It’s annoying if you’re at the top of a high climb, but not a major issue. That said, enemy hitboxes can be finicky, and it has the Castlevania problem of catapulting you back roughly a city block when you get hit by an enemy. Animations are fast and fluid, and the combat is smooth. The pixel art is gorgeous, with some great enemy design and some impressive environments. It doesn’t feel overly punishing and never makes you feel like it’s just pounding you into the floor for fun. It will kill you a lot, but there are save points everywhere, space to grind and improve, and items to buy or find that improve your chances. It is tough, but also feels almost old school in its dedication to fairness. You can feel like you’re just chipping away at them and it’s more disheartening than challenging.Įlderand is a fairly refreshing experience though. The issue isn’t necessarily their move-sets, but how much health they have. The bosses themselves are pretty tough all-round, but once you get the hang of reading hitboxes they become less troublesome. Once you’ve unlocked the fast-travel, it becomes easy to simply stock up before each tough area, and there’s usually a save point before a boss fight. You can only carry three health or energy potions at a time, but you find them in breakable pots or you can buy them from merchants. Though, you can exploit this for money and XP. Leaving a screen and returning respawns enemies like its Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, which is a system I’ve never liked. You can dash, but it doesn’t have i-frames so you can’t use it to get through enemies like in Dead Cells, which means large enemies you can’t jump over can and will back you into corners. It being on a strictly 2D plane means you’re limited to back-steps to avoid danger. I stuck to a massive axe and a shield which I swapped out for stronger versions throughout and, with a bow as back up, had little real trouble beyond bosses. Sorcery comes from equipped staves rather than spellbooks, and I found the staff to be a little too weak in the early game. Levelling up allows you to assign points to Vitality, Wisdom, Dexterity or Might, so you can build a heavy-hitting warrior, a nimble archer, or a staff-wielding mage. What Elderand does slightly differently to the norm is incorporate RPG elements. Some of these artefacts are taken from bosses, others simply handed to you by a mysterious woman you meet in Terrakand, which is like a hub village. There’s a double jump, the ability to scale high walls, a hook-shot, various methods to open locked doors or clear thorny vines out of your way. Thankfully they’re nicely spaced, and once you unlock the ability to fast travel between them exploration becomes a much more enjoyable affair.Īs with other Metroidvania games, progress is periodically halted until you find certain artefacts that afford your hero new powers. When you die you go back to the last bonfire (seriously, they called them bonfires) and progress resets to that point. Ultimately it boils down to killing everything that doesn’t sell you things.Įlderand is not a Soulslike though. There’s some story here, though as with Soulslike titles, much of it is told in flavour text and snatches of cryptic dialogue that don’t make much sense even in context. You play as a nameless bounty hunter who has come to the mysterious land of Elderand to find it in the grip of a religious civil war between the followers of two almost Lovecraftian cults. Elderand, despite some impressive moments, is no different. They’ll often put their own spin on certain elements, but all Metroidvanias share mass amounts of DNA with their vaunted progenitors. What they often lack – outside of the really big hitters like Dead Cells or Blasphemous – is originality. They’re not graphically intensive, for one thing, although pixel graphics can be an art-form of their own. It’s unsurprising that there’s no shortage of pixelated Metroidvanias these days.
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