I love discovering indie gems that operate a little differently than AAAs, who play it safe because they have to satisfy their shareholders with sales figures in the double-digit million range. When looking for titles like this you’re sometimes unlucky and Ario is one of those unfortunate cases, as it resembles an unfinished technical demo and is one of the worst games I’ve played in a long time.
Before we comment on Arius’ merits, let’s take a step back. We are dealing with an action and platform game in which we will control a boy named Ario on his dangerous journey to save his missing mother in a land plagued by curses. At first glance it reminds me of classic 90s titles like Pandemonium!, with a bit of Prince of Persia thrown in, which doesn’t sound bad at all.
The game system consists of traditional 2.5D platforming in which we move normally from left to right, jump from wall to wall, from platform to platform and defeat enemies. We are taking steps in the right direction. The problem is that it feels unfinished and the controls are clunky due to imprecise controls. Ario can run fast but has no inertia, so he stays still the moment you release the analog stick. It’s a little difficult to describe, but it’s very fun to watch.
Ario can also break down doors, but only if you position yourself in the right place, if you’re not perfectly positioned he’ll trip over the door, which is also very funny. Additionally, you can roll dice to avoid enemies, traps, or other threats, but only if you have enough space. Otherwise, you will stumble upon the enemy or the trap, and as our careful readers have discovered, this is not a good thing. This completely unfinished mechanic makes the game seem very imprecise and clunky.
This game pattern is "Anima" with the very boring sequences in which we control ballistae and fixed crossbows. In these sections we will have to defeat small hordes of enemies by moving the arrows in slow motion. I think this is the part of the title that the creators are referring to in the description, where it says: "Vivid 2.5D action-adventure with tower defense elements"but I’m not entirely convinced.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. When I opened the game it was in Persian so I couldn’t read the menus. I had to poke around until I found the options to change the language, but once I got into the menu everything was easy as the language is the only thing you can change. There is no way to adjust the controls, subtitles or volume of the music, sound effects or other parts of the soundtrack. That would have been very useful since said soundtrack is completely unbalanced. Some sound effects, but not all, seem to be twice as loud as the rest of the soundtrack and others play too late compared to what’s happening on screen.
To make matters worse, I found bugs that caused me to only be able to run to the right, cross every obstacle in the world and get nowhere, others that caused me to run into elements of the environment or between enemies and Stuck in walls where neither my character nor the enemies can hit each other because the game gets confused because they are so close to each other, causing a restart from the last checkpoint. Finally, I noticed that the subtitles stayed on the screen for too long, that there were spelling errors in both these and the help messages, and that in other cases the text in English was spelled grammatically incorrectly.
Ario isn’t a pretty game either. The graphics range from reasonable to downright ugly, and the fact that the animations are stiff and fluid doesn’t help. The insubstantial story is told in beautifully drawn sequences, but it looks like they were done by two different illustrators as they have two slightly different styles.
Game development isn’t easy, especially for a small indie, but in my experience as an analyst, I’ve received unfinished versions of titles that seemed much more complete than Ario. Whether you’re a AAA developer (*ahem* CD Projekt RED *ahem*) or an indie developer, you have to meet certain standards in order to offer a product that the consumer is likely to pay for. Ario is not yet ready for the market and therefore I cannot recommend it in any way, not even for the modest price of 12.79 dollars.
