Iconoclasts

Iconauts Iconoclasts is a game that I would have never found if I didn't search through the Metroidvania subgenre tab in Steam. The developer spent about 7 years making this game. In fact, his original game Ivory Springs can be played for free on his website. That game came out in 2007 while Iconoclasts started development in 2010. The problem is that this game, I will say without a doubt, is not a Metroidvania game. There is a lot of secret areas and backtracking but otherwise the game sort of falls flat when it comes to exploration. In fact, sometimes you have to redo puzzle sections just to bypass an area within a section. Is it worth playing? Yes and no.

Bad Mechanics: ...heh, I made a pun. The puzzles are decent and the interface is polished but I kept feeling as if I was being cheated somehow. Enemies tend to only have a specific weakness that isn't exactly clear to you until you've tried every trick in the book. Surprisingly the most effective way to defeating a soldier is by stomping on him. Repelling their attacks, using your super weapons, or even attacking them from behind all prove ineffective. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Trying to use your weapons against bosses are even worse. Charging your weapons creates an exhaustively long cooldown. The ranges of your weapons are ridiculously short. I honestly had to look up online how to defeat a boss or two.

Dark Story: If you ever read one of the developer's interviews, you would get a sense that the world he wanted to create would be "realistic". The game starts out with a barrel full of laughs with ironic situations and crazy characters. But then you start seeing main characters die and heroes being dismembered. The story turns into this end of the world situation and you have no idea how the story will end until the very last 5 minutes of gameplay. Even then the ending is pretty crazy since now everyone had to deal with a situation sort of like in Final Fantasy 6. I will admit it was hard to finish the game with some of the hard choices you have to make.

Little Problems: There was a headline in a review I saw that read "The more I play, the less I like Iconoclasts". On top of the two problems I listed above, there were a ton of little things that annoyed me. Why in the world does the main character not talk? Can't you distinguish who is talking by a little bit of color-coding, even if it was in the name only? Why can't I access the sound menu while the game is paused? Why are the maps so tiny? Why aren't all the maps displayed at the same time? Trying to pause within a cutscene actually causes you to skip it entirely. I understand it helps speedrunners but I never want to skip a cutscene I've never seen before. It is good to have checkpoints before bosses, since I die while learning how to defeat them at least once, but why not transitioning between areas also? Why in the world do I only have access to three tweaks? I kept getting materials to build more tweaks but I could only build more of the same tweak! And why can't destroying the statues refill all three tweak slots? And why do I have to de-equip a tweak before equipping another one? You see what I mean about the little problems?

Summary: $20, even with $5 discount, is perhaps a fair price for a 10 hour game that I somehow only finished with a 44% completion rate. But I would not recommend this game for the sheer depressing atmosphere and troublesome gameplay. I have no doubt that it was a good game, just not the type of game I expected to play coming in.

 

11-25-2018