Sundered: I went on PSN to get Night in the Woods and wound up grabbing some stray Metroidvania with it. Sundered is a visually stylish platformer with good combat, several questionable design decisions, and some absolutely ruinous technical problems.
It shouldn't be any surprise by this point that item #1 above means I personally put it in the file of "worth experiencing in spite of its flaws."
We're on...another planet? Another dimension? It's not entirely clear. But humans visited and fucked everything up, as humans do. Now there's just insane robots and Lovecraftian horrors left, and one player character trying to get the hell out. You have a black lightsaberish thing for melee, a BFG for ranged, and the usual Metroidvania suite of movement abilities in double jump, air dash, wall climbing, and grapple-launching. Movement is very fluid and you can stay in the air pretty much indefinitely once you've got all powers (and for the last zone's bosses, you pretty much have to be able to do this). The mechanics are fundamentally solid and fun. There's a skill tree that's robust enough to allow for distinctly different builds on separate playthroughs (you're not going to get anywhere close to learning everything without putting in solid days of grinding). Dying is basically Dark Souls death plus. You go back to the hub, but all your exploration and progress remains, and you don't even lose your level-up currency. (The
real penalty for dying is something much more insidious. We'll get to that later.) Creepy alien narrator voice is also suitably creepy.
The visual design is fantastic. I will link the first two boss fights here, both because they simultaneously demonstrate what is good
and what is bad about the game, and also because that is some of the most metal fucking spritework yet created by humans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BauWQj7FIJohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnrQLfA2bQAll those red orbs are enemy-spawning portals.
All of them. Look at them, they cover the screen!I'm playing on normal difficulty and have largely found it brutally difficult. Those bosses took me 4-6 tries and each victory ended with mad flailing at the last target in a spasmodic fit of "ohgodohgod I'm at 20% health and I'm out of healing and
every inch of the screen is coated with enemy sprites please just die already!" I have
no remote idea how the third boss is feasible on my build. I can't even make it halfway, and having looked up what happens at halfway,
oh fuck me. I'm feeling like I made some serious tactical blunders after looking at other videos. All the cool kids ignore HP and just pump shields, apparently. I beelined for anything that would boost melee damage and didn't pay much attention to what I needed to go through to get that. I wound up with an epic health bar but shit healing, shit armor, and shit shields. Turns out playing LoT Komachi in this game isn't a healthy combination. I've also almost completely ignored the cannon. Most of the game I made up for all these problems with parasitic healing, but that isn't cutting it anymore.
I guess I'll fiddle with perks and see how much of that HP I can convert into shields. Either that or I have lots and lots of grinding ahead of me. The only other things I have unfinished are: the self-cloning miniboss that's also a platforming challenge over an instant death pit with wind effects in play; the flying keepaway boss with regenning shields; three totally apeshit endless hordes zones. None of these feel practical either.
I also may have screwed myself by declining Nyarly's generous offer of
corruption. There is a pathsplit sorta thing with abilities, in that you can turn in your boss drops for enhanced skills or you can throw them into the incinerator for almost no apparent benefit at all (this also effects final bosses/endings). So you look at a video and see the bat gliding and the teleportation and the crazy purple shield, well, I don't have any of that shit. I am just going full human because
science. I suspect doing this is actually stealth hard mode.
But I mentioned some...problems, right? Some maybe, just a teensy little bit,
crippling technical problems?
Okay, first and most obviously, it's the load times. Oh my gooooood why is this happening in a game released in 2017. It's worse than Bloodborne at launch. I keep a book next to me for something to do after every death. It's that egregious. The game also drops frames like a motherfucker. And that isn't even a consequence of the screen being loaded up with mindboggling numbers of enemy sprites (that actually doesn't seem to cause any slowdown no matter how much crap is onscreen at once). It just...happens, periodically, throughout every stage of play, for no discernible reason. It isn't slowdown from visual effects onscreen, it's just some persistent behind the scenes fuckup that noticeably occurs even when nothing's moving onscreen but the PC. You lose like a full second of action when this recurs, and this
has caused me a couple totally avoidable deaths while platforming over lethal drops or overwhelming crowds of enemies. I really do not understand how a self-respecting developer could release a game with technical problems this glaring. EDIT: maybe worth noting this is on PS4 and not PC, so could just be a shitty port, but still.
On a less technical level, there are also some disappointing design decisions in the mix. One, all enemy spawns are random. This does mean you don't know what to expect any time you head back into an old dungeon, but it can be intensely frustrating when you're just trying to revisit an old area to unlock a wing you missed before and are suddenly inconvenienced by yet another occurrence of
forty fucking enemies dropping right on your face at once holy shit (this is not an exaggeration; Sundered loves to shove literal hordes of enemies on the screen at once just to prove that it can). Two, as might be surmised from the above, lor' there be backtracking, which is probably expected for the genre, but Sundered's levels are so sprawling and confusing that it can just be too much even if you
aren't having to retrace your steps from constant death. There's no fast travel except in the last zone (where practically speaking you need it least due to having all the movement abilities by that point). Three, the level design itself is sub-par. The
visual aspects of the levels are good (and the background vistas are impressive enough that sometimes I do just have to stop and say Wow), but the physical layout of the rooms suffers massively from copypasting. The last zone sorta gets around this, since by that point your mobility is supreme and the level was obviously built to encourage exploitation of all abilities, but the first two zones are just full of cramped, twisty, lookalike corridors. Couple those issues with high difficulty and egregious load times, and respect for player time is not at a premium here.
So, pretty game, mechanically fun to play, but undermined by a lack of technical polish and some ill-advised level design philosophy. Can only recommend if you're as hard in for the combination of exploration + Aesthetics Are a Moral Imperative as I am.
