Review - Batora: Lost Haven... Can I Make it Anymore Obvious?

Image courtesy of Stormind Games

I haven't really had the opportunity to write a review on something less than stellar. Until now, that is. Batora: Lost Haven is an indie game that attempts to tell a grand story but doesn't commit enough to make it happen. In the story, you play as Avril, a teenager girl in a post-apocalyptic world. Her name and character alone make me want to start belting out questions like "Why'd ya have to go and make things so complicated!?" but that really wouldn't fit in with the narrative here. If anything... the game is the opposite of complicated. Now that my Lavigne reference is done, I should note that the game's Avril comes along with all the angst that could be expected of her, but that's not necessarily true all the time. Her mood swings have her enter into philosophical moments where she comes across as more wise than what we had seen just five minutes prior. This kind of bipolar nature actually goes well with the rest of the game, although I suspect it's unintentional. 

The Good

There is actually some good here in this title. I can't just completely bludgeon the thing and leave it at that. For starters, the combat is fairly fun if not a little repetitive. You switch between physical (melee) and mental (ranged) combat to fight some little cretins that swarm all over the maps. Again, there is little explanation as to why these things are just running absolutely rampant. There is a lore to the game but... we'll get to that in a bit.

    Another good aspect of Batora is in the animation and overall art style. The graphics aren't going to win any awards, but I thought that it was still done with a simple innocence that works well throughout. Whether we're talking about the 3D animations or the hand-drawn character images, everything in the art realm is done with love. I can appreciate that.

The Bad

What I can't appreciate is how little attention was paid to much else. The soundtrack is lackluster to the point of being irrelevant, and the story could have had a lot more going for it than it does. One could say that this was done deliberately for the sole focus of getting to the combat in the game, but then you'd have to overlook all the little lore trees peppered throughout the maps. Clicking on any of these trees drops a coconut of information, literally, that can be perused in some kind of codex that the gamer can view in a pause. The lore was there, but it's so derivative and trite I couldn't get into this world that Stormind Games was trying to flesh out.

    A couple of instances of this were the half-baked moments where we're supposed to care about some little characters more than others. One instance has Avril choosing between saving one alien in particular while condemning an entire other race. If you choose the race instead, you're led to believe that you've really done a disservice to to the first alien "after all he's done" for you... Dude, we only just met. Don't get clingy, bro. This is that bipolar nature of the game I was referring to. It's not just in the solar and lunar powers that Avril is granted, but also in the simplistic "morality" system that Stormind created for the game. Choosing between Defender and Conqueror options doesn't always make a lot of sense for more reasons than the sheer fact that the world isn't so black and white. Sometimes the Conqueror options are really more about safeguarding humanity as a whole, while the Defender ones lean into the emotional category of pushing towards rescuing a single friend.

The Middle

Avril has been granted powers simply because she is the chosen one of the story. There's not really a rhyme or reason why, but then again there wasn't much of a rhyme or reason why I chose to buy this game. I suppose I have that in common with the gods Sun and Moon in Batora's apocalyptic wasteland. Their options are pretty limited, and I must have felt the same when I picked up that controller. Batora has a couple fun moments along its 8ish hour run-time, but not enough to truly justify a purchase. And certainly not at a full price.

5/10

Middling at Best