Doesn’t Break New Ground

HIGH Charming. Nostalgic aesthetic, fresh mechanics.

LOW Rookie mistakes. Uninspired combat, stale boss fights.

WTF Did they really need to make that dude’s butt jiggle sound like that?

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When I first saw the email from Tastie Games with “bossavania” in the subject line, I cocked my head in puzzlement and was curious to know what that meant exactly, so I took a look.

The press release included stills, accolades and a brief description of the new genre, stating “It combines the strategic, puzzle-like boss fights of games like Punch-Out!! with the freedom and exploration of a metroidvania.”

While there aren’t quite enough novel ideas to say that it truly did establish a new genre, the devs clearly put a lot of love into it, and I enjoyed many aspects of their work.

The premise is centered around a girl who belongs to an underground-dwelling society and must endure a rite of passage which involves collecting medals from four area captains. Along the way she’ll encounter a plethora of curious life forms in different biomes and a colorful cast of idiosyncratic NPCs with authentic humor.

Tonally, it seems cheery, but underneath the charming retro aesthetics and upbeat chiptune soundtrack lies a darker social commentary regarding the reason why her people are living underground — they don’t have much of a choice, if there ever was a choice, and this situation is explained by unearthing intriguing lore nuggets that help fill in the blanks.

Gameplay-wise, I found Mole Maiden to be engaging thanks to tight controls and a novel approach to platforming. While some abilities and powerups will be familiar to platforming fans, its drilling mechanic is the most unique, as it allows the player to reach new areas by digging, flying around and leaving bombs in their wake.

There’s a bit of a learning curve to controlling it effectively, but once the player gets the hang of it, drilling through a section of sand or rock and then launching into another is a blast, especially as the level design becomes more elaborate and offers more opportunities to reach a previously-inaccessible upgrade or rare item.

I also liked how the devs tied this drilling to health — attacking hostile NPCs loads the player’s drill with fuel, which they can then use to replenish their life. However, while this reward mechanic worked for me, Mole Maiden‘s combat, as a whole, lost its charm quickly.

While it’s possible there were some abilities or powerups I hadn’t yet unlocked, most of my time in combat amounted to little more than dodging and mashing the attack button — and for a self-proclaimed “bossavania,” the bosses of Mole Maiden feel gimmicky and ultimately underwhelming.

During my first boss fight, I was frustrated by the sluggish pace as I exchanged blows with the enormous butt-jiggling King B. who I defeated simply by getting behind him and wailing on his rear end over and over until he had a tantrum, and then I would get out of the away until he was finished — wash, rinse and repeat.

Maybe I’ve played too many soulslikes, but I found the movesets of every boss or miniboss that I faced so predictable and easy to telegraph that I barely felt any satisfaction when I won and progressed to the next area.

I was also disappointed to find that the devs structured things so that there was a linear order to what bosses and areas needed to be cleared before advancing — although that’s essentially consistent with traditional metroidvanias, games like Hollow Knight have shaken up the formula in that they adopted a more open approach so that there are multiple avenues to acquiring different powerups needed to advance.

Finally, there were a few glitches that weren’t gamebreaking, but did feel a bit amateurish. The most glaring oversight that I came across early on was the “thank you for playing” message from the developer which appeared mid-boss fight and caused me to die.

I assume it exists because a demo version would let the player try for a certain amount of time before it triggered the message, but I was playing the full version of the game. Or maybe they kept it in intentionally? Either way, they shot themselves in the foot, as a message shouldn’t pop up and cause the player to be defeated because their view is obstructed.

Other glitches were fairly commonplace, like various camera issues, and there was one recurring miniboss who would sometimes start sliding across the screen and get stuck attacking into a corner, making it cake for me to beat him.

Some glitches were just plain weird, like the occasional sound effect that would sometimes linger following a defeat. Most memorably, it happened with the first boss whose squishy butt-jiggling sound effect persisted even after the screen faded to black.

Maybe after the devs squash the bugs and make a few other changes I’ll want to come back and dig some more, but in its current state, Mole Maiden doesn’t feel like it’s quite ready to surface.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Buy Mole Maiden – PC

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Disclosures: This game was developed and published by Tastie Games LLC. The game is currently available on PC. It was obtained via publisher and reviewed for PC. Approximately 3.5 hours were devoted to the campaign mode. The game was not finished. There is no multiplayer functionality.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB but has only cartoon violence and crude language, so the equivalent of a “T” may be appropriate.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game features text-based dialogue with some audio in Japanese or gibberish dialogue to give it flavor, but doesn’t have any audio cues that impact the gameplay in any significant way. As such, this game is fully accessible.

Remappable controls: The controls cannot be remapped.

The post Mole Maiden Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

The Mundane City

HIGH Nuking the dragon with an array of archers before it torched anything.

