Aaru's Awakening

Aaru's Awakening is a fiendishly hard game that harkens back to an era where side scrolling games were made for patient and persistent gamers. Fans of the genre will appreciate the nostalgia trip but it's possible that some of them will be put off from its high difficulty and unforgiving gameplay. If you think you' re up to the challenge, then you should check it out, especially at a discount.

Aaru’s Awakening is a beautiful frolic into a world of nightmares and imbalance: championed by its hand-drawn art style, compulsive level of difficulty and thrilling sense of achievement.

A fine game which presents a grueling challenge, Aaru's Awakening is perfect for the player who thinks 2D platform games today just aren't difficult enough.

Inconsistencies aside, Aaru's Awakening does make for a relatively enjoyable experience, even with its control flaws.

It’s lack of accessible controls or incentive for laboring through arduous stages, combined with the sloppy presentation of its story suggests that Aaru woke up a little prematurely.

As it stands, Aaru’s Awakening is more entertaining to watch than it is to play.

Aaru’s Awakening is a competent if unspectacular game, that with a little more time in the oven could have been much better as an overall experience.

Beautiful and creative, but controls and design issues often drag it from challenging to frustrating.

Aaru's Awakening has a serious difficulty curve, but when you combine the twitch-based controls, the confusing art style or the camera zoom, you end up with an experience that, once completed, doesn't offer a feeling of joy or accomplishment. You just feel like you've finally completed a tedious task.

Despite being instantly engaged by Aaru’s Awakening‘s artistry and intrigued by its innovative teleportation mechanic, I came away frustrated. I had no desire to keep playing, no need to better my times or scores. Each completed level led to a sense of relief rather than satisfaction, and if all I was after was a sense of relief I could achieve that by taking an Aspirin rather than subjecting myself to scores of irritating virtual deaths.

Aaru’s awakening is a gorgeous game with a great story. Due to the sheer difficulty of the game, replayability is very low. Once I got through each level, especially the boss level, I did not want to go back and play it again. As a matter fact it makes you lose interest in the game period.

Aaru’s Awakening could have used a couple of more months in the oven to tweak and test the controls and pace of the game. Who knows, if it’s well supported, those tweaks might be coming and they might actually improve the experience.

Only the hardcore of players will get into it, and even then they will have controller breaking thoughts while playing it.

I loved the art style of Aaru’s Awakening, I loved the story premise it had, and I loved teleporting. I did not love the rest of the gameplay decisions along the way.

If you’re looking for a challenging, fast-paced action platformer should simply flock to games like Velocity 2X or Guacamelee, as both of these titles do everything that Aaru’s Awakening does, only better.

Aaru's Awakening is beautiful from an artistic stand point, but its irregular gameplay makes it a poor videogame.