Agartha-S

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Agartha-S is an Action-Platformer that puts front and center its physics engine that has water and lava flowing over the contours of the land, the earth deforming as you shoot it, and things reacting to hot and cold in ways that players are encouraged to play around with.

Glaringly obvious right from the outset is the fact that this game is rough, and I mean that in multiple ways. Firstly, the game’s menus and interface seem hastily slapped-together as if this was some sort of student project. Players need to select the level they want to play and then go into another menu to actually start the level, which is a really awkward interface, and everything here just looks ugly.

The ugly continues in-game too, with some really simple, amateurish pixel art character graphics. And while seeing the land deform in real-time is kinda’ cool, even there the game seems rough and incomplete, with things not quite behaving in a way that makes sense – use your flamethrower to turn a part of a lake into steam, for example, and the rest of the water will form a wall off to the side rather than rushing in, like you’re some sort of flamethrower Moses. Burn some oil, and the fire will burn through the section you hit, but won’t reliably spread to the rest of the pool. Shoot a hill to tunnel through it, and you’ll likely leave floating specks that will bar your progress.

This might be somewhat forgivable if the game was fun, but players are limited in how much ammo they have for their weapons, really limiting the “sandbox” feel of the game. Plus, the frustratingly unrealistic and inconsistent way that things react to your weapons saps much of the fun out of finding your own solutions to problems. And as for the core gameplay, the platforming here is sluggish and doesn’t control well, and the action is frustrating, with even the tiniest creatures requiring multiple bullets to down (made even more frustrating by how difficult they are to hit).

I love the concept of Agartha-S, but in many, many, many ways the execution just fails to hit the mark. It’s an Action-Platformer where the action and platforming are just bad. It’s a game built on a physics system with bad, inconsistent physics. It’s ugly and feels quickly slapped-together, and frankly this feels like an incomplete game. If you’re wanting a game vaguely like this that doesn’t feel so shoddy, you’re better off going with something like Terraria.

tl;dr – Agartha-S is an Action-Platformer with a physics system that has it’s elements deforming as you interact with them. Unfortunately, just about every element of this game is executed poorly and amateurishly slapped-together. While this game has some good ideas, in the end it’s a shoddy mess, not worth playing.

Grade: D+

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