Batora : Lost Haven is a top down hacker/shooter heading our way later this year from Team17.
I got to spend some time with a early access preview build for some first impressions.
First off here's the blurb....
"In Batora: Lost Haven, players will take on the role of Avril – an unlikely young hero and the last hope of a dying Earth, as she travels between planets, meets an eclectic cast of characters, and explores a range of colourful and diverse sci-fi fantasy environments. Along the way, players will be faced with an array of important decisions, the consequences of which can be far-reaching and shape Avril’s personality for the rest of the game. For Avril to survive, players will have to fight, think on their feet, and master the ‘Nature Switch’ ability to balance their mental and physical fortitude while solving unique environmental puzzles."
It's important to keep in mind that this is an early build and a demo, as such, a lot can change and many bugs have yet to be addressed.
Straight out of the gate Batora looks lovely, a vibrant cartoon style and a protagonist palette centred around orange (physical health & damage) and purple (metal health & damage).
Avril can swap between the two schools of damage to match enemy vulnerabilities, as well as dodge and the obligatory special attacks. Along the way Avril can augment her 'affinities'with runes that have various effects or bonuses.
Gameplay wise it's ok. My biggest gripe and an issue I just couldn't get past (even after a time), is the camera distance. For the most part the camera gently pans and adjusts to follow the direction of the action very well. It's just the distance, it's too "zoomed out" from the action. This just makes the whole interaction element feel disjointed and unconnected. It felt like I was playing the game with one of those litter grabbers rather than my actual hands.
That's not to day the controls weren't good, they're perfectly fit for task, responsive if a little unintuitive at first.
In the demo version there wasn't a menu option to adjust the default camera distance, nor to zoom in and out in game. They're were also no options to assign custom keybindings.
I really hope that these are features that are still in development.
The game ran well in it's default setting. There is an option for raytracing, I didn't notice much difference visually by enabling this, but it did impact performance quite considerably. Going from buttery smooth to hefty intermittent frame drops and stuttering.
I was running the game on an RTX3080 with it set to 1080 resolution, RTX on, DLSS set to 'performance mode'. There really should have been no issues running a game like this, with those settings, on that hardware.
Fingers crossed this is just yet to be optimized.
So giving complete benefit of the doubt to the full release later in the year, Batora does show promise. It's a tried and tested and very 'safe' formula with very familiar presentation for the rougelike ARPG genre. While it does try some new approaches and in game mechanics, I'm not sure it will be enough to stand out from the crowd or hold interest over time. However, bugs squashed it would be a game I'd be happy to go back to experience in it's full release.
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