Review: Chaordic - Monkey ball in hell
3Chaordic is a very unbalanced platformer that makes no sense whatsoever, but who cares. Because it's a lot of fun.
Somehow, I was intrigued by all of these weird dialogues between demons, you, some other random characters that I couldn't place. At first I thought this was based on Lovecraft's mythic horrors, but google doesn't recognize any of the characters names as such. All this nonsense seems to be originating from the minds at the Russian indie developers at Artepi Studios.
Doesn't matter, really, what's the game like? Well, you're this blob, as I said, and it's your job to hop and jump through the levels, which are beautiful to look at. The way you're lighting up the surroundings is impressive. The graphics can be a little bit disctracting, especially during boss fights, but overall I really appreciate the look and feel of Chaordic.
The whole thing starts off with one of the most confusing tutorials i've played in a while. There's some translation issues for sure, but also the lack of logic regarding the controls doesn't help. Once you figure out how to shoot, block and move your blob safely, you're pretty much good to go.
Pretty Soon, you'll get access to more skills, such as an ice spear. Now, you can kill some demons and collect their souls, which can be used to upgrade the blob. Killing enemies and bosses also grants you experience. Once you gained enough XP, you level up and are able to either increase the statistics of your blob, or learn a new skill.
There's a ton of options to choose from, when it comes to progressing the protagonist. There's your normal RPG elements, like mana, health, regeneration and such. Spending points in those is really significant, especially mana regeneration helps out immensely. The skill tree offers new and interesting ways to kill your enemies. You can shower them with meteors, electrify them with lightning, summon more blobs or use shields, to name a few. Finally, there's the appearances of our blob, which can be upgraded using souls. Neakai can take all sort of shapes, and each of them comes with their own benefits.
That's all nice and fun of course, but Chaordic has a pretty big balancing issue currently. The first hour of the game I was stuck in stage 1. I was way too weak to do anything. There's no difficulty settings either by the way. Every time you die though, you keep all collected xp and souls. So even though I died for an hour straight, I gradually got stronger. I farmed the first boss and his minions for a while, because I was unable to kill the guy. After an hour of farming, I could instantly buy the best appearance, read armor, in the game. I was totally overpowered and never had to worry about dying again from enemy fire, basically. This could've been countered by locking the appearances for example. Or not allowing Neakai to keep everything once you die.
Oddly enough, the game is still a lot of fun, even though you're overpowered. You're not only killing enemies, you see. Chaordic offers for example also some basic puzzles which you can solve making use of various abilities. Another great feature were some levels where you're either on a timer, killing crystals or enemies, or a level where you need to travel through a dark maze, unlocking passage ways by hitting buttons as you go, while the lava creeps up on you. Once again, by making smart use of your skills, you can bring some light to the darkness and solve the puzzels. These levels are well designed and very satisfying to beat, after dying multiple times.
A special mention goes out to the audio department of this game. They created a very versatile soundtrack, with pumping rock licks during boss fights, and soothing melodies afterwards. Less great were the audio and framerate bugs I encountered, especially when there's a lot of enemies on screen. At some point, I lost audio completely. And during this boss fight, where this dude keeps summoning demons every 6 seconds, the game lagged to the point where I had around 5 frames per second.
Despite its flaws, this game offers something that for example Feudal Alloy didn't, which is fun. This game is just fun to play. It offers a nice variety of things to do, interesting boss battles, a decent amount of play time, a blue blob, ye, I'm glad I picked this up. And the best thing, it's on sale currently, 50% off, for only 2,84. A bargain, ladies and gentlemen, and definitely worth a buy
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