Developer: Alientrap Games
Publisher: Alientrap Games
Rrp: £9.89 (Gog.com), £9.99 (Humblebundle), £10.99 (Steam), $14.99 (Alientrap.org)
Released: 3rd February 2015
Available on Steam, gog.com, Humblebundle and their own site
Played using: An Xbox 360 Controller
The gods have abandoned mankind, your people are on the brink of starvation and now raiders have come to take what little you have left. What will you do? Rise to meet them or let fate take its course?
Apotheon is a 2D side-scrolling Metroidvania (meaning a platform game where you can go back to previously played areas with upgraded powers to find new things) set in the era of ancient Greece. Of course there really isn’t much backtracking to be done in this game at all, its quite easy to complete everything in an area without having to upgrade yourself.
All weapons have a finite lifespan and will eventually break, thankfully they also aren’t hard to find in the environment or from fallen enemies (you can even buy them if your really having a hard time finding them). You also seem to be able to carry a great deal of them so you should never really be in any danger of running out.
Throughout the course of the game you will collect and upgrade the armor your wearing and just like the weapons armor will also break eventually. But unlike the weapons you can buy, find or create repair kits which, as you can imagine, will allow the to last longer.
Notice I said you could ‘create’ repair kits in the paragraph above, that’s because Apotheon has a crafting system. Its quite simple, nothing like the sort you see in survival simulators, needing only two items to be combined to make anything. With this crafting system you can create items such as healing potions, Greek fire and of course repair kits. Before you can make anything though you need to buy the recipes for these items first.
Scattered across the game are small plaques that you can read to give some context to the world around you (assuming that you don’t already know your Greek mythology). There are also several secrets and missions to be found within the various areas that you can explore and merely completing the objective of that area won’t reveal them all to you.
Those that are used to metroidvania style games may find the controls slightly strange due to the placement of the attack and throw buttons being on the right trigger and right bumper button instead of X etc. All of this can be rebound through the options menu though, so its not the end of the world.
One of the best things about this game is the ‘boss battles’, each boss that you come up against will react in a way that is fitting to the character. So in a some cases the ‘battle’ is actually a drinking contest or becoming the prey. I’m sure some would find that disappointing wanting some grandiose boss fight but I like that the developers have kept the characters as close as they can to the way the originals were portrayed.
No review of this game would be complete without mentioning the art style. Apotheon has been made to look like the paintings and frescoes found on ancient Grecian pottery even including a few imperfections like light scratches on the paint. Whats interesting is that even as your character moves around the levels the background textures and imperfections don’t move, almost as if the levels have been projected onto a clay surface.
I liked this game, its clear that a great amount of thought and care has been put into it and it clearly shows. It is quite a short game, lasting only a weekend, although I am something of a completionist so it would be quite a bit shorter to many others. Completing the game unlocks a new difficulty setting as well as a new area to run through.
If you’re looking for a new metroidvania to wet your pallet then you certainly could do much worse than this title.
If you liked that then perhaps try;
Rogue Legacy
Unepic
Dust: An Elysian Tail
