Judero Review (hailoc)
I picked up this game based on a glowing review from Owen at The Infinite Review. Now, despite having played Judero, I'm still a fan of him and of these developers. I'm even cautiously excited for their next title. But there's a reason why almost all of the positive reviews say it's more of a "good experience" rather than a good game.
The visuals and music are genuinely great and I wish the effort would have been spent making an animated short instead. Everything involving the gameplay however, is subpar to bad. The puzzles almost get interesting towards the end. But unfortunately they make up a very small part of this "experience".
Starting off, "fast and fluid" are the last two adjectives I would use to describe Judero's combat system. It would be like calling this review "well thought out and concise." To the game's credit, it is faster to just bash enemies with basic attacks because all four of the "combos" you can purchase are useless 99% of the time. These combos (4) and some bonuses (3) are also the only thing in the game you can purchase in the shops. There's not a lot of these but the game still showers you in gold. This makes many of the hidden chests useless because you don't have anything to buy and it's only ever gold or a Bestiary page. You do also get hearts in these chests but there's checkpoints every ten feet and the game isn't particularly difficult. Even during the final gameplay segment while ascending The Glass Mountain there's still useless "gold" chests off to the side. My last bit of goodwill towards this game would have evaporated there if it hadn't already been extinguished by my fireball upgrade constantly hitting the lever in front of Mab's cell; restarting and reversing the needlessly slow gate opening.
Controlling enemies isn't much fun either as you're still vulnerable while controlling them and they don't have any interesting combat mechanics of their own. I thought this would have been more of a focus. I'll admit I'm not too familiar with Scottish mythology but figured Judero would be more of a shepherd based on his appearance. You even unlock a mechanic that allows you to summon enemies but it's not used much for creative thinking. The puzzle mechanics involving swapping enemies are usually just seeing an obstacle and using the one enemy that does the one thing to remove it. The two types of mini games, basic shmup and timed coin collection, are functional, but never exciting. You also only play the shmup section once unless you go back and do it again but you don't get any of the ammo replenished and it doesn't matter if you fail or succeed in that section anyways.
Early on, I enjoyed talking to all the unique NPCs in the game, but started skimming if not mashing through the dialogue towards the end. The fact that the camera has to zoom in and out for every little blurb of text is annoying and baffling. It wouldn't be so bad if it just did all the available dialogue at once and included an option to back out. Most games do it this way for a reason. There's also a frequent bug where it shows the new dialogue icon when it's just going to repeat it again. The writing is good and very funny. It's not really something I'd choose to highlight on the store page though. I guess I can see why they chose the "features" they did. There is gameplay, Mab is cute, the chest is usually filled with gold, and the visuals and music are inspired.