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Sundered

Sundered - Hands-On Impressions

We've sampled an early build of Thunder Lotus Games' Sundered, a game that mixes metroidvania structure with roguelike elements.

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Thunder Lotus Games' first game was the well received and beautifully hand-drawn top-down action-adventure Jotun (originally released on PC in 2015). Their second game Sundered borrows some of same the DNA, most notably the hand-drawn animations and beautiful art, while transporting it to a very different setting and genre. More specifically it's a metroidvania-style adventure that features procedurally generated worlds to explore.

We recently got to try a pre-alpha version of the game featuring one world (the second one), but given the procedural nature it offered many different layouts to explore as we died and tried again. As you die you're transported back to the hub where you can use resources gathered to unlock abilities and perks. Understandably this area seems to be under construction, but it appears to feature what you'd expect from this sort of game.

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There is seemingly a paradox between the meticulously handcrafted nature of a metroidvania and the sort of procedural generation you find in roguelikes, but Sundered attempts to strike a balance offering a structure that is handcrafted with certain key rooms, whereas the rooms in between (the majority of the rooms) are procedurally generated. The positive of this is that you'll feel that sense of exploration every time you try on a world, but the downside is naturally that there's that eerie feel of the world being a bit random. Perhaps it's the knowledge of how it was put together that plays tricks on your mind as it may very well be that if you only play a world once you'll not get that sense. Nevertheless, it didn't feel the same as exploration in say Symphony of the Night or Guacamelee.

We did find that some of that metroidvania feel was lost as a result, and respawning enemies made it feel a tad more grindy than we would have liked. The enemies themselves move across the screen with little regard to the platforms or areas inaccessible to the player. They kind of reminded us of Studio Ghibli's No Face in Spirited Away.

The grunts are not particularly hard to deal with, but they do tend to gang up on you and that's when you may want to pull out that hand cannon to clear some space. For the most part though you'll hammer away at the square button and swing your blade. If we could have asked for one thing to have been different it would have been fewer enemies and for these enemies to require a bit more finesse. That's not to say you're not capable of pulling off some sweet moves, the acrobatics and swiftness of your blade can make for some rather spectacular displays. There's wall running, wall jumping, double jumps, and as you connect with your blade mid-air you're also given a boost so there's great freedom in terms of mobility.

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Each of your abilities in the game are "corruptible", this means that you can upgrade that ability to a more powerful version after defeating a boss. It comes at the cost of your humanity and not only will this affect your gameplay (what abilities if any you choose to corrupt), but it will also feed into the final boss encounter.

Speaking of boss encounters, Sundered will feature some massive bosses with specific patterns and attacks you'll need to learn. As you'd expect each boss encounter will be a massive highlight and while these are naturally kept under wraps what we have seen impressed and hopefully each one will be interesting enough to balance out the fatigue you might feel from the grind in the level themselves. As you'd suspect there are secret areas and perks to discover (you equip these in the same hub room that you upgrade your abilities).

It is clear that Thunder Lotus Games are onto something with Sundered and the current Kickstarter will allow backers in for beta testing to help make the final design decisions, balances and tweaks. What we tried was polished, but there is room for improvement and Sundered could go from being a good game to a potential classic. It's early days, but we're excited to see how this one turns out when it's released this summer.

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We've sampled an early build of Thunder Lotus Games' Sundered, a game that mixes metroidvania structure with roguelike elements.



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