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You’re never doing any one thing for too long. I never once thought “It would be nice if I could fire five arrows instead of just four,” especially considering how fast arrows regenerate.įighting baddies isn’t all you’ll be doing in Bridge of Spirits, and the fact that it balances combat, platforming, puzzle solving, and exploration so well is one of its strongest suits. Three of the four melee upgrades are abilities that feel like Kena should have from the outset (two dashing attacks and an overhead slam while in the air) the post-parry counterattack doesn’t feel much stronger than just attacking while the opponent is recoiling, and many other upgrades are just small and barely noticeable incremental improvements.
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You can upgrade your moves, but the impact of those upgrades is disappointing to say the least. Bridge of Spirts’ progression system doesn’t provide very many enticing options to evolve your fighting style, and made me feel pigeonholed in my approach to combat – especially because there’s one melee weapon, and that weapon never really got much better or different as I continued to play. That said, it would have been nice to have a little more to do in a fight. There’s rarely more than two of these healing spots in any given scrap were, which makes every bit of damage you take incredibly significant, and often you have to make the call of whether you want to use your courage to be able to survive another hit, or use it to cash in a bunch of damage on an immobile enemy or boss. Not only can you use Courage to lockdown enemies with the Rot, but you also need to use it to heal by cleansing specific areas in a fight.
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You also have to manage your resources very carefully in battle once the difficulty starts to ramp up significantly later on in the campaign. That’s exactly how it should be in a game like this. There’s an impressive amount of enemy variety, and once they started showing up to the party I felt like I was constantly being challenged by new and interesting scenarios. Whether that’s making use of your bow’s time slowdown by jumping into the air and aiming at hard-to-hit weak points, using a parry against an attack that’s difficult to dodge, or using your Rot to immobilize a tough enemy so you can attack them from behind. What really redeems Bridge of Spirits’ combat is that after a while it begins to introduce new enemy types that strongly encourage you to change up your tactics and explore some of the subtleties of its limited tools. Combat options were so limited, in fact, that I actually was pretty let down in the early goings because most enemies could be killed with just one or two light attack combos, and I wasn’t given much reason to do anything else for a lot longer than I’d have liked in a game that only lasts about nine hours. that’s about it in terms of your primary offensive tools, from beginning to end. You’ve got light attacks, heavy attacks, and the ability to use your staff as a bow for ranged attacks, and. It’s fast-paced, deceptively simple, and surprisingly challenging on the normal difficulty level given its cutesy and colorful demeanor. It’s very simple and formulaic, but it works elegantly: each area is home to a corrupt spirit that Kena needs to save, and as you explore the region you meet other characters who were close to the spirit, learn about the history of how things went wrong for them, find their personal effects, watch flashbacks, and then everything culminates in a boss fight that ties a nice little bow on the story arc.Ĭombat, on the other hand, is absolutely nothing like Zelda’s. Each zone will then require you to collect X amount of Y item, fight a boss, and then snag an upgrade that lets you travel to and explore the next zone. She struggles to uncover the secrets of this forgotten community hidden in an overgrown forest where wandering spirits are trapped.In many ways, Bridge of Spirits is a throwback to the classic 3D Zelda style of games of having a large overworld that’s split up into major zones, and then guiding you through them in a linear fashion. Kena, a young Spirit Guide, travels to an abandoned village in search of the sacred mountain shrine. Summary Specifications User reviews (0) Collections (57) News Forum
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