LOW Wounded swordsmen taking space in my army without ever returning to action.

WTF This is obviously a fantasy world, yet there are no fantasy buildings or units?

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The past decade has seen a flood of creative city-builders setting a new standard for the genre. It’s unfair, of course, to expect every indie team to turn out a Frostpunk or The Wandering Village, but the bar has been raised. That means some reasonably competent titles that don’t stand out will be forgotten, and unfortunately, that’s the fate I expect to befall Becastled.

Becastled is a phased-combat city-building game. The player’s forces can only build, recruit units, and gather resources during the day. Every night, “Lunar” enemies attack from a nearby spawn point and follow predictable paths. On each fifth night, a more powerful force attacks. At the edges of the map are a few towers that, when destroyed, provoke a more powerful attack featuring a boss. Destroying all of these towers grants victory.

There’s no campaign to speak of – the closest thing Becastled offers is a series of tutorials – and the meat of the experience is the freeplay mode described above. There’s also a sandbox mode that feels somewhat pointless, as it removes the core resource management aspect of play. A limited map editor is also available. For purposes of this review I tested the sandbox mode, made a few maps, completed the tutorial, and played five full rounds of varying difficulty in freeplay (each of which ran 2-4 hours).

Becastled’s maps are made of irregular polygons of territory, each of which can have a resource and trees, and one curious feature about these resources is that they don’t really deplete. Even on higher difficulties I never had a mineral or food resource run out. Except in the winter season, forests regenerate completely every day. This bounty eliminates the typical progression of city-builders, and among other things, it leads to oddities in city planning like massive stone walls that completely enclose a forest. Another curiosity is that the world of Becastled is clearly one that’s full of magic – the game’s “Lunar” enemies include a golem, a dragon, and a necromancer – but the player can’t create a building or unit that has any obvious magic capability — the closest one can get is an herbalist.

That herbalist building is not initially available, and must be researched on the rudimentary tech tree, which is only about two steps deep on average. Researching new techs is instantaneous and requires only that the player spend resources, primarily wood. This points to a significant resource imbalance in Becastled, as the need for wood is awfully steep since it’s needed to create every early building and also research every tech to get additional resources. Even obtaining the ability to trade other goods for wood requires 2000 units of wood in research, not counting what’s needed to recruit and sustain manpower and gather gold.

The lack of any other resource can be worked around, but if the player spawns in a map with no wood next to the initial position, they might as well restart. Strangely, the bare-bones map editor has no method for adjusting the position or density of forests, so even when creating a specific optimized world, one is utterly dependent on the RNG to get enough wood in the early game to survive.

I also noticed that units sometimes had trouble getting where they needed to go, or that they would make strange movements. This was most notable with the military units — archers would sometimes teleport outside of walls and troops would sometimes get trapped by a cluster of their comrades. Workers would also sometimes get stuck on terrain or be mysteriously unable to reach their work sites, even when nothing had changed from the previous day. Also, walls laid out near lakes would sometimes simply not get built.

During my time with Becastled, I noticed it being patched almost daily, yet each patch seemed to make pathfinding worse. The last time I played, military units would regularly fail to move at all when I clicked on a destination, and numerous workers failed to reach their work sites every day. This leaves me with some doubt that the pathfinding problems will be addressed.

While those are serious shortcomings, the fundamental problem with Becastled doesn’t really lie in its systems — the key issue is that there’s just no hook here. There’s no unique resource, no unusual mechanics, and no unexpected interplay between units or buildings. There’s not even anything approaching a graphical twist. Becastled is simplistic and straightforward to the point of being generic, and the magic that’s missing from the player’s build menu is also absent from the experience as a whole.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

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Disclosures: This game is developed by Mana Potion Studios and published by Mana Potion Studios and Pingle Studios. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (driver 581.80), a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed (as described above). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. The violence is totally bloodless, just little guys falling over. If it can hold their interest, this is an all-ages joint.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: During main play there is no dialogue. In tutorials, dialogue is accompanied by text boxes (not true subtitles, example of text below) that cannot be resized. There is narration in the opening movie but no subtitles. During play there are no essential audio cues. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers partially remappable controls. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but it is not clear whether controller mapping can be changed (indeed I couldn’t find a page that even had the mapping on it). In KBM mode panning and rotating the map is primarily on the keyboard while the mouse is primarily for zooming. While hotkeys to perform a few functions on selected buildings are available, most selection and other functions uses clicking and dragging of the mouse. I found the game awkward to play with a controller. The left stick controls cursor movement (sluggishly) and the right stick adjusts the view. Buttons are used to select but once a building is selected the D-pad must be used to enter its menu and assign workers (using the face buttons).

The post Becastled Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.