Solar Ash Review (TheThirdMask)
I was looking forward to playing this because the game looked like it's gonna be a unique experience and I liked Hyper Light Drifter(previous game from Heart Machine), and I'm always happy to see developers doing something different, but aside from occasional good vista I found the game to be painfully bland and average.
The health system is a good example of how toothless and directionless the whole experience is, you can have 5 HP total, in the beginning you only have 2 and get the rest of them by buying upgrades. To buy upgrades you have to gather Plasma, red orbs scattered all over the world. Plasma is your only gameplay reward for exploration aside from collecting suit pieces, 1 suit per location.
By the middle or end of the first level, after the tutorial, you will have max HP just from casually exploring all there is, so gathering plasma becomes pointless. Developers tried to fix that by taking away 1 max HP from you every time you defeat a boss/finish the area, so you have to gather 3000(for 5th point) Plasma to buy the upgrade again, which just happens on it's own as you're completing main objectives of the area.
To make things worse, having health in the game is pretty much redundant, every time you take 1 damage during exploration or boss fights, the game shoots you back at the nearest checkpoint, of which there are many, and respawns every health pack on the map which are practically everywhere. If somehow you manage to actually hit 0 HP and die, you're not punished in any way, you just respawn at the checkpoint as usual, which again begs the question: What's the point of the HP system?
In a way you're even rewarded for hitting 0 because all Plasma orbs and boxes on the level respawn, so you can get more of it if you need it for some god forsaken reason.
The only times when HP comes into play is during normal enemy battles, but there are only 2 or 3 encounters in the whole game that are actually dangerous. 90% of the time you will kill things just by spamming attack button while being near them and to make matters worse, most enemies can be easily avoided and your only reward for defeating them is the ever so useless Plasma.
Instead of coming up with good rewards for exploration, or interesting ways to spend Plasma or actually making HP system useful, they just put those things in the game for the sake of having them.
And it's the same for every other part of the game, just thoughtless and nonfunctional, put in there just for the sake of having it, not because it's actually needed or makes the game better but because other popular games have it or because devs just decided to have it on a whim.
It felt like the game design process sounds like "All successful platformers have stuff to collect, so we need that too. And look at AAA games, they're so successful and they have protagonists who won't shut up for a minute, we need that. And don't forget to add objective markers, so the players won't get lost in a square room. Have you heard of Dark Souls? Boy, so successful and those scattered lore bits, we need to have those and grab the audio recordings from Bioshock, good trend that one. People like RPG mechanics and dialogue nowadays, so we'll have quests and dialogue choices too, and an ending choice. We also heard how people don't like hard games, so we'll make all puzzles solve themselves even on the hardest difficulty, everybody will love this. Oh, almost forgot, call our composer and tell them to make OST and sound design be exactly like Hyper Light Drifter because people liked that stuff." Add this, add that without ever thinking how or why.
There are rare moments when it looks like a great game, when you're gliding on the clouds, jumping between pieces of flying ruins, denying gravity, all while looking at the upside down horizon and a huge creature walking in the distance, but unfortunately it's just a brief illusion soon to be shattered by reality.