Dust: An Elysian Tail (XBLA) review

[PeteJ]

Out now on XBLA for 1200, Dust is one of the highest rated games on the format this year. I'm only a couple of hours in but it is basically Castlevania meets cheesey 80's cartoon, and if you can get passed the art style and voice acting it is very good indeed.

Combat feels very satisfying (if too easy so far - playing on Nomal) and the graphics are really impressive outside of the character art whichis pretty horrible, though once I started seeing it as a old cartoon I started to accept it. Likewise for the voices, which are initially really irritating but I got used to them quite quickly. Animation and attention to detail is staggeringly good and the music seems nice too.

There appears to be a lot of gameplay on offer, with multiple side quests, routes, upgrades and crafting, all of which seems to be nicely implemented. All the more impressive that one guy pretty much did the whole game by himself.

Give it a go!

[Synthesthesia]

Get past the art style? ​That's pretty much the reason I wanted it to begin with!

[PeteJ]

Yeah that probably didn't sound right! The look of the game is lovely other than the character art which is horrible, bit of a weird thing to say but I know what I mean

[EvilBoris]

The character art is atrocious, like something a teenager with a fixation on Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction would draw.

[nakamura]

Nothing wrong with the art. It is just average. Looks a bit like a japanese style thundercats.

[Kaosu]

I ended up playing this in a marathon style session from start to end. Needless to say, even though I was half asleep for the final few hours, I somehow made it up to § Gaius § and then got my ass kicked. It's funny because even on the Tough difficulty, it was pretty easy and then BAM difficulty spike.

How did someone play this for over 40 hours (on leaderborard)? I only made it to half that time doing everything. Yeah, the game is amazing but it's not that long...

[nakamura]

How long is it?

[EvilBoris]

Console Arcade's review said they got 15 hours from it without searching every nook and cranny

[Lebowski]

I'm not sold on the character artwork that displays when talking to the npcs, it detracts massively from the lovely overall look of the game. Its a massive misstep on the designers part, he deserves to be called out on it as its a very overused derivative looney tunes style with really negative links to fury porn.

But if you ignore the artwork missteps it really is a Great game, enjoying the exploration and fighting in this it's great fun.

[EvilBoris]

I did see someone elsewhere decribe the character art as "Deviantart bad"

this is a classic example of what he was describing