Review: Feudal Alloy - Fish, Robots and a lot of Backtracking
7Feudal Alloy let's you play as a fish in a tank, controlling a robot. A bit like Krang, but nicer. You are Attu, a young aspiring robot, and when bandits raid the village in which you take care of the elderly, you take on a quest to recover the stolen components that are vital for these villagers, such as oil and parts.
Your quest takes place in this beautiful hand drawn world, which is impressive at first sight. The detailed environment is beautiful and sets the mood well. Unfortunately the levels don't have much variation and you're mostly underground in tunnels trying to find your way out. Because the surroundings look very similar, it's hard to figure out where you need to go, even after you've found the hidden maps. This is one of the main issues I have with this game, because while Metroidvania's have getting lost as a trademark, you could say, I found myself aimlessly wandering around in Feudal Alloy a lot. Too much, for my taste.
As you progress, you unlock more and more upgrades for Attu, which come in the shape of these modules. You can discharge electricity for example, learn to double jump or shoot an electric bolt. Even basic platformer skills are locked at the start, like blocking attacks and dashing. After acquiring a new skill, you have to backtrack to the point where this skill can now be used, such as traversing a certain area with the newly learned double jump.
Apart from new skills to progress, there are these cartridges that act as keys, which open up new parts of the level. Also teleports are available throughout the world. Do some additional exploring and with a keen eye, you'll find hidden rooms with treasures and parts. A big downside of Feudal Alloy is that you are backtracking a lot and every time you enter a map, the enemies respawn. It then becomes painfully clear that you're constantly fighting the same types of enemies, only with different skins. It adds to the repetitiveness and that is an issue.
Feudal Alloy is quite extensive when it comes to gameplay elements, because next to skills, there are also items to find and equip, such as armor, helmets and swords. They're kept in chests throughout the world or can be bought from shops with the parts you get from killing enemies. Weapons and armor each have their own statistics, for example increasing damage or increasing armor. It allows you to tweak Attu to your liking, just like the different skill trees this game offers.
Feudal Alloy has done a good job on making use of the ridiculous notion of fish-controlled robots in a medieval era. Your health bar for example is an oil meter, and replenishing health works by pouring an oil can in your body. The animations are well done and it reminded me of Popeye, popping spinach. When you jump and fight, you hear the hydraulics of your character, which is a nice touch. And like actual hydraulics, they can overheat, which can be reduced by using cooling liquid.
The overheating mechanism is worth highlighting, because it will largely determine if you're going to have fun with the combat system in this game. Overheating works a little bit like reverse stamina. Every action generates heat, until the meter is full, and then you're unable to do anything for a few seconds. It prevents you from button bashing, dashing and using skills all the time. It forces you to time and plan your moves wisely, because overheating during a boss fight is basically a death sentence.
While this system really fits the style of the game, I personally didn't like it. To me, it kills the flow of a game like this. The game is tough enough as it is, trying to dodge the enemies, block the attacks and use your skills. Also because of the controls, which really aren't always as intuitive and responsive as you'd want. Especially blocking for me was bugged quite a lot, or easily canceled somehow. It really screwed me over a couple of times, but that could just be me. I'd like to hear your experiences in the comments below guys, because this is one of those love it or hate it games.
Speaking of the controls, even though the developers recommend playing with a controller, it's quite apparent that the game isn't optimized for the Xbox 360 controller on PC. Going through menu's reminds me of Fallout76. It's rather messy, with triggers, RB/LB and the sticks. Overall navigation feels clunky and is far from smooth.
I'm just not blown away by this. It's not bad, but it isn't great either and it's definitely not a must-have for platformer fans. The price of 15 euros is fair and Feudal Alloy brings some new ideas to the competitive indie platformer table, but fails to execute them properly. I loved the art style and the theme of the medieval robotics, but bad level design, the combat system and repetition and backtracking caused enough frustration for me to stop really enjoying the game.
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