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Review Moonscars (eShop Conversion) | Nintendo Life


Moonscars Review - Screenshot 1/7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Unattached)

Has everyone again soul? Yes, we thought so much. However, Black Mermaid’s Moonscars Much has changed since it was first announced due to the finely detailed pixel art style. This is a delicious dark 2D killer with Metroidvania elements that remind us a bit of the brilliance of the Motion Twin Dead cells, although with much more extreme environments, contains its meticulously animated battles. But how did all this adorable looking murder actually take place?

Well, all of that is told with a bit of a twist, a fascinating marriage of stellar presentation and strong combat. However, there were some pretty persistent frame rate issues present in this Switch port that prevented us from recording it exactly as we wanted. Let’s collectively get through that Black Mermaid can patch these as soon as possible because, if these problems can be solved, you’re looking at a super smooth and stylish action game. way, looks great and has some wrinkles in very clever gameplay. its bloody sleeves.

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 2/7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Unattached)

In Moonscars, you play as Clayborne Gray warrior Irma, a seemingly unstoppable force of nature who is on a super violent quest to locate a mysterious figure known only came as The Sculptor, to determine what happened to both her and her now missing band of fellow warriors. The action here is set in a gritty world where flesh and clay intertwine, giving its inhabitants the power to shape and change their bodies, to possess enemies. their own and resurrected from the constant death. This is very useful when you create a Soullike, innit.

Well, to be honest, the story here is mostly lynx. We’re not entirely sure what half of the confusing conversations between the characters mean as we chart a creepy trail through the campaign, but it does have some interesting ideas packed into it. there in points. It’s no worse than that impregnable guff is Dark souls itself, and the whole thing does a perfect job in giving you a grim fit on which to paint a very bloody picture.

Like any other game in this now-overloaded genre, you’ll die then resurrect in a never-ending cycle of death, resting by a fire (or mirror) to level up or move. Fast-forward to other locations and spend time hanging around the game’s Nexus-style Mold Workshop central area. Death sees you lose all the souls (bone meal) you currently have collected from enemies, meaning you’ll need to return to your last place of death to get them and different areas which you go through are matching mazes. Full of shortcuts and secrets to twist and turn before you take on a nail-hardened boss who will test your combat skills and patience to their absolute limit. Then all Soulslike boxes are checked.

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 3/7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

However, if you find yourself starting to get drowsy reading through the details of this currently overused gameplay mechanic, you might want to give yourself a little vibration, as Moonscars adds a lot of excitement back. into the mix through some new additions to the game and some amazing battles that look and feel great thanks to some of the most detailed pixel art we’ve ever seen. Seriously, there’s an amazing amount of detail in every movement and small action here, you can even see Gray Irma’s warm breath in the cold night air as she walks past the Level, slash and hack a bunch of weird and wonderful vampires into absolute pieces. As a result, it’s all very satisfying to capture, the kind of bloody combat that’s hard to stop coming back to just one more time.

As you make your desperate run through enemy-invaded areas – the game’s bleak orchestral soundtrack accompanies you in the dark – you’ll fill in the Spite gauge with each enemy you hit. lose. Fill the ruler to the top and you can open the menu and choose a Spite-based benefit from a random selection of three. Maybe you want your health to recharge 15% faster, attack more bite or slightly reduce the cost of your spells. These benefits can be stacked and you can keep piling them up until you die and lose a lot. It’s a system that, again, reminds us a bit of Dead Cells (although it’s not a fantasy game) and it gives you a lot of discretion in how you create your character. for every attempt to save it to the next mirror. score or boss battle.

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 4/7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

The core battle is also different from the norm in other ways. There’s no Estus potion here, instead you have an Ichor gauge above your health bar that recharges when you take damage, then you just hold the left button to drain and recharge your life. yourself when needed. Further complicating this is the fact your magic attacks also use Ichor, so you need to constantly choose whether you want to get some health back or scream at enemies with huge, heavy spikes amount of explosive earth, string rock, magic explosion, bullet spike, and a ton more besides. You can equip any two magic attacks at once, and they each have their own advantages depending on the type of combat you’re engaged in.

