Bastion Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on July 20th, 2011

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When I beat Bastion for the first time, I reloaded my save and played through for the second ending. When that was done, I started my new game plus. I'm not the repeat type of gamer, but Bastion's leveling, weapon upgrades, and difficulty tweaks are just too gosh-darn addictive. The story could've been better, but it doesn't matter. This game is amazing and you owe it to yourself to download it.

Battles are a lot of fun, even if they don't always have the depth, speed, or complexity of a true action game. Exploring the world and uncovering its secrets is equally engaging, but like the battles, it's limited in scope. With the exception of a few short side routes, most levels have a relatively linear progression. While the idea of a floating world that comes into being as you walk toward it is cool, you'll get frustrated more than once as you fall off the edge. But don't worry too much you'll only take a small health hit for your misstep.

The more subtle design elements are what make this game magical the moments of discovery that peel away the layers of story, the thrill of coming across an abandoned weapon left behind by the old world, and the startling choice that closes the game. The sounds and images stick in your mind after you complete the game just like when you closed the final page on a favorite childhood picture book. Bastion makes a good case for the idea that simple gameplay, straightforward design, and a clear guiding vision for art, music, and story can go a long way to making a good game great.

Combat requires that you stay light on your feet. Its challenge stems from spatial awareness and knowing which targets to strike first. While the world of Bastion does rise up around you, it only extends so far. The danger of falling over the edge is always present--thankfully, the penalty for this is only a slight loss of health. Some enemies like attacking in swarms, others lay down constant strings of projectiles that can box you into a corner. All throughout your time in Bastion new and varied enemies are introduced. To survive, the game forces you to act quickly and lash out at those most likely to lay on the hurt with a variety of different weapons.

The Kid can bring along two weapons at any given time, as well as one secret technique. You earn new armaments to equip at a constant pace throughout, and each has its advantages. For instance, the hammer may be powerful, but it has a low attack rate. On the flip side, the sword is incredibly fast, but it doesn't deal as much raw damage. This lets you tailor your loadout to suit your style or address a particular challenge. Upgrading your weapons helps with that as well. Each weapon has five tiers of upgrades, with each tier broken into two improvements. The first tier of the hammer is a choice between extra damage or critical hit chance. While you can only have one of the two improvements active at a time, the game lets you switch back and forth between them at will. It's a welcome bit of flexibility that is too often lost in other role-playing adventures.

Striking the perfect balance between story and action can be a tricky proposition; but even in these far-flung future times of 2011, developers still force players to sit patiently during lengthy cut-scenes as these tortured souls wait patiently for the chance use their controllers as God intended. While Japanese games can't seem to shake this problem, in the past decade we've seen companies like Valve give their players agency at all times, even as the talking heads surrounding them spout paragraphs of Sci-Fi exposition. Supergiant Games' Bastion approaches this specific issue in an innovative and unobtrusive way: throughout the game, a narrator describes your every action on the fly, commenting on the surroundings, enemies, and even your weapon choice. While Bastion's method of delivery could easily come off as a cheap gimmick, the narration is written with a sense of economy and sincerity, adding another layer of quality to an already stunning game.

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Truthfully, Bastion could be sold on its presentation alone; the game's hyper-detailed 2D graphics along with its eclectic and moving soundtrack perfectly match the well-told and understated story. But beneath this pretty packaging, there's a real game here -- and a good one at that. Supergiant Games seems to have done the seemingly impossible by creating the perfect mesh of game and story, all while preventing each of these elements from overpowering one another. Other developers, take note: this is how it's done.

The real star of Bastion is the audio. The narration is used to masterful effect to set the tone and atmosphere, but that isn't all. When the game uses voices or audio, it is usually important and distinctive. In a later scene, you hear a character besides Rucks talking, and it's made much more effective due to the lack of other voice acting. Likewise, after a long silence broken only by Rucks' voice, hearing someone singing in the distance drives the player toward finding the source of the voice. The audio absolutely steals the show in Bastion. Rarely has a game used voice acting both its existence and absence in such an effective way. The music isn't half-bad, either, but it's hard to pry your attention away from Cunningham's mesmerizing narration.

Bastion's only visible flaw is that it takes a little while to show its true colours. While it's not at all slow or plodding in its opening stages, its most powerful assets - the many imaginative and useful array of weapons, its challenging side activities, and a story far more interesting and thought-provoking than what first appears - aren't obvious from the outset. A demo might not reveal these strengths, but give Bastion a chance - it's a whip smart action title that's satisfying through and through, and gets the Summer of Arcade off to an absolutely rollicking start.

Aside from gameplay, as is the way with some of the more artsy-leaning XBLA games, Bastion's story falls disappointingly flat once you strip away its stylish façade. Yes, it's presented in an engaging way that held our interest to the end, in large part because of the amazing narration that carries through the entirety of the game. The slick presentation though merely masks a story that's a fairly standard dressing up of a typical fetch quest.

