Awaken – Astral Blade review

I’m going to be honest right off the bat here and admit that I didn’t have the faintest idea of the plot of Awaken – Astral Blade for the entire runtime. I mean I got the basics: you play a vaguely 2B-esque bionic girl named Tania, charged to investigate the Horace Islands a faceless old dude who she calls “Father”. Beyond that, it’s a bit of a nonsense.

The problem is that it drops you into this setting, hands you a sword and tells you not to get killed. Pretty straightforward, right? Most Metroidvanias have a similar set up, but like last year’s Fortune Hunter, it gives you little context beyond the wildlife being “corrupted” by a mysterious “energy”. In this instant it’s called Carpus, and your job is to find a missing research team who came here to investigate it.

Between the hackneyed premise and the lumpy translation, there’s not much here to hold your attention. Or at least it didn’t hold mine. I resigned myself fairly quickly to simply push left or right and deal with whatever appeared in front of me like I was filing paperwork. Which is at least quite fun to begin with.

Combat in Awaken – Astral Blade is pretty satisfying. It’s combo-based, with a variety of different finales available by holding different inputs and directions at the end of a combo. Once you move beyond the starter sword (which remains viable for the whole game in terms of the combat), the animations at least become varied even if the method of input doesn’t.

This in itself, though, could be an issue. No matter which melee weapon you use, the combos feel the same, and so combat does start to feel repetitive after a while. On a purely mechanical level it does entertain, but I played so much of it on automatic until I hit a boss fight or another impassable door. As with many middle-of-the-road Metroidvanias, Awaken does that thing where the key to a new type of door is found a few screens after the first instance of said door, and some are just sitting there. I prefer to have to work for a new traversal power, or at least have it awarded for beating a boss or puzzle.

Moving Tania feels great in combat despite some clunky animations. She has a dodge with invincibility-frames, an unlockable parry, and a claw-like finishing move for weakened enemies. Limited heals mean you need to avoid tanking damage, as resting at a save point respawns the enemies. Sadly, the variety is sorely lacking, and there’s little rhyme or reason to enemy placement. You’ll fight the same types over and over regardless of your environment, and it doesn’t cycle new ones in very often.

The Skill Tree is split down two main branches of Combat and Passive. The former houses skills like the parry, while the latter has nodes to boost your stats and survivability. Often the Combat skills will give you Hormone Buffs that improve your DPS, or unlock new abilities altogether. Gifts like the double jump or weapons like the Scythe that can cut down thick brambles, however, are found in the world.

As in many games aspiring to the Souls template, you have to find a save point to level up using Aether, and these save points are often positioned close to boss arenas. The bosses are okay, but have fairly straightforward patterns and feel very susceptible to rolling through them and comboing them right up the jacksie.

It looks pretty good overall, despite the aforementioned janky animations, with some attractive environments and character design. Enemies feel a bit also-ran, though, with little to set them apart or make them memorable. It’s safe to say that big fans of genre will find plenty to like here, as Awaken – Astral Blade is a decent if run-of-the-mill MetroidVania. Just don’t go into it expecting anything unique or particularly invigorating.