Awaken Astral Blade is the next big title from the China Hero Project, an initiative supporting Chinese game developers in creating, marketing, and publishing globally. From development, to marketing and publishing, there’s a big push to expand Eastern games to a global audience. There are currently 12 titles in development for the next phase of the project, with titles such as Anno: Mutationem and F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow already gracing multiple formats. Now, Awaken Astral Blade is the next title to be released under the project banner.
Awaken Astral Blade is a Metroidvania set in a dark fantasy and Sci-fi world. With a heavy focus on narrative and a deep, though at times slightly confusing story, Astral Blade goes out of its way to lay down the history of this world. The past, you see, is extremely relevant to your adventure now. And your place in what’s happening goes much deeper than what your creator intended for you.
You play as Tania, a Bionic warrior developed for the sole purpose of advancing science by exploring where it would be far too dangerous for humans to go. Your latest mission takes you to the mysterious Horace Islands, where the remnants of an ancient civilisation with far too advanced technology lies. A mysterious energy known as Karpas also seems to be running rampant on the island, turning the local flora and fauna into dangerous mutants.
Does the past truly affect the present? Are you more than what you were just created for? What defines life and consciousness? These are just some of the questions Astral Blade explores in its narrative heavy story. Tied into Tania’s journey to discover herself is Horace Island’s past, a richly developed history whose tale of two warring tribes has a far more tangible connection to Tania’s creation.
The story is told through character interactions from the cast you meet and journals and documents you find scattered across the islands. While the story is richly detailed, the flow of it can be confusing due to some wonky translations at times. While the narrative can be problematic, it’s made up for with the visuals and gameplay.
Visually, Awaken Astral Blade is a stunning 2D Metroidvania, featuring great character and enemy design and fluid, impactful animations. The art for the level design is also stunning, featuring lush foregrounds and multi-layer backdrops that are packed full of environmental detail. Awaken Astral Blade is a game that’s just as stunning to stop and look at as it is to play through.
The usual set of moves and design style are here: double jumps, air and ground dashes, grapple-style moves, areas that require new upgrades to access and fast travel via save points. There’s plenty of platforming to go around and there’s rarely a moment where you will be standing still. Level design is as expected as well, with spiked pits and endless depths to make your way across. Adding to the difficulty are timed and instant death chase sequences that require Tania’s full move set to make it through.
For the most part, movement design is tight and very precise but the grapple style move, which sees you launching yourself from moving points, is imprecise to the point of frustration. The direction you’re pushing the analogue stick in seems to have very little relevance to the direction the point launches you in. Unless I specifically needed those points to get through an area, I generally took the long way around.
With the combat, Awaken: Astral Blade jumps onto the bandwagon of more recent Metroidvanias that trade in fast-paced, combo-based gameplay. And Awaken: Astral Blades combat is incredibly speedy and smooth. Weapons are kept to a minimum, three to be exact. These can be upgraded using energy collected from killing monsters and specific alloys. Each weapon; a blade, a scythe and darts, come with specific perks. The blade deals poison damage and, at higher levels, leaves behind poison clouds while the scythe has a chance to spawn homing knives.
The blade is the fastest of the weapons while the scythe trades speed for power. It’s in the combo use that Astral Blade adds its own flavour as you can swap between weapons during combos which increase damage and activate energy bursts for even more damage. Not to mention that they’re much faster.
The other two skills you need to master are parrying and perfect dodging. Once you’ve bought the perks for them from Tania’s limited passive and active skill trees, these become the most needed moves in your arsenal as both perfectly timed slow down time, allowing you to deal serious damage.
And you’re going to need to because Awaken Astral Blade packs a pretty high difficulty into its multi-stage boss fights. Upgrading your weapons and perks and extending your health bar goes a long way to helping survive these sometimes frustrating encounters. At about the halfway point, there’s another significant difficulty spike across Awaken Astral Blade as a whole, from normal enemies to bosses. If you don’t get used to perfect dodging and parrying then you’re in for quite a bit of frustration.
There’s no reinvention of the wheel here. What you do get instead is a fun though overly difficult Metroidvania that is beautiful to look at. While the story could do with some tweaking for clarity and some of the movement mechanics need more work, Awaken: Astral Blade kept me immersed in its world until the credits rolled.
Awaken Astral Blade Trailer
Code was provided by the Publisher
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