Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

Bastion is a fairly simple game on the surface. You run through various dungeons, slicing, hammering, stabbing and shooting your way. You come across a wide variety of enemies, each unique and requiring a different strategy to take down. You unlock weapons, skills and level up along the way. All standard stuff. But every aspect is so well crafted, and when it all comes together, it becomes something truly amazing to play.

The game focuses on 'the Kid', a boy who wakes up in the middle of nowhere after something known as 'the Calamity' struck, destroying everything. He sets out to find the Bastion, a place of refuge in case anything like that ever happened. However, it is incomplete - and thus he must trek through various environments, searching for the pieces to repair the Bastion and to find any survivors left. It's a nice plot, with a few twists, and a good setup to allow you to explore various different locations, each with a different theme - from a vast jungle to an abandoned mine to a frozen wasteland.

The combat is simple - you eventually gather up ten different weapons, each of which handles differently. You can only equip two weapons at a time, and this opens up opportunities for experimentation with various combinations, providing diversity in a game otherwise repetitive in nature. There's a bit of everything here, from a hammer and a sword to a naval cannon and even a bazooka. Every weapon also has various levels of upgrades which can be switched between, buffing weapons with things such as range, damage, fire rate and more. This adds another of customisation. You can also equip various skills, which range from hand grenades to spinning wheels of flame.

The enemy variety is quite diverse as well, adding more variety in combat. There are enemies which pepper you from afar with spines, enemies which charge at you with swords, enemies which self destruct on contact and much more. The game throws lots of enemies at you at once, but it never feels overwhelming - the difficulty is very manageable, and skillful blocking and dodging will get you through any tough situation. The difficulty feels a bit too easy at times, but this can easily be compensated through the various Idols you can activate, each of which increases the difficulty of combat. Each Idol affects the combat in a way, such as granting enemies the ability to deflect attacks or increasing their defence. Overall, the sheer amount of customisability available is huge, and no two levels play the same. There are also challenge levels which test your skills with weapons, allowing you to fine-tune your knowledge of each weapon, and even earn loot if you perform well enough.

The graphics and sound are amazing. Each environment feels unique, with bright colours and detailed backgrounds. Enemies are not only diverse in their attack patterns but also in their appearances. The character animations are very smooth, and everything feels very well fine-tuned. The soundtrack is simply terrific, with various different tunes for each world. There are slower, more sombre tracks for certain areas, but there also features heavier, faster tracks which build up a sense of tension. The overall presentation is very well done.

One of the greatest features of the game however is the commentary. The whole game is narrated. Every action you perform causes the narrator to say something. The narrator is your constant companion, aiding to provide story, and livening things up even when you're simply walking through another pathway.

However, there are some minor faults with the game. The controls, despite being very responsive, can sometimes cause problems. Because the keyboard must be used, you cannot move with a thumbstick, and thus maneuvering around some obstacles can be slightly annoying, and can cause you to fall off the edges of the map more times than you would generally like. Plugging in a 360 controller would solve this, but overall aiming with a mouse is a much smoother experience. Also, despite packing a decent amount of content, the game still feels as if it could've done a bit more. There aren't really any sequences which particularly stand out. The game is brilliant the whole way through, but there aren't really any exceptionally brilliant portions of the game.

Overall, Bastion is a great game. The games strength lies in its variety - there are such a vast and diverse range of ways to tweak the game that it always feels fresh. Also, new things are introduced quite often, and there are always items hidden away to be found. Bastion is definitely worth playing.