Developer: Cool Frogs Studio
Publisher: Black Shell Media
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
Beyond Dimensions – Review
Beyond Dimensions is the latest action-adventure roguelike shooter by Cool Frogs Studio. It’s a chaotic moshpit of discovery where you can adapt your character completely to your play style as you unlock things while playing. Kill enemies, go high on the leaderboards or share your creative ideas on the Steam Workshop.
Story
The story in Beyond Dimensions is quite creative at times. The main story is that you’re in a world where magic disappeared years ago. However, Magitech, a preeminent technological conglomerate has claimed that the magic can be restored, and you have to help restore it. You’ll go from world to word in order to steal their magic and bring it back to your world.
That’s pretty much the basics of the story, but the game itself randomizes a lot of the story during the game so it will change pretty much in every playthrough. Sometimes the story can be very grim and sometimes it can make no sense and be pretty funny.
Graphics
Beyond Dimensions combines both 2D and 3D graphics, which is a very cool concept. The world you live in is in 2D but the other worlds you enter all are displayed in 3D, which makes your character kind of confused and nauseated… The 2D characters look very old-school and pixelated and the 3D world looks fairly good, which provides a fun contrast. There are a couple of different worlds and each of them looks very different from the other, both in graphics and in layout.
Sound
The music and sound effects in Beyond Dimensions are OK overall. They’re not the fanciest there is but it fits together well with the rest of the game. The background music is sometimes a bit odd and weird sounding, but it’s not to a point where it gets annoying to listen to. Sound effects are pretty much just there, there isn’t really anything amazingly good or bad about them, but they do the job.
Gameplay
Beyond Dimensions is a twin-stick action-adventure roguelike shooter. That’s a mouthful of words to describe the game, but you pretty much just walk through procedurally generated dungeons while shooting magic spells at enemies, collecting loot and going to the next level once you’re done. The game can be played with mouse and keyboard but also supports a controller.
The point of the game is to go to other worlds and collect as much magic essence as you can and then bring it back to your planet in order to restore the magic there. This essence can be obtained by killing enemies and destroying objects. However, this essence can also be spent in shops you find around the dungeons, so buying things in the shop might help you, but you’ll return less energy to your home world. These upgrades always have two effects though, and only one of them is picked. So an upgrade might have resurrection or continuous bleeding.
Every game gets started with character creation. You can make a character and customize the looks as you want. There are also classes and stats that can be chosen from, that can be unlocked as you play. These classes can be balanced, which gives one attack, one defense and one support spell. Then there’s attacker, which gives two attack spells and no others. Defense gives one attack and two defense spells and technician gives one attack and two support spells. The stats can be base, mage, runner or catcher, which just gives points in health/speed/mana/strength to reflect those classes. Once you unlock the spells you can also choose with what spells you start out with, else the will be chosen for you at random. After that the difficulty and game mode can be chosen.
The game consists of three worlds each with a couple of levels in the world. In every level, you have to find the crystal that teleports you to the next one within the time limit. Once you reach the last level in a world, you have to fight a boss in order to progress to the next world. In these levels various things can be found like enemies (duh), obstacles, traps, chests, hidden chests, shops and more. Most of these things help to better complete the level, and enemies can also drop powerups which increase your attack range, reduce mana cost, increase damage and more.
Once all worlds have been completed, you’ll return to your world and some magical things might happen if you didn’t spend all your essence in shops… If the game starts to get too easy, you can always up the difficulty or try to get high on the leaderboards. You can also get creative and draw your own character sprites and share them on the Steam Workshop.
Conclusion
All in all, Beyond Dimensions is a very fun game to kill some time. In the beginning it’s quite hard even on the easy difficulty, but as you unlock more characters and spells you can mix and match everything and this helps to adjust your character to your play style. Some things like the sound could be better since it’s quite mediocre, but it’s still a lot of fun to play for a while.
Beyond Dimensions - Review,
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