The first time you enter many of the rooms, they’ll feel like little puzzles.
#ASTALON TEARS OF THE EARTH CHARACTERS UPGRADE#
The most common things you’ll find are keys and instant upgrade shards.
It seems like every few rooms you explore you’ll find some sort of reward, whether it’s a concentration of soul currency or an item to help you in your travels. The monsters will always be there and I continued to find new secrets. Because of all this I rarely felt bored when retracing my steps. There’s also a ton of variety in the enemies they range from traditional fantasy-type enemies like slimes, skeletons, and gargoyles to a few robotic ones, with plenty in between. There are a total of 84 enemies to encounter in the tower, 68 of which are regular enemies that respawn every time you come back to a room. As I played, it always felt like I had multiple exploration options, whether it was in my current room, or a path I passed in a different area.
Most of the rooms have multiple entrances and exits. Each room is the size of the screen and when you change rooms the camera quickly slides over to the new room, so there’s no waiting to get back into the action. The tower is made up of hundreds of rooms, spread out across multiple sections, each with its own art style, color palette, and theme. There are multiple reasons why I like the gameplay in Astalon so much. Once inside they realize they must traverse the tower and defeat the group of fearsome Gorgons that lurk inside in order to save their town. Our heroes’ village thinks that one large, looming tower, in particular, might be the reason their water supply is now contaminated, so the trio set off to investigate the tower. Recently strange structures from the past have been rising out of the desert sand. Not everyone perished in the fighting or the perilous aftermath, and the current civilization that remains hundreds of years later struggles to survive in the harsh climate. Long ago the countries waged a catastrophic war over natural resources that left the planet in ruins. The world that Astalon: Tears of the Earth takes place in is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. If you’re on the fence, keep on reading and I’ll do my best to explain why I enjoyed it so much. If you like retro action platformers, then just go buy the game. LABSworks have put together a brilliantly paced 2D adventure with some Metroidvania elements, a unique gameplay loop, and tons of secrets and fun extra features. I now need to add another game to that list: Astalon: Tears of the Earth – the latest title to release from pixel art game specialist Matt Kap and his team at LABSworks and publisher Dangen, who are starting to build a pretty solid catalog. Some of my favorite modern indie games have taken this approach, games like Shovel Knight, The Messenger, and CrossCode. I get a heavy dose of nostalgia when playing pixel art games, and it can reach intoxicating levels when I encounter a game that implements a realistic retro style, where the game looks like it could have been released on the NES or SNES. A fair amount trickles down to the Xbox platform and it feels like I end up playing most of them. Retro action platformers seem like they’re a dime a dozen – the Steam store is practically overflowing with pixel art games.
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