Bastion is a beautiful, moving game that players of all skill levels (and most ages) can enjoy.
Bastion's first impression is laid out with the unique and beautiful audiovisual experience. The game's color palette is oversaturated, giving it a vibrant, eye-popping looking that is immediately recognizable as its own. So many games are technically sound while being artistically lacking, but Bastion's mix of munchkin-sized characters, whimsical foes, and curlicue design elements stake out a look all its own.
The music, dubbed by SuperGiant games as "acoustic frontier trip hop", mixes up classic video game sound structure with the sounds mentioned as well as some more esoteric elements that bring an eastern flavor to the audio. It's all good and enjoyable on its own, but a few tracks are absolutely stunning. Lately I've wondered why it's been so long since I picked up a game soundtrack; nothing has struck me as must-buy since the Halo trilogy ended. Darren Korb may not be a name you're familiar with (or it might), but he's definitely someone to look out for.
One of the game's hooks is the narration, provided throughout the experience by Logan Cunningham. Instead of just introducing a scene or filling in a bit of story, his aged tone keeps up throughout the game, filling in bits of back story, world-specific knowledge, and occasionally narrating the random actions a player might engage in (dying, mashing inanimate objects, etc.). It takes a delicate hand to cover all aspects of a story as involved as this one, but Cunningham's voice is perfect, sounding like an old ranch hand who's been on a great many cattle drives but still has the fire to go on a few more.
The game plays pretty straight, with the player moving through lush environs that are literally built as they progress, pieces of the ground rushing up from below to create the pathways, halls, and gauntlets the player must run. In this way the game looks very similar to the dungeons of the PlayStation classic Azure Dreams, though the games certainly play differently. The player can carry two weapons and one special attack at any given time, and the weapons run the gamut from fast-firing low-damage projectile launchers to a big, heavy hammer for smashing everything around into a pulp.
Beyond the story mode, which I will not spoil in the slightest except to say that it's surprisingly powerful, there are weapon-specific challenge arenas and a few "survival"-type levels as well that round out the experience. It's all fairly standard action fare, though talented players will find that the game allows them to deftly counter attacks, dodge others, and generally look as slick as an isometric-perspective game can allow. For those of us that are less skilled, the story mode isn't too difficult at all, with generous health potion drops throughout the game on the standard difficulty. The game also has a" New Game+" mode, allowing players to continue to level up and progress beyond what they accomplished the first time around.
For those that are itching for a more robust challenge, there are "idols" that act like the skulls in Halo 3, allowing players to turn on difficulty-spiking elements that can make the game more challenging.
There aren't really any major drawbacks to Bastion. It's a bit short, but it encourages replay (at least once), it as leaderboards, and it has the aforementioned idols to ramp up the challenge. It's also reasonably long for a downloadable game of this genre, since it doesn't rely on randomly-generated dungeons or cut-and-paste design - every environment is its own. The RPG element is also pretty light, since it's the weaponry and a few swappable perks that make up the entire "RPG progression" element, with no real loot as its known within the genre present. The gameplay is somewhat simple, but it's rock-solid, and I never ran into any glitches or elements that didn't seem to belong.
Bastion feels like the game that it is - a hand-crafted title made by a small group of creators with a shared vision. This lends the game a sense of cohesion that not many can boast, and the quality writing, graphics, music,and gameplay all go together like a fine stew. It's easy for a game to get lost in the constant stream of releases, but Bastion stands out as a game that is both unique and familiar, a game that stands on its own while also paying homage to some of its forbears. It's at the more expensive end of XBox Live Arcade games, but it's money well-spent.