Odallus: The Dark Call. This one is retro action platformer. It has such fun retro elements as clunky stiff controls, short attack range, start over the entire level if you run out of lives, annoying enemies at annoying places. Ughhh… I’m so tired. Man who’s bright idea was to implement limited lives? That the one thing I don’t mind to leave in the past to gather dust. Even NES games had password and cheat codes. And in year 2015 of our lord Jesus making a game that forces you to start over a level, come on. I can take sluggish controls, badly placed check points placed many enemies away from the boss but starting level over just ugh.
Anyway we play as some warrior man who is bored without a war. Well as we say in Slavlands “Хозяин Барин” which roughly translated to you’re the boss you call the shots. Here is your war as you asked, milord. War comes to our Christopher Lambert looking dude. His village is raided by his own nobleman and the village elder lost his mind and turned into a beast. So as you have guessed we need to stop that so we could go back to the campfire in the forest and be mellow about how war’s over and we are no longer needed.
Gameplay. It’s classic action platformer similar to Kick Master or Trojan. Closer to Trojan to be honest felt as clunky and as stiff. Delay between hits is a little long to just spam it. Range of your sword leaves you with desire for a Sephiroth’s Masamune. Jumping is a little stiff but mostly okay. Enemies are unfair as usual and annoying. I mean why they can do dash/leap forward attacks and I can’t? Some love to fly in a wave arc like classic medusa’s heads. Also enemies love to be in a place where it can easily knock you over down to make you climb all over again. How could I also forget that you are locked in a place when you attack so don’t get greedy with you attacks like I always do, bumrushing is my motto. You also have upgrade items and sub weapons. One upgrade increases the number of each sub weapon you can carry. Others give you a new ability such as pushing big heavy objects, breathing underwater. There are also weapon upgrades but I haven’t found one yet. But best feature imo that you can easily grab a cliff and hoist yourself upward.
Pixel art looks good enough, OST is not so, nothing memorable and ear catching like in the nes classic collection. Bosses look good but not as good as it was say in the… was the name of that game. It’s about Templar dude who wears red bandana and slays the undead with his mace. I remembered it! It’s called Infernax. Anyway it‘s okay homage to classic nes action platformers just have a bit of patience. Otherwise it’s mostly okay.
Good pixel art
Nothing memorable
As kids says these day you need to lock in.
