Bastion (XBLA): The indy game that could

As I recover from my new years hangover as I'm sure all of you are as well, I've decided to take a small break from the glamorous lifestyle of playing games by myself, and have enlisted the help of some contrasting personality and opinion for this next review. Lady Blue, The floor is yours...

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Hello! Big Sister here sitting in for our Ragemaster at the moment, to talk to you for a bit about Bastion - the little indy game that could.

BASTION: (XBLA, STEAM)

There were two things that attracted me to this game: the art style, and the fact that in the demo you could smash the fuck out of every single object in sight. I can say that the game delivered consistently on both of those points so if that's all it takes to drive you then it's worth a play through at least. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Bastion is a pretty simple, straightforward platformer. You play as a nameless character, known only as The Kid, who hacks his way through shortish levels capped off by boss fights. The Kid wakes up to an annihilated world and sets out to find what's happened, heading for a haven called The Bastion (which was conveniently built just in case this exact circumstance should occur). On the way there he realizes that pretty much everyone is dead, as a result of what they refer to in the game as "The Calamity". Adventure ensues.

I would not call the gameplay of this game its strength, as the levels (of which there are maybe a dozen or so) are pretty brief and the boss fights are not super challenging. What makes it so awesomely playable is Rucks, a secondary character who talks like a cowboy but looks like Colonel Sanders, and narrates your every move throughout the entire game. In in between action narration, he's dropping cryptic blurbs about the background of the story, what led up to this point, and where it could possibly be going. So, while you're playing the game, you're also being told a story. It might seem like it could get annoying, but it doesn't. Somehow it just works. In fact, I'm reading my own writing in Ruck's voice in my head as I'm writing it. How fucked up is that?

Other game elements include building up your home base with practical shops to work on your weapons or add challenges & powerups, collecting a series of weapons throughout the game which include melee and distance weapons, earning or finding special skills, and seeking mementos of all the folks who are now ashen corpses. (you run into them throughout the game and can hack them into smoky nonexistence. Effectively killing them twice). There are also some "shooting range" type of challenges for each weapon you acquire, with three prize tiers on each level.

As far as gameplay goes the play control is pretty good, although you can't really navigate in true 360 degrees so sometimes lining up shots is hard, but the game likes to auto aim on what's closest or mostly in front of you so it's not often an issue. If you're locked on, you can toggle targets, and if you're in attack mode, it will auto target to the next enemy once your focus is dead. You can be equipped with any two weapons at a time, plus a special skill and a shield which can also deal damage with well timed blocks. This brings me to one of my few complaints about the game: the in-level weapon swap. If you find a new weapon mid level (and you do, on almost every level) then it is auto-equipped-taking the place of whatever you were using before. You can't switch back until you return to the Bastion at the end of the level (unless you find an armory mid-level which happens not nearly often enough for my taste). At least the levels are short enough that you're not stuck with it for long, but I don't like being force fed an item. The only other real inconvenience has to do with the map edges. In this game, the ground is floating in an abyss. If you fall off the edge, you fall off the edge. You don't die, but you do take a damage hit when you come plummeting back onto the map. (Oh, I didn't mention that there is a lot of plummeting in this game).

As I mentioned, this isn't a long game. I played through in two sittings. If you want something super challenging then this probably won't grab you, but if you just want to be entertained by some beautiful game design a good story, and some odd folksy sort of music that is haunting and catchy in a way I never thought I'd enjoy but do in fact to a borderline obsessive degree, I'd say spend the points (or the five bucks, you Steam people).