- Gorgeous Art Style - Combat Is More Frustrating Than Fun
- Fantastic Music - Instant Death Mechanics
- Game Rewards Exploration - Bracktracking May Cause Frustration
I've never had a good relationship with water based games, since playing a fiendishly difficult water level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles some 25 years ago. Still, when this game was announced, I was intrigued to learn more about the story of this father and daughter. What is it that causes a child to build her own submarine, and go off exploring deep under the sea?
You play as Merryn, who lives happily with her fisherman father. Living in a small, leaky home, sometimes not having enough food to eat, they are simply happy to have each other in their lives. Merryn's father tells her bed time stories of a fantastic world under the sea each night as she drifts off to sleep, knowing deep down these are simply make pretend.
One night, Merryn's father does not return home from his daily fishing trip. She falls asleep while waiting for him, and has a vision of him stuck under the sea, asking for her help. She wakes up, and immediately gets working on a plan to rescue him. Step 1: Build a submarine. It is never explained how she builds this (or even gets it to the water!), and yet this is how Song of the Deep begins.
This short introduction caught my curiousity. Actually seeing the game world for the first time however, this got my interest. The first thing you see is a side on view of your submarine, surrounded by a colourful world of innocent fish swimming around in the background, with sea plants calmly swaying away in the foreground, all while accompanied by soundtrack that would not sound out of place in a hollywood blockbuster.
Moving forward, going by seemingly impassible doors, it's clear from the start this is very much a metroidvania style game. You start with very low health, and no firepower or special abilities of any kind. You set off on a linear path to start with, while the game teaches you the basics of how to get around, and more importantly - how to survive.
The linear setting changes quickly. After fitting your submarine with a couple of upgrades (how does a child do this, while far under the sea?), and what I first thought to be a small to average size map, quickly unravels to a massive explorable area with secrets to be discovered, should you choose to explore.
And it is definetly worth exploring. If not to see more of the gorgeous world the game is set in, then for the money and unique ship upgrades that would otherwise be missed. True to the Metroidvania name however, many of these secrets cannot be unlocked until finding that key skill or upgrade, and returning back later on. Getting back to these area's is easily done, thanks to every secret being labelled on your map. Find out how to unlock them though..
You are rewarded for exploration by getting money to spend on upgrading your ship further. Want faster charging boost? How about a icey shield to help in combat? The shop has you covered. And although money is in short supply to start with, I found myself missing only 1 ship upgrade by the end of the game, having missed a good amount of treasure.
There are also plenty of puzzles to solve in the game. This can vary from simply moving a bomb to a plank of wood before it blows up, to arranging what appears to be a complex array of lasers to hit certain points in the construction they are in. Most of the puzzles in the game are solved easily enough, though they do get harder as you unlock more abilities.
Among the more interesting of these abilities - Merryn's ability to jump out her submarine, and go for a swim, exploring area's of the world she otherwise would not be able to reach. While she has a couple of tricks she can do herself, this mechanic also helped me appreciate my submarine that much more when I got back.
Ah, and then there is the combat. This is one of the few area's of the game I did not find much joy in. The floaty feel of the controls can make it difficult to avoid some enemy attacks. Aiming and movement is all done with the left analogue stick, leaving the right to switch through the different torpedo types you have. This does make it a touch tougher still to avoid attacks. Having spent most of my 7-8 hour playthrough learning to master my ships techniques to get me through combat, I ultimately learned near the end of the game, it was simply best to use 1 ability repeatedly, killing enemies before they got the chance to get near me. By the end of the game, combat felt more like a chore, than something I looked forward to.
There is also a suprising lack of bosses for a game of this type. Having only encountered 2 main boss fights, and a few copy/pasted mini boss battles, I feel like more well executed boss battles may have helped change my views on the combat. The boss battles that are in the game are orchestrated well enough though. Especially the first boss, which is a good test for what you have been taught in the early stages of the game.
My final issue with the game, is the instant death sections. Thankfully, these are few and far between (usually with a checkpoint nearby). But there are a handful of sections with a particular type of enemy who move very fast, are very hard to see, and in 1 section in particular, seemed to reach me when I was very far away from them. I felt this took away some of what I enjoyed in the game.
With all that said though, this is a wonderful, slower paced game that had me hooked from the start, to the very end. With a colourful cast of characters to meet, narration of what's going on to help explain the story further (not unlike Bastion), fantastic music that really helped keep me enthralled in this world, and a wonderful story that at it's core, is simply a young girl wanting to find her father.
If you are looking for a solid action game, I would argue there are better titles out there for you. If you want a great game of exploration with beautiful music, I recommend you pick this title up.
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