have Fidget splash a magic missile style of attack, that doesn’t do much damage. Combine that with a Dust Storm and the missile multiplies and flies all over the screen, doing a lot of combined damage. You only have a limited amount of time to do either – your spells and your dodge is limited by an energy bar, and you can do the dust storm for around six seconds before you’ll injure yourself, but you can recover them by landing your attack combos as well. This all makes for a rapid attack system that looks and feels very impressive.

Elsewhere, the platforming is challenging but not insurmountable, the puzzles are not hard to work out but are a little tricky to put off, and the treasure is useful but not essential. This is one of the best parts of the game’s design – you don’t have to feel obliged to do all the side quests and collect all the treasure. If you do, great, and that can add an extra level of fun for the completionists among us, but the game won’t punish you for wanting to get to the end.

I won’t talk much about the story; it’s great but needs to be experienced by yourself. I will, however, mention the sound. The background music is gorgeous; it strikes the balance of being memorable enough for it not to be merely background noise, but not so much that it becomes cheesy or ridiculous. A lot of work went into those compositions, and it shows. The voice acting was very good, and they didn’t ruin it by trying to draw facial animations. And the game’s sound effects are visceral and effective; all the bells and whistles happen in the right places.

All in all, a very well-designed game that does its job, is fun to play and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I might return to this at some point for a completionist run, but the game is as long as it needs to be and I’m ready to move on.

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[1] Controls refer to an Xbox 360 controller

Golden Axe 2: Better balanced, and a LOT easier...

A sad fact of my gaming life at the moment is that while I’m busy spending hours deciding what 40+ hour RPG to get invested in next, not being able to decide and spending even more hours on Gotham City Impostors to get one achievement, I found myself wanting to play a game I could just beat. No need to think too hard, I just want to kick ass. Enter Golden Axe 2…

Regular blog readers (all eight of you) will remember that Golden Axe was the last game I finished, and that it took me 21 years from first playing it to beating it.

The sequel didn’t take me quite that long.

As was the case in sequels of the time, nothing much had changed about the nature of the game. It was still a fantasy-based side-scrolling beat-em up. The plot was more or less identical; it just had a different antagonist. The levels were slightly different – there was a little more variation to the backdrop this time around – but still a fantasy based setting. And it was still the same three characters: Ax, Tyris and Gilius. And why not? The formula worked so well the last time, and it wasn’t all that common to mess with it in those days.

So what has changed? Well, I saw two main changes from the previous game:

The first was the way the magic works. Skirting past the fact that the little Wizard creatures you have to beat to gain power can now actually harm you, magic is now a little more flexible in terms of how much you use. You can press the button to get a basic spell, or hold it down to charge up to the amount of power you have. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good that you don’t have to commit to using all of your power the moment you cast a spell as in the previous game. It’s not so good because as it will take at least some time to charge even the most basic power, it’s now almost impossible to use magic to break stun-lock. It doesn’t happen as often in this game but it would have been nice to have the option!

The other thing that has changed is the way that attacks have been balanced. In the previous game, it was all about spamming the dash attack. In Golden Axe 2, different enemies require slightly different approaches and the dash isn’t always the best one. The Lizardmen, for example, are best dealt with using a jump attack. The Headless Swordsmen are ferocious but they tend to go down more easily if you come at them from an angle and use your attack combo. It’s still a case of spamming your attack, but there is some flexibility over which one to spam. The minions, and the Skeletons in particular, can be a pain in the bum, but that’s the time to be using your magic – to deny them their advantage of numbers.

This results in a game with a lot less cheap deaths than Golden Axe. Stun lock occurs a lot less, any of the characters work well and there is a lot more variety when it comes to strategy. However, it also meant that I beat the game on my third attempt, having gone through all the characters and chosen Gilius this time, and that only took about 40 minutes in all. I suppose I could go for a score attack if I really wanted to give myself a hard time – you tend to be graded on how much damage you did to how much you took – but that would suck all the fun out of the game for me. Golden Axe 2 is a better designed and objectively more fun game than Golden Axe – but I’m glad it was part of a bundle and I didn’t spend any significant amount of money on it.

Unless someone really wants to play two-player co-op with me, I probably won’t come back to Golden Axe 2; the job is done in my opinion. It was fun while it lasted, but in this case, the game didn’t last too long.

Golden Axe: Taking 21 years to beat a 40-minute game.

Most people who play games have done Golden Axe. It is one of the staple games of the Sega Mega Drive, in a time when side-scrolling arcade beat-em-ups were being ported to the home consoles. I first played it when I was eight years old. I’m now twenty-nine and I’ve just beaten it for the first time. I shouldn’t be too pleased with that, but now that I’m in a better position to concentrate on what the game is doing and how to respond to it, I stood a much better chance of beating it and finally managed it yesterday.

Here’s a setting so generic it’s almost cliché: Evil monsters, lead by the horrendous Death Adder, have taken over the land and kidnapped the King and Princess. Three Heroes, from whom Death Adder has taken their family, their friend Alex and also in two cases their outer clothing, swear to bring vengeance down upon the evil commander. They are Ax Battler,[1] Gilius Thunderhead and Tyris Flare.

Mechanically, the characters are quite similar. They all move at roughly the same speed and have the same moves: While the move animations differ for each character, they all have a regular attack that can develop into a combo, a dash attack and a magic attack. It is only on the latter that there is any significant difference: Magic is generated by carrying potions. The more potions you are carrying at the time you cast the spell, the more damage you do, but each character has a different track of developing magic. Gilius the Dwarf, only has three levels. Ax has four. Tyris has six, but you need to collect four potions just to get her past the first level of spell.

Once I could tear myself away from the many
pictures of Tyris Cosplay girls, I found this one.

I chose Tyris for my playthrough. Apart from my usual habit of playing the female characters if there is one available, I also found she has the best dash attack – purely because the attack goes futher. The regular attack combo is all well and good but locks you in place for too long. The dash doesn’t do a huge amount of damage by itself but it means you’re moving more quickly than most of the enemies, so you can attack two or even three of them before they have the chance to react. The Magic attacks are powerful but with these brawler-style games, it is helpful to remember that these attacks also have a function: breaking stun-lock. If the enemies are attacking from both sides you often find that they’re attacking more quickly than your stun animation allows you to react. At that point, you can cast a spell and no matter how much damage it does, it also has the effect of knocking enemies away. It’s also useful for boss battles – not necessarily for damaging the bosses, but for clearing the screen of their lesser minions which can be a pain to deal with.

The dash attack, though, is where you do the real damage. The minimal amount of damage coincides with a knockback effect, which if you do it close enough to a ledge means that you can take out the minions with one hit. This is particularly true for Skeletons, second only to Dark Souls in how much of a pain in the anal cavity they are. They usually attack in numbers and take a good few attack combos to go down – but there’s no getting up from being pushed off a cliff.

This, I found, was the ONLY way to defeat the last level – the one where, having rescued the King and Princess, he sends you on your way to kill Death Adder’s mentor, Death Bringer. On the way through the castle you find narrow paths and ledges, and with several enemies appearing out of nowhere and attacking you at once, the best thing to do is to knock them off the edges. Problem solved.

The ending sequence is what I’d expect for this level of game; not brilliant, but the fun was in getting to the end and finally beating a game after 21 years. I probably won’t play this game alone again, but if someone wants to play the game 2-player co-op, I wouldn’t say no.

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[1] Ha!