I saw a trailer for this about a month before it came out, and this looked really interesting. The gameplay looked to have some heavy Actraiser vibes, with it being a platformer, but having some form of RTS-ish gameplay too. So I was really excited to give this one a try.

Not much else to say for an intro, so let’s jump into it!

Developer: X Plus
Publisher: DANGEN Entertainment
Release date: April 22nd 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer and also tower defense

In this game you play as Eve. The one from the bible. One day Adam and Eve are minding their own business, and suddenly the Garden of Eden gets nuked the fuck up. Eve falls down a giant hole to a place that the other protagonist, Smelter, calls the Rumbly Lands. I guess it’s hell, I dunno. Smelter is this a flying green… thing… He flootipoos with Eve so that she’s wearing him like armor, and he promises to help her find Adam who he believes is still alive, if Eve will help him retake control over the Rumbly Lands, by getting the 9 Doma Runes, separated in 3 different regions of the Rumbly Lands. That’s about it, there’s a pretty obvious twist in there but I won’t spoil.

So how this game works is that, if you’re outside of side-scrolling levels, you fly around in a bird’s eye view of the Rumbly Lands. You can move around in all 8 directions (actually more but it is 2D), and with the right analog stick you can shoot like in a twin-stick shooter. The Rumbly Lands are set in a square grid. With resources you get automatically, you can build roads between squares, and when you do you can build buildings on those spaces as well. There’s a few building types. There’s houses, which gets you Zirms (basically the residents of the Rumbly Lands) which you can somewhat command. There’s a building that I don’t even remember what it is. If you command a Zirm to it, it produces 5 apples. You need apples to get more Zirms from houses (note: apples aren’t core apples… just for some confusion). There’s barracks, a useless thing that doesn’t shoot projectiles, but it does attack ground troops. There’s outposts, which is like barracks except it shoots at enemies from a distance. There’s another one I didn’t get. There’s blueprints hidden in several of the levels, if you get them all there’s another tower that shoots stuff I guess.

So at first you do get access to 3 levels, one for each region. After beating any of these, you get access to the next area of that region (or at least the ability to break certain rocks, so you may need to complete another region to get access to the next area of the region). This will lead to needing to build stuff, fight off enemies, and do some kind of task to unlock the next level of the region, which usually requires you to defend structures. You do that by shooting with the analog stick, of course, but you also probably need to place some outposts so you have other people also shooting at enemies. This is an interesting thing, but also I feel it lacks depth. It wants to do the Actraiser thing of going between strategy/simulation and action platformer, but the strategy part is… a bit lacking. A quick note as far as strategy, once you clear an area in a region, just remove all the defensive towers and replace them with houses and the apple structures. The more Zirms you have, the more HP you have in platforming levels. There may be a bit of “strategy” at some point with the placement of the apple towers, but it’s not really much of a thing.

Also there’s the heart in the middle of the Rumbly Lands, you can power that up with certain resources. Some from the platforming levels, some from the strategy areas. This allows you to upgrade the houses so they produce more Zirms, and it makes you stronger in platforming levels in some ways.

So the platforming levels. They’re fine. At first you start with basic Smelter, who is based around the orange Doma Rune’s moveset. Eve can jump (and wall jump) and attacks with punches and kicks. Smelter can also “Smelt”, which makes him reach out a ghostly green hand, which can activate certain switches, swing across certain things, activate checkpoints, grab items from far away, and enemies randomly grow green when you kill them which allows you to smelt them for HP recovery. Basically if a thing has a green border, you can smelt it. And you have a dash. If I have any complaints with the base controls, it would be how weirdly floaty the jump is. It feels a bit delayed and you stick to walls a bit too easily. You get used to it, but I think it’s worth noting when jumping doesn’t feel quite right in a platformer.

What I mentioned about the orange Doma Rune is basically that you can switch between 3 movesets. The orange one (Gurabi) has the punches and kicks. There’s a blue-ish one (Eremagu) that has an electric whip of sorts that you’ll never end up using because the punches are better. And there’s a slightly-paler-blue-ish one (Nutoro) that has a chargeable projectile weapon… Each moveset gets upgrades in their first levels. The Gurabi moveset gets a ground pound, double jump, high jump and can transform you into stone to not be affected by heavy wind. The Eremagu moveset get’s a long jump if you dash and jump and can run up walls, and a very short-range teleport dash (that recovers faster if you use it to go through electricity). The Nutoro moveset, alongside the bullets, gives you the ability to hover (which lets you get push by upwards air currents), air dash and phase through attacks and certain barriers for a second.

What’s annoying with all these movesets… first the colors are a bit too similar on Eremagu and Nutoro, so I kept mixing them up (an actual accessibility issue in a game, wow). Second… you get all those different kind of jumps that you need a specific form to do, but it’s just really annoying to always be switching just to jump differently. And I guess some of this is just an association issue. Why does the rock one (Gurabi) have a double jump, but if you’re using the lightning one (Eremagu) you can do nothing with the jump button once you’re in the air? It’s just weird, you know. I wish you could just do all the jumps regardless, and the weapon switch actually being a weapon switch (and special skill switch) and not an… everything switch.

So I’ve been talking about the things you can do, but not really the actual game design. This is a pretty straightforward platformer. You just go from point A to point B. You kill enemies on the way. You do have infinite lives, so if you die you just go back to the last checkpoint. There’s some weird enemy placement here and there, but overall it makes sense. Some stages have fun gimmicks like having alternate worlds where the level design changes and you have to switch between worlds. There’s Megaman X-style wall sliding/jumping, which works pretty well. Levels aren’t just linear though, as there’s pickups all over the place. There’s these big crystals to destroy that give some resources for the strategy segments. There’s core apple which you can use to upgrade the heart. There’s the blueprints which I mentioned already. And there’s trials. These are mostly pretty good platforming challenges (some of them are absolute bullshit though), where you have to get to the end with some challenge, like not dying (duh), not getting hit, or going fast. These give you coins. At the end of a level there’s usually a boss, and most of them are actually quite well designed. There’s usually a weapon that works better on them, though I do find that charging up the Gurabi’s punch is so strong you might as well do that unless that’s not possible.

Those coins I mentioned are the last element I really have to talk about. There’s structures in the strategy gameplay you can build a road to. If you have enough coins, you get a skill tree upgrade. These will basically upgrade one of your base moves on the Doma Rune based on that area. So the Gurabi area will upgrade your punchy form, and so on. This can be adding charged attacks, making your jumps better and such stuff. So as you progress through the game you do get mildly stronger, and there is incentive to actually do the trials. I call that good game design.

Overall

This was okay. Not quite at the level of the first Actraiser, both in the platforming and strategy gameplay. The strategy is too simple overall (and sometimes just annoying), and the platforming, while more complex than Actraiser, has some problems and isn’t quite as tight.

That said it is still a pretty fun game, the platforming is generally well done though it has some issues with the rune switching, the levels are generally really good, and the bosses are mostly great. It has a lot of good ideas, and many of them are well executed.

With this and Sol Seraph, I’m happy we have a few new Actraiser-likes, but I wish they were a bit more… interesting. Like having the strategy part being more interesting, and experimenting with combining the 2 gameplay styles in more unique ways.

Overall I give this a recommendation, maybe at a discount.

No I don’t know what flootipoo means.