Developer: Spearhead Games
Publisher: Spearhead Games
Rrp: £10.99 (Steam), £12.09 (Gog.com), £12.49 (Humblebundle)
Released: 12th April 2016
Available on: Steam, Gog.com and Humblebundle
Played Using: A Xbox 360 Control Pad
How many times have you done this? You can’t remember any more, it all just seems to flow into one. Maybe this time it’ll work? You’ll just not do what you did last time or maybe you’ll say something differently… SOMETHING has to work! What’s the point in reliving this over and over if you can’t change anything?
Every so often a game comes along with a mechanic that you swear has been done but no matter how hard you think or search no answers come. Stories: Path of Destinies is one of those games, its a hack and slash game with a good dose of choose your own adventure thrown in.
You play as Reynardo, he’s a fox in a world of anthropomorphised animals. Once he was a pirate but he decided to pack that life in and retire, that is until civil war came to his doorstep.
As the title suggests this is a game of many stories. Actually in a way its more like its a single story that contains a lot of other stories within it, they just all happen to have one focal point in common, Reynardo. With each story you complete you learn something new about the characters (including Reynardo), the world and the events that have lead to the very adventure you are on. You also receive a reward, usually something like crafting materials (more on that later) but occasionally you’ll receive a free level. These stories typically take approximately an hour to complete each but that does speed up a bit once you get to higher levels and unlock more abilities. Once a story is completed the world resets to just after the opening tutorial although this time with all your skills, equipment and resources intact.
There are four ‘truths’ to uncover. These truths are important facts that Reynardo must know in order to break the cycle of restarting over and over. Once you’ve got all the truths unlocked you can attempt to go for the absolute end game. Each truth that’s uncovered also unlocks a new tier of skills that Reynardo to use.
The first time you wander through the world you’ll likely come across large glowing gates that, on matter what you do, you can’t open. These are known as hero gates and to get past them you need to create the special ‘hero’ swords that unlock them. Thankfully that is a fairly easy task as the material you need will be easily found as you continue to play and the workbenches required to forge these swords are pretty plentiful.
The swords are more than just keys of course, They all come with special abilities and can also be upgraded making those abilities more potent.
Workbenches have a second purpose in that you can use gems to give Reynardo passive abilities. You can equip up to three different gems at once and they grow more potent as they are upgraded. This is done automatically once you find another gem of the same type.
As you play there is a narrator who will occasionally comment on your actions in-game. This is cute and its done reasonably well. But in this regard Bastion still holds the title of best narration (for me anyway), although this narrator is funnier.
At last, we come to the combat. It’s somewhat basic, being that there’s only one button for attacking which is [X]. However as you unlock more abilities you find that certain equipment and skills come in useful such as the hook and the dash which makes the fighting a bit more varied. The game uses an Arkham style of combat where you build up a combo and do greater damage as you do so. And like every other game that does the Arkham style of combat your enemies will give you an indicator that they’re about to attack. However, unlike Batman: Arkham Knight, Remember Me and so many others you can and will be attacked by more than one enemy at a time, and you can’t block both of them, not at the same time anyway. In the early game this feels… unfair, to say the least, but once you have more skills, like the dash, you can avoid this situation fairly easily.
As enemies are defeated in combat Reynardo will gain experience (and the better you perform in combat the more experience there is to be gained) and in turn increase in level. Each level grants a skill point which is used to unlock/upgrade your skills at altars found in the world. As was mentioned before some skills stay locked off until you have discovered a set number of truths.
If I do have a complaint about this game, and I know its kind of the main mechanic, is that it can become quite tiresome repeating the same few levels over and over. It wouldn’t be so bad if the combat were a bit more fluid feeling. Also while you can skip the cut-scenes which does remove a large chunk of the repetitiveness it still becomes tedious, especially as you can’t just skip to the part of the story you wish to do differently from last time.
I have to give this a thumbs up, its something of a flawed gem, enjoyable but with a few small parts that hold it back from being something great. I heartily recommend this game to anyone who would a hack and slash and a decent set of stories.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Hand of Fate
Fable: The Lost Chapters
Bastion
