Ario

I love discovering exciting indie gems that do things a little differently than the safe AAA titles, where shareholders need to be satisfied with sales figures in the double-digit millions. In the hunt for these indie gems, sometimes you miss the mark - and Ario is one of those cases. The game resembles an unfinished tech demo and is one of the worst games I've played in a long time.

Before we dive into Ario's merits, let's take a small step back. We're dealing with an action-platformer where you take on the role of a boy named Ario who embarks on a perilous journey to rescue his missing mother from a land plagued by curses. On the surface, it reminds me of classic 90s games in the same genre, such as Pandemonium! mixed with some classic Prince of Persia - and that actually sounds pretty good.

The gameplay is traditional 2.5D platforming, where you typically run from left to right, jump from wall to wall, from platform to platform and defeat enemies. And already, we're taking a small step forward again. The problem here is that it feels very unfinished and extremely clumsy, due to very imprecise controls. Ario can run fast, but there's no inertia in him - the moment you let go of the analogue stick, he stands still. It's a little hard to describe, but it looks absolutely silly.

Another thing is that Ario is able to break down doors, but only if you're standing in the right place. If you're standing in the wrong place, he'll stumble into the door instead and it looks silly too. He is also able to do a roll to avoid enemies, traps or anything else, but this roll can only be done if there is enough space - if there isn't, he will instead stumble into the enemy, stumble into the trap and as the astute reader can probably figure out, that's not very good at all. Because of these completely unfinished mechanics, the gameplay feels very clunky and highly imprecise.

All of this is "spiced up" with some incredibly boring sequences where you take control of large stationary crossbows or ballistae. Here you have to defeat small hordes of enemies and you can aim the arrow towards the target almost in slow motion. I think these are the sequences the people behind the game mean when they write in the description of the game that this is a "vibrant 2.5D action adventure with a touch of tower defence". But I'm not so sure.

Unfortunately, it doesn't end here. When I started the game, it started in Persian, meaning I wasn't able to read the game's menus. I had to guess where the settings were so I could change the language. Once I finally found the settings, it was pretty easy from there because the only thing I could adjust was the language. There's no way to adjust the controls, no way to adjust the subtitles, no way to turn the music up or down, the sound effects, or indeed any way to adjust the soundtrack. This would have been nice, as the soundtrack is completely out of balance. Some sound effects (not all of them) seem to be twice as loud as the rest of the soundtrack and some sound effects are even slightly delayed compared to what's happening on the screen.

To top it all off, I experienced bugs where I could only run to the right, but I could run through all the obstacles in the game world and eventually into nothingness. Other times I would get stuck in the environment or even stuck between an enemy and a wall and then you'd be stuck there as neither my character nor the enemy could hit the other as the game got confused by being so close. This resulted in a restart from the last checkpoint. Finally, I found that subtitles were stuck for a long time after they were shown, that there were spelling mistakes in both the help texts and the subtitles, and other times the text was simply grammatically incorrect English.

Ario is not a pretty game. The visuals range from reasonable to downright ugly and it doesn't help that the animations are stiff and clunky. The paper-thin story is told via some pretty well-drawn sequences, but it seems as if two illustrators may have drawn these sequences, as they consist of two slightly different styles.

Developing games is not easy - especially for small indie developers. But in my time as a reviewer, I've received previous builds of games that seemed considerably more finished than Ario does. And whether you're a AAA developer (*cough*CD Projekt RED*cough*) or an indie developer, you have to live up to a certain standard when you offer a product that you expect the customer to pay money for. Ario is not in a state where it is ready to be put up for sale and therefore cannot be recommended in any way - not even at the low price point of less than £10.