Actraiser Renaissance (Switch) Review

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I only had the chance to try out Actraiser back in the day, never actually sat down to play it, so I go into this without any real thoughts on the matter. And the first thing I want to bring up is that I don't think calling this game (The remake at least) a City Building game is accurate. The way you are constructing your city is far more like a tower defense game. I'll get more into that, but that's how I'm going to be looking at this game as a result, half Tower Defense and half Side-Scrolling Action game. I did play through the game on Normal Difficulty.

You take on the role of The Lord of Light. After having been asleep for so long, you wake up and now try to guide humanity and protect them from The Lord of Dark. The overall plot doesn't get any more complicated than that, but there are some interesting short-term plots focused on each area's champion, but I'll get to that. They don't matter beyond their area, however.

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The game is broken up into two sections. When the Lord of Light descends to the planet, you play through Side-scroller levels and defeat demons that are too powerful for mortals to handle. Simple controls with an attack, a magic button, jump, and a dodge/dash. There are a fair few re-skinned enemies, but not enough to start feeling lazy. Every new area has enough new enemies and quirks to their level design that keeps each area feeling fun and fresh. This doesn't hold for the Enemy Spawner levels, however. I'll talk about how you get to those when I get to the Tower Defense portion, but the Spawner areas play like the normal stages, but they take place in a small room. The room will constantly spawn enemies until you destroy the Spawner, but the issue is you can largely ignore every other enemy on screen with little issue. Most of the Spawner fights are just you standing in a small portion of the map smacking away until it dies. A few maps are a bit more than that, but most of them are just tedious. Thankfully none of them take too long.

Now to the second section of the game, building your towns. Use magic to destroy obstetrical on the map, tell the people how to expand the settlement. This will give you more space to place forts, and they will naturally just build structures that spawn resources (HP Recovery, Mana Recovery, and Materials). Once you have placed forts and guided the town, however, the game does slow down a lot. You fly around as the Angel who acts as the medium between the world and The Lord of Light. Largely you are just slowly poking away at demons that fly around and prevent them from blowing up parts of your town. Of course, you can just sit back and wait for them to rebuild, there isn't a drawback to this happening. You wait for supplies to build up so you can upgrade or build forts, wait for mana to spawn (Small bits come back when you kill an enemy), wait for the population to grow, you are just sitting there waiting a lot until you can do what it is you want. That is the biggest problem of the game, a lot of waiting around doing very little in these portions.

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When quests become available, you can start clearing out the spawners that cause monsters to appear over your town. Simply select the quest then you can descend and destroy the spawner. Other quests involve almost no involvement on your part, like collecting a certain number of fruits from your farms, meaning you just sit there and wait for them to spawn. Doing quests gets you Faith, which powers up The Lord of Light, and Tombs used to power up the Prophesied Heroes.

Hordes are the final thing to note in terms of mechanics, when they attack this is where the game becomes a Tower Defense game. Portals will open up around the map and enemies will start to come from them. Your variety of forts will set in place once a horde invades, but the angle can use its magic, the same spells you can use to clear obstacles. They all do damage but have varying effects like slowing down enemy movement or attacks. You have limited MP based on your level, though you can get more SP from farms. You can also place temporary barricades to slow enemies down. The final thing you can do is direct your Prophesied heroes and move them around where they are needed most. This is where you have to take account of your resources available to come out on top in some of the harder maps, you need to be sure to defend your temple. Flying enemies can bypass normal forts, and need to be hit with either mage towers or block towers, and you have a limited amount of forts you can build. It's the highlight of the overworld portion of the game.

As far as the different areas go, the story is carried by brief story arcs for each hero. They are all pretty small, and most of them are just okay. That said, a couple of the heroes are really interesting and get you invested in their story, however short they are. Mirgana of Aitok being my absolute favorite. It's a shame that you just watch the story unfold as you do all the above stuff, you don't really interact with it directly at all, but they are fun to watch regardless.

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The game isn't all that hard playing through on normal, but at the same time, you do need to take some time to think through what it is you are doing. A few bosses being an exception (Pharoh), I at least felt like the actual effort was required to progress. I kind of wish I played through on hard though, because it didn't feel like much of a challenge on normal.

I can't comment on how faithful the game is to the original, what I can say is it's a solid and fun experience. There are a lot of times you end up sitting around waiting for things to happen, which can really drag down the pacing of the game, but overall what works about it works well. It's just a solid overall experience, and if you like Side Scrollers, Tower Defense, and a little bit of city building, you are likely going to enjoy the game despite the flaws.

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