Developer: Dreamplant
Publisher: All in! Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Arboria – Review
Arboria is a Roguelite hack & slash game with Souls-like elements, created by Dreamplant, a small Polish studio consisting of only a handful of employees. From what we were able to gather, this is their first game and coming from such an inexperienced and small company, Arboria is a pretty stellar effort and a daring combination of two hardcore game genres that have found a solid footing in recent years.
Story
You play as one of many trolls born from a big tree’s sac, tasked with hunting down a rogue troll that found a hat that somehow made him smart, who then disrespected your tribe by pissing on their god statue and escaped into the cavern system below. While doing so, you’re also required to heal the roots of the same tree that gave you life, collect Veri, the game’s main form of currency, to please the “Godz” and defeat a heap of bizarre monsters that inhabit those caves. All of this is shown in the form of cutscenes at the start of the game, while playing through the tutorial level.
Graphics
Arboria’s graphics are a mixed bag. While the textures are mostly crisp and the trolls’ art style, in particular, is delightfully disgusting. The environments are slightly dark and monotonous. This is not a big surprise, seeing as the entire game’s premise is played out in the underground. There is at least one area that has an entirely different theme, but we don’t want to spoil too much. The backdrops in this game remind us of Oddworld quite a bit.
The enemies look passable, but are sometimes plagued by muddy textures and also lack variety. Most of them, in fact, are different colored versions of annoying flying bugs and various other bugs and plant-like enemies. Some of the bosses are small-ish and slightly unimpressive, then there are others that are very well-made and live up to this genre’s standards in regards to scale.
Sound
All of the trolls in Arboria sound like they came straight off a certain island in the Caribbean. The voice-acting coupled with the cutscenes is hilarious at times and the weed puns are seemingly neverending. For example, the player’s healing potion is a bong. Then again; who decided that all trolls have to sound like voodoo doctors? We guess they took a page from World of Warcraft in this regard. There’s an issue with certain gameplay sounds cutting off. This is not a huge dealbreaker, but one might wonder why this isn’t easily fixed.
Gameplay
Most of Arboria’s gameplay elements are borrowed from other roguelite games, while the combat system is very Dark Souls-esque, sans the stamina bar. This means that you’re able to dodge and roll like there’s no tomorrow. Avoiding enemy attacks works really well, as there is a clear tell for each of them, either visually or aurally. Your attacks, as well as that of the enemies, are at least one of five elements, that all counter each other in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way.
Weapon drops are randomized, as is typical for the genre, and come in the form of either symbionts for melee weapons, or mutations for magic weapons. As the name implies, this allows you to combine different symbionts, mutations, and essences (the game’s form of modifiers), to create new weapons and attacks. Obviously, these all have rarity levels, and descending further down the cave, will allow you to find better ones. The is basically what we’ve come to expect from the genre.
After each death, you’re taken to a screen that allows you to distribute Veri to either please the Godz, or hold on to your currency to buy upgrades for your next run. Pleasing the Godz allows you to start the following run with stronger trolls. While on the topic of descending down: you have access to waypoints that allow you to skip earlier floors to save time. This does mean that you will have access to fewer drops, so it makes for a more challenging run.
Both of the genres Arboria draws inspiration from, tend to be notorious for their difficulty. However, the boss fights in this game, while sometimes grand in scale, are pretty easy and a floor of regular enemies has routinely given us more trouble. Each run is also pretty forgiving in the sense that you will almost always get enough currencies to upgrade at least something to get stronger for your next run. Hades did this really well too and it does a nice job of keeping the player hooked. All in all, the game is not so difficult that it is impossible to progress, and not so easy that you’ll finish it in one sitting. The latter is especially true, seeing there is also an NG+.
Conclusion
With a solid foundation of gameplay mechanics coupled with a ‘loot and combine’ system that keeps the player hooked, a difficulty setting that is mostly right, and a theme that doesn’t take itself too seriously compared to other entries in the genre, Arboria has a bright future ahead. A few bugs in the sound department were not detrimental enough to keep us from enjoying the game, and the lack of variety in enemies and environments is something that could be expanded upon later.
Arboria - Review,
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