Reviews// Bastion

One of the interesting things about Xbox Live is how it's enabled developers to slap an atmospheric score or a vaguely-interesting art style onto a game that could have been produced 15 years ago and pass it off as... arty, I guess?

Yeah, I know, that was a totally bitchy way to start a review. I'm not telling you that Bastion is bad. It's quite enjoyable, actually, I just want to be clear on the fact that Bastion is basically a dungeon crawler that could have been put out on last century's hardware with some fancy-pants narration and a lick of HD paint.

You play The Kid, a guy living in a ruined world with only an old bloke to help him make sense of things and maybe, just maybe, put it all back together. As mentioned above, Bastion is basically a dungeon crawler, albeit one that's flipped on its head. The world you navigate is floating and builds itself as you traverse it.

Giving voice and context to your travels is the aforementioned old bloke, who delivers his narration like some sort of 'old timer' sitting on a rocking chair out in the Old West, drinking whiskey as the sun goes down and his demented nephew frolics with a goat and a blacksmith's hammer. Mixed in with a guitar-based musical score that kept reminding me of Firefly, the narration provides plenty of rustic, woody atmosphere.

I liked it. Tim, who was working in the office as I played through Bastion, seemed to want to stuff root vegetables in his own ears. At the risk of sounding like I'm copping out, there's an aesthetic at play that will either appeal to you or it won't. I'd suggest watching a trailer to get a taste of it and, if you start to find it even slightly annoying, avoid Bastion at all costs.

What I will say is that the narration is deftly woven into the gameplay. The game reacts to what you're doing and you're not likely to find much repetition in there.

Combat is worked around ranged and melee attacks, with the odd specials available to mix things up. While it's action-based, there's a strong (and welcome) element of strategy involved. Button mashers need not apply and can throw themselves of the nearest high thing. You'll need to pay close attention to the movements and attacks of your enemies and deal with them accordingly.

Now, many developers would have you believe that you need to employ strategy to deal with the enemies in their games, but when you get down to it if you hit/shoot them A LOT they'll just fall down.

This isn't the case in Bastion. The giant armoured froggy thing, for example, attacks you by trying to jump on your head and is invulnerable from the front. Dealing with it requires some very specific manoeuvring and choice of weapon, which I won't go into because people hate spoilers and you may well be 'people'.