PlayStation 4 Review Code Provided by Stormind Games and Team17
Batora: Lost Haven is a new game made by Italian indie developer Stormind Games and publisher Team17 that recently launched on October 20th and we previously covered here. I received the chance to review Batora: Lost Haven for the PS4 and can say it was an excellent experience.
Batora: Lost Haven is a story-driven action RPG, where your choices affect the outcome of the game’s story and weigh on your conscience. Stormind Games has previously made two action horror games, Remothered: Broken Porcelain and Remothered: Tormented Fathers. I was slightly wary going into Batora: Lost Haven as Broken Porcelain received mixed reviews whereas Tormented Fathers had done slightly better, but either way, a story-driven action RPG is a big departure from their previous work. I can only say I was pleasantly surprised with how enjoyable I found Batora: Lost Haven.
However, I will say there exists a fair amount of rough edges in regard to some small bugs related to the UI, but nothