Evoland (2013)
Genre: Action Adventure, Role-Playing Game Developer: Shiro Games Price: £6.99
The best way to nurture a sense of nostalgia is to present something to people in the way they remember it, rather than how it was. After several hours of slogging through Evoland, I feel secure in saying that its history of gaming theme offers an experience that was less the way I’d like to have remembered things, and more just the elements that needed to be repressed.
Evoland is a hybrid action-adventure and RPG game that promises a ‘journey through the history of action/adventure gaming’. Mostly this just means that the developer designed a cool gimmick in which the graphics occasionally ‘improve’, but didn’t really put in enough effort to attach a decent game to it. The player stars as a hero called ‘Clink’ (and yet somehow this isn’t the laziest reference in the game) who is tasked with saving the world from a not particularly well defined threat. He and his travelling companion/healing mage Kaeris must travel to some-place-or-other to fight the dastardly Zephyros. Mostly this just involves being dragged through a series of setpieces designed to show off the game’s duelling graphics engines whilst a series of unsubtle references are paraded in front of the player.
Most of the game feels barebones and skeletal. It’s not very often that we see something so inherently polished and yet so amazingly soulless and empty. Advancement through the game is entirely linear, and, whilst there’s a plot of sorts there’s very little character development or worldbuilding done to augment the main gameplay. It is as if the developers expected the product to work based upon systems alone, which, when the game’s structure and underpinnings are such a mess, is quite a laughable idea. It has a jack of all trades approach to gameplay, switching between Zelda-like action-adventure and Square-Enix style JRPG formulas unpredictably, but this unfocused approach means that little effort has been made to develop either these two different styles of gameplay any further than their most basic, vanilla forms.
The turn based combat is tedious, overly simplistic, and quite frankly unpleasant, with random battles occurring every few steps along the way in those areas in which they are prevalent. The action-adventure combat fares a little better, but the design of the Zelda-style dungeons is dull, and filled with enemies that just aren’t fun to fight against. In one particularly egregious example, the weapon required to beat one particular kind of enemy isn’t granted until well after those enemies start appearing in the game, resulting in the only option being to power through them slowly with repeated chops. A third, one-off dungeon presents what is possibly the second worst attempt at Diablo-style combat I’ve come across in a game, and whilst it sort of works as a joke, the actual gameplay involved far outstays its welcome. Anyway, the addition of American ARPG combat to what is essentially a (badly written) love letter to the works of Nintendo, Square and Enix seems vastly out of place.
Frankly, Evoland is a disappointment. A soulless shell composed of half-remembered ideas and threadbare reference jokes covering a mediocre stumble through systems that were heavily refined or abandoned long before many of the games being referenced were even released. Whilst the visuals are interesting, and there’s some music that harkens back to classic tracks from games you may well remember, between frustrating random battles and slow trawling through poorly designed dungeons it offers far more boredom than it does nostalgia.
How long did I play? - 5.8 hours, but that includes the 2 hours or so that I left the game running because there weren't any save points nearby. Did I finish it? - Yes Would I play it again? - No







