Arboria is a 3D roguelite, ARPG currently in Early Access on Steam.
You play a Yotun (jötunn?..basically a Troll) who must venture into a procedurally
generated dungeon with the aim of healing the "Father Tree" thus restoring the power of your tribe.
As with all dungeon crawlers and roguelites you will find a variety of handy tools and weapon upgrades to overcome challenges. You can also find material to upgrade your Symbiotic Weapons via mutation and become even stronger.
Your Troll will die, but its legacy lives on in the next Jotun iteration you spawn to send into the next Dungeon.
Sounds a good premise, but how does the game measure up to the synopsis?
Quite honestly, not very well...
This is an Early Access Review and the game does show promise but it stumbles into the pitfall that swallows up far too many Steam EA releases.
It simply isn't ready for release, even EA.
It's a worrying trend on Steam and one that negatively impacts so many releases. For whatever reasons.... publisher pressure, shortsightedness, overconfidence, laziness, greed.... titles are pushed out into paid early access before they should be.
While I completely understand and support the premise of EA there is a big difference between closed beta and EA.
If I make an anchovy pizza from scratch and take it out of the oven after only a few minutes, it will look unappetizing with all its raw floppy dough and unmelted cheese. People will respond very negatively and wonder why I'm trying to poison them.
If I were at least to make it edible before serving, the reception would undoubtedly be more positive, with constructive criticism like " anchovies do not belong on a pizza!"
I'm hungry and I digress, but my point is, a little more closed Beta testing probably would have resolved some glaring issues and afforded it a more positive reception in Early Access. In turn, better perception, more sales, more support, mo money!
EA is there to put the final polish on a product, tweaks and suggestions before a full release. It is not there to showcase proof of concept.
The game looks quite nice and has some decent voice acting and quality Audio. Graphically though its all very samey with a limited colour palette which leads to over-saturation within the environment causing things to be difficult to differentiate.
A weird design choice i found a little cringe/embarrassing was the choice of using the somewhat stereotypical Jamaican Patois for the voiced trolls and the inclusion of a healing "bongo"; where smoking the weed within heals you. Obviously one of the Devs is seventeen "I like smoking weed, lets make a weed reference then everyone will know how cool we are, weed is cool Trolls Rock!!"
(Trolls , "rock" get it? that's funny, "bongo" not funny)
It's 2020 FFS not all Dwarves are Scottish miners and not all Trolls are Jamaican tribesmen!
The gameplay is the real let down here though, the collision detection is atrocious!
You control a large troll swinging a huge axe, arcing through the air, but it struggles to make contact with an enemy directly in front of you.
Coupled with a sluggish protagonist and very basic abilities make it dull at best, but mostly just frustrating.
It's not a lost cause however and shouldn't be written off, the game does have a decent framework in place for an interesting take on a roguelite.
While this is to be commended in a market already full of generic roguelites/roguelikes it needs a lot more work to bring to market.
This is definitely one to keep on your wishlist. Keep checking the patch notes and latest user reviews each time it pops up on a Steam Sale to see how it's progressing. But it's definitely not something I could recommend for current purchase.
For a recent Roguelite that shows how Early Access should be done, check out our video review of Dreamscaper,
Comments