If you like action RPGs, and the reviewer certainly expects that you do, you should probably quit reading this and just throw your money at your Xbox already and make it give you this game. Bastion takes the basic Zelda-like gameplay and makes it deep enough to claim it as its own. It focuses on the different combinations of weapons and upgrades for those weapon, as well as the various liquors of the world that give your character different perks, and rewards you for experimenting with the many combinations of all those elements. As you go through the game, you also collect resources from the old world that help you build and upgrade your homebase, the titular Bastion, in order to make your trip through the shattered world just a little bit simpler. Only a little bit though, because Bastion does not lack in difficulty for you more masochistic types. You can even pray to the game's various gods to make the game more difficult for you, which is a possible social commentary that the atheistic reviewer can definitely get behind. It's pretty hard to complain about a game that offers you this many options, two different endings, and a New Game+ for less than the cost of a plate of deep fried food at a middle of the road chain restaurant. The only complaints that can be made are complaints that miss the point to what this game was trying to be. It doesn't have online multiplayer, but who says it needs it? The levels themselves are fairly straightforward, but who says they can't be? It doesn't cause people who play it to rise up and incite revolution in order to create a perfect utopian society, but it never set out to. The reviewer realizes what Bastion set out to do, and he knows it accomplished it to the letter.

But while the setting and story are entirely unique experiences, the action-RPG combat should be familiar to any gamer. Enemies will swarm you in groups, and survival largely depends on your reflexes and choice of weapon. Although you can only carry two weapons at the time, bringing things back to the titular Bastion further aids the Kid as you retrieve survivors, collect gear, and build "foundations" that become your home base shops. As you play, you'll likely start to favor trusty twin pistols over a flamethrower, or perhaps you'll shelve your hammer for a longer-range hunter's pike. All the options you're given are an incredible mix, and that variety contributes to Bastion's addictive appeal.

Sporting a lush, hand-drawn animated look, the title is a beauty to behold. Its influences are varied, with a splash of spaghetti Western dabbed on a rich fantasy-folklore-cyberpunk confection. As the world literally, and almost constantly, rebuilds before your eyes, the player is compelled to keep pushing forth, to play for just five more minutes as the hours melt, just to see what new delightful sights await. That's a credit to the talented art development for designing such a fertile landscape. One matched by the game developers who constantly keep us chasing the carrot of new loot and experience. And while I spent the majority of the title slightly wandering in the dark, trying to make sense of the story, the folksy charm of the narrator compelled me to push forth and learn a little bit more. Or to sit for a spell and soak it all in.

Of particular note to the design's narration, part of the game's magic required recording thousands of lines of dialogue that change depending on the hero's real-time situation. My soundtrack usually included the old man riffing on the many times I fell into oblivion. It easily makes the story feel like a personalized experience.

Overall, Bastion's ton of cartoon-museum-quality visual moments, the on-the-fly commentary and always-frantic combat deliver a tempting combination.

It's certainly well worth the $15 entrance fee to this beautiful adventure.

So strong are Bastion's achievements in presentation, it can be easy to overlook how solid the underlying gameplay is. Anyone with a few action-RPGs under his/her belt will feel right at home. Very early in the game, the Kid obtains his first weapons--a giant hammer, and a projectile-firing Repeater--as well as a shield. As the adventure continues, more ranged and melee weapons are unlocked with great frequency, each bearing their own unlockable special attacks and choice of upgrades. Would the hammer and bow suffice, or should I go after an in-game achievement using the machete and rocket launcher? Whatever my choices were, each weapon was unique and fun enough in its own right, with each combination of weapons subtly influencing my approach to combat. With the ability to dodge, block, and unleash weapon-specific power moves in the mix, success in Bastion isn't just about wading into a hoard of enemies and spamming the attack button.

Combat varies depending on the weapons you take into a stage with you. There's a nice mix of weapons given to the player over the course of the story, most of which unlock for you after completing stages. The variety is also pretty close to 50/50 when it comes to ranged and melee weapons, so the smart choice seems to be equipping one of each most of the time. Every weapon is upgradeable, and you'll find crafting materials scarcely scattered across the stages to uncover. Once you gain access to a shop it becomes a little easier to upgrade, but there's a large amount of currency involved as well, and it's unlikely you'll fully upgrade everything in a single playthrough. Also worth noting is that you can time your blocks to do instant counterattacks, reflecting damage back at an enemy if you time it right.

Bastion's quest is short (you'll finish in around four hours or less if you're just running straight through the main levels), but there's plenty of reason to keep coming back. Although the game is generally very easy, the weapon-specific '˜Proving Grounds' provide a solid challenge if you want to unlock everything. It's worth playing through the '˜New Game Plus' quest as well, which allows you both to keep all your weapons and dramatically increase the game's difficulty by activating various '˜Gods', who imbue your enemies with all sorts of powerful upgrades. The combat, it turns out, is more enjoyable when your enemies are putting up more of a fight.

This isn't the sort of game that is going to set the genre alight, nor is it quite the masterpiece that some have hyped it up to be. But Bastion is enjoyable, addictive and beautiful, and a good example of a game that comes to slightly more than the sum of its parts.

If there's a drawback, it's that I didn't really feel like the combat ever evolves much throughout the game. Although certain weapons add variety in the way you target and aim, I couldn't help but feel like I was doing the same thing (bashing enemies or killing them at range) over and over again. The mechanics are sound, but relatively unchanging, so you see most of what the game has to offer early on.

The story is engaging because it is being given to the player as a reward for progress. If you just stay still in this game, the world never comes alive. The player is the catalyst that brings the world to life. The voice narration is pinpoint perfect for the game and the well-planned delivery and richness of Cunningham's voice gives each word so much weight. The music is award-worthy and fills heavy emotional moments in the story with depth. Bastion is a game that not only begs to be played, but begs to be experienced.

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