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A witness to the fall: Ars reviews Bastion on the XBLA

Bastion is filled with artistic flourishes and some of the best context-based …

A witness to the fall: Ars reviews Bastion on the XBLA

The world has been destroyed, but as you walk around the battered landscape, materials rise up from some point under you to recreate paths and architecture. It's as if the very act of existing is enough to begin the rebuilding process, and it's your job to move across the land and find the materials needed to build what your new friend refers to as a "Bastion," a small landmass where you can begin to rebuild the world and fight for some form of safety.

Bastion is an attractive game, filled with expressive animations and colorful enemies, but the real star is the near-constant narration. This is provided by another character in the game, and it gives information, context, and even hints—so it's worth your time to listen up. It may seem like Bastion is based on a gimmick, but the gameplay itself is rock solid. This is a game that's worth your $15 when it launches tomorrow afternoon.

Heaven restores you in life

There is a story here, and it's told through the narration and by speaking to characters in the hub-world of the Bastion. The story unfolds slowly, until great swaths of it are laid down in the final hour. While the details are interesting—if sometimes hard to follow—it's the atmosphere that both fills and carries the game. Everything you do seems to carry weight, and there is a sense that the damage has already been done, and you're just there to witness the end.

As you play through the levels, you'll collect new weapons and items, and you'll be able to level up your abilities and powers. You can carry two weapons at once, plus a special ability and three health potions. There are certain places you can swap out your arsenal, so make sure you're carrying the right loadout for each level. The game also gives you areas that present challenges for each weapon, and reward you with powerful items if you can complete the section quickly. The game can be played to completion in around five hours, but if you're focusing on mastering the weapons and finding everything in the world, you'll be playing for much longer.

Bastion launch trailer

The game's story and narration are the drawing points, but the fighting, healing, and upgrading systems are all satisfying and well designed. By choosing to equip different spirits—the booze kind, not ghosts—you can buff your character with different powers. By worshiping different gods at the temple, you'll be able to bump up the game's difficulty while increasing your rewards for survival. Each weapon can be upgraded in multiple ways, and your character himself can level up to become more powerful.

This may look like a basic hack-and-slash, but you're given a surprising amount of control in designing how your character fights, and the multiple weapons all look and act differently in combat. You'll find combinations that work best for you, which makes it even more annoying when you find a new weapon during your travels and it's automatically equipped. This may make sense from a story perspective, as you'll often need that weapon to get past the next segment, but when you're already holding your favorite combination of melee and ranged weapons, it can be a bummer to have one slot taken over by a weapon that simply isn't as good.

There is much more to do and see than is immediately apparent, and the game has some interesting tricks up its sleeve in a few places. Near the end you'll come to an area where you're operating past the sight of the narrator, so he begins to talk to another character and the stories split into two pieces: one told via audio, and the other controlled by you. You'll also be asked to make some hard choices, and you're warned that you can't go back once you've pushed ahead. Don't worry: after you beat the game you can restart with the weapons and powers you've earned and try to do things differently.

This is the kind of game that thrives on the Xbox Live Arcade. It's novel, the graphical style is striking, and it can be finished in an afternoon or two if you don't feel the need to finish every challenge and collect every upgrade. There are great moments of beauty here, including some musical cues that make me long for an official soundtrack release. This isn't a perfect game, especially when the pace begins to move so quickly later on the in the game, but it's a very good one.

Verdict: Buy

Channel Ars Technica