WarriOrb (PC) Review

What's on offer here is a sad story about failed resurrection and its consequences. When a wizard tries to resurrect his daughter, he accidentally binds a powerful demonic soul to a toy in the room, creating the titular WarriOrb - a small ball-like being, with long gangly limbs. The story is fairly light, but it does have a varied and colourful cast that has Rareware-style "bleh, bleh" voices that are not very endearing. It has humour in its dialogue, with some rare but pretty good quips between the wizard and protagonist, which are full of sarcasm. Each level has at least one NPC to chat to, who typically has some sort of very pronounced character trait that is played for laughs creating some genuinely comic moments. When it boils down to it, the story isn't the focus, but it does its best to keep players busy, and provide them with some funny and dramatic moments.

Gameplay is advertised as being challenging, and in a way it is, but maybe not for the reasons the developer wanted. Being a ball with arms and legs, it would really have played to the characters strength to have some sort of momentum-based puzzles, but in actuality the gameplay is incredibly stiff, and lacking in momentum in general. This is a 2.5D platformer, with some unique points. Moving left and right while the level pans around feels alright, and is responsive enough. Jumping is less responsive, and can drive some frustrating moments when trying to climb over spikes or water, as the character catches on edges and loses the high in the jumps, or slips off an edge due to the slightly odd collision.

What is quite neat, and kind of drives a comparison with the 2D Metroid titles is that by holding a trigger button the protagonist can roll into a ball and bounce around, slide under traps and more - this is the unique element of the character design being well deployed as a game mechanic. Overall the traversal controls okay, but is not at the level of, say, Trine or Hollow Knight, which are both good comparisons for this particular game.

Time to mention combat, and it is here were WarriOrb started to lose the attention it had garnered. It's just sloppy to control, the character swings a sword around with little grace or quick response, leading to quite tedious combat, where something fast and flitting like in Hollow Knight would have felt better. It's simply too ham-fisted in its execution, and lacking in the method its slower speed suggests would be present. It's something that, unfortunately, raises the difficulty in a rather unsound manner. In fact, many aspects of the relatively steep difficulty are driven by an underriding unfairness in the system. Instead of having a difficulty curve it seems to rely on having a single difficulty level which actually feels bland while progressing.

The tone of this review may seem scathing but that would be disingenuous if it continued. The developers is very active, and has issued patches to try and address similar problems being experienced by players, and the team clearly put a lot of time and effort into building this title. It's oozing with charm and atmosphere, and has plenty of visual flourish highlighted by a fantastic visual style reminiscent of the Trine series.

The 25D levels are well-designed, and have an air of... "Darksoulsiness," crossed with some more whimsical elements. Muted colours of areas are punctuated with little colour flourishes, which aim to highlight intractable or collectable elements. It's genuinely quite nice to experience. Finally, the musical score that accompanies the levels is very nice as well, and does its job to build the atmosphere in each area.