Bastion

And here we are with my second ever review. If you’ve read my last one, welcome back. If you haven’t, then have a seat and make yourself comfortable. Yes, that does mean that if you read the last one, you aren’t allowed to be comfortable. Deal with it.

This time around, I’ll be looking at the game Bastion. This game was released last year on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, and earlier this year on the Mac App Store. Bastion tells the story of The Kid, a survivor of The Calamity in his home of Caelondia. The Kid then begins a journey to find pieces of Core, a substance that is keeping the remaining few parts of land in existence. He brings these pieces of Core back to The Bastion, which he then uses in order to expand it. But as he learns more about what caused the Calamity, the lines of who's right and wrong being to blur, and an army seeking retribution begins to rise...

Gameplay-wise, this game is pretty easy to play. You move with the arrow keys, and have two weapons, one assigned to each of the mouse buttons. You can change which weapons you have equipped at Arsenals, scattered infrequently across the levels, as well as in the Bastion, the game’s hub. By the end of the game, you’ll have eleven different weapons from which to choose, ranging from the basic Cael Hammer to the insanely destructive (and fun) Galleon Mortar, which, for those of you who can’t or won’t do the math, gives you a total of fifty-five different potential weapon combinations to fight off your foes.  As you gain experience from fighting enemies, you gain new slots in the Distillery in the Bastion, allowing you to equip drinks with groan-inducing pun names, like Stabsinthe, which damages enemies when they damage you, or Hearty Punch, which gives you another chance to continue should you run out of health. Should you run out of health without any continues remaining, you’ll be sent back to the Bastion, and have to repeat the entire level. However, this only happened to me one or two times, and the levels aren’t ridiculously long, so it isn’t overall that annoying. As far as gameplay goes, this game doesn’t really do anything particularly innovative. In all honesty, it’s the story where this game shines.

This story is certainly different from the standard game. Nowhere in this game is there anything resembling the basic ’stop the Big Bad from destroying/taking over the world,’ because in Bastion, the world has already been destroyed. You’re not trying to save the world, you’re trying to build a new one from the scraps of the original. There’s no real antagonist in this game, just other groups trying to survive, just like you. There’s this one point in the game where you find a piece of Core that has been claimed by a group of monsters. These monsters have banded together, using the Core to form their own Bastion of sorts. It becomes a bit of conflict for the player as to whether or not its right to take this piece of Core and destroy their home just to improve yours.

At this point I’d like to go off on a slight tangent and talk about the narrator. Rucks, played by Logan Cunningham, a man who has not had nearly enough roles if you ask me, narrates about everything. No, seriously, everything. Every event, he’ll be giving a play-by-play. You remember how I mentioned earlier that the game gives fifty-five different weapon combinations to use? Yeah, Rucks  has a different comment for each and every one of them. Any item you find in the game? Take it to him in the Bastion, he’ll have something to say about it. Any building you build, achievement you gain, challenge you overcome, he’ll say something. Say you fall to your death, (which will happen, apparently the Cataclysm was especially unkind to walls) he’ll give you snark about it. Just the sheer amount of recording this man did is impressive, and the quality of the lines is a credit to both the actor and the writer.

Something else that strongly deserves mentioning in this game is the music. This wasn’t something I went over  last week in Kingdom Hearts 3D, but I need to talk about it here. The music in this game, simply put, is great. I was lucky enough to decide to get the Soundtrack Edition of the game, which, as it sounds, is both the game itself and a copy of the soundtrack. This is not a decision I regret. Darren Korb did a great job composing the songs, writing the lyrics for a few tracks, and even recording vocals for two songs. So, if you are a music lover, I would recommend getting the soundtrack with the game. And even if you don’t, as long as you have the game, you can still get the soundtrack later. It’s just that Steam, for whatever reason, won’t let you get the soundtrack unless you have the game. Seems strange to me, but there you go.

Now, my last word. Do I recommend this game or not? Well, really, this should seem like a fairly obvious answer: Yes. Yes I do. Immensely. Seriously, why are you still reading this? You obviously have a computer with an internet connection. Go onto Steam, find this game’s page, hit the ‘Add to Cart’ button, pay for the game, download it, and then play it. Unless you’re some kind of crazy bizarro-person, you will almost certainly enjoy this game.

As a final side note, if you do get this game on Steam, once you’ve beaten the game, be sure to start a New Game Plus and play through until you build the Arsenal for a special treat.

So, this concludes my second review. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and be sure to come back next week, when I review something very different, a bit more mainstream, and from a series just a little bit closer to my heart: Pokemon Conquest.