Another nice little wrinkle is that there’s no stamina bar, which gives a very fast combat speed and allows you to dash around and get ripped off for fun, which you really need to do if you want to stay on. That Ichor gauge is fully loaded and ready to use. That’s all pretty cool stuff and it’s complemented by some surprisingly good backgrounds, great level designs on the board, and a great selection of well laid out enemies to turn each zone into. The new area becomes a tough and fun glove to run.

The unlockable skill tree in Moonscars also expands impressively, with lots of opportunities to build very different versions of Gray Irma in later plays, and this is added with a bunch of Stones Charms have the effect of refilling your life when you successfully block an attack, increasing your attack power, or making you more resilient to projectiles. You can equip three of these amulets at once, so again there’s plenty of opportunity to mess with your build here and tailor your approach to any What difficulty are you currently trying to overcome?

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 5/7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Unattached)

On top of that, Gray Irma also has a bunch of special weapons that she can deploy with the ‘X’ button; awesome big guillotine wheels, spears, hammers and the like, and each of these gives you many benefits and perks as you use them. You can only own one special weapon at a time, and you can’t keep it either. Every time you unlock a new mirror, you’ll return to the central area of ​​the game, where the NPCs you’ve met will chat a bit and sell you trinkets, but when you return For your last position in the underworld, you’ll need to do the malice fighting a doppelganger of your own who will use all your weapons, tricks, and skills to try and take you down. . At best she and you can pick up a new special weapon, and all of these automatically level up as you progress further into the game. It’s a very cool but somewhat controversial mechanic, perhaps, not someone we think of personally, but these doppelganger face-to-face encounters can certainly be tough, and doing so often will cause discomfort for some people.

Indeed, it is the difficulty of this game that is perhaps its biggest downfall in the end. To make an already difficult fight a little more punitive, the developer added a mechanic that can see the state of the world change every time you die, meaning the enemy enemies become significantly more difficult. The problem with this is that you need to pay an Ichor Gland fee every time you want to reverse the blood moon and reset the world to normal. Every time you die. We’ve had parts of the game – and a really tough boss battle in particular – where we’re struggling to locate any more Ichor Glands, leaving us with a serious battle. tough but honestly, you’ll need a lot of patience to stick around without tossing your controller in the air.

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 6 of 7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

While we eventually got over this hump and then the game settled into a much better rhythm, this spike in difficulty is a key point and can be done with a little bit of tweaking. correction. Furthermore, there aren’t any difficulty modes or easier accessibility tweaks available, so you really need to be prepared for death, as it were, to be able to see this to the end.

However, aside from these hard problems, what Moonscars has to offer overall is some super stylish and challenging action full of atmospheric locations, great enemy designs, some scary boss battles (a bloody showdown against a floating haunted baby, anyone?), and that combat is strong and animatedly sharp. It’s the kind of tough old game you’ll want to get through just to see what terrible thing happens to you next. It’s also vastly improved with progression, with the variety of enemies and the level design becoming much more satisfying as you make progress and start to link areas together and get to know each other better. how things are connected and carefully constructed.

And so, we come to the score. We’d give Moonscars a more generous number here – although some difficulty issues and game-breaking launch bugs were only recently resolved – if not for some speed issues frames with this Switch version that we can’t afford to miss. The stuttering is very little in the beginning and most of the time it’s perfectly fine when you’re just rushing in or engaging smaller groups of enemies, but it starts to get significantly worse as more enemies appear. on screen and in some battles with bigger bosses.

Moonscars Review - Screenshot 7 out of 7
Taken on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Unattached)

In short, frame rates start to hinder the flow of fights and thus detract from the shine of a game we enjoyed so much. Your mileage will vary on this, of course, and it doesn’t destroy the game, obviously – we passed and obviously enjoyed the defiant experience – but that makes our desire I solved with a more robust patch.

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