Bastion Review

The gameplay of Bastion has a great balance of depth and difficulty which makes it relatively easy to pick up while still requiring a good amount of skill to complete the game. As you make your way through the game you will start leveling up the kid and choosing which upgrades he will acquire. After each level up you can choose one upgrade to assign to the kid. These upgrades vary in their purpose and will hugely affect the kid’s abilities. The game offers a great variety of upgrades to customize the kid with which gives you the choice of how you want the character to play like.

The game also features a large library of weapons to unlock and use in battle. The weapons diversify from your starting hammer all the way to shotguns and rifles. You can only however bring 2 weapons with you to combat. Your weapons can also be upgraded and enhanced by collecting materials and using them to purchase upgrades. The weapons are highly customizable giving you different routes on what upgrades you choose to give your weapons. This gives you 10s of combinations to go with which proves to be quite fun to try out. In addition to the weapons you equip you also get to choose one “secret skill” to use in combat. Secret skills are powerful attacks or temporary upgrades that often, but not necessarily, rely on which weapons you chose to take to battle with you. There is a list of secret skills provided to you at the start of the game, but as you progress the list grows in number and you eventually end up with a wide arsenal to pick from.

Throughout your adventures you will fight an array of monsters from different types, shapes and sizes.  It’s interesting to note that the monsters you fight are very different and unique from one another. There are always different ways to approach each monster and hence you need to find the right combination of weapons and moves to beat them. This is definitely one of the strong aspects of Bastion as it keeps the gameplay fresh and new as you progress throughout.

There are also a lot of optional things you can choose to do. You can complete challenges specific to each weapon you unlock  in locations called “Proving Grounds “which in return rewards you with different materials and items. You can also choose to activate certain idols a place called The Shrine located in the Bastion which makes the monsters in the game harder but in turn presents you with a variety of rewards. There is also a place called the memorial which presents you a bunch of side objectives that when completed can be redeemed for fragments to purchase materials and upgrades.

I had really high expectations for Bastion and the game didn’t disappoint one bit. I often felt myself highly engaged with the characters and the world which is something that is quite uncommon in games these days. The final part of the game also offered some hard moral choices that needed to be made. I don’t want to really give away anything about the game but let’s just say it’s something that many other games often fail to deliver in comparison. Supergiantgames truly did an amazing job with Bastion and people will definitely be on the lookout for their next project. Bastion is worth every single bit of its $15 price tag and is definitely one of the greatest and most unique experiences I have ever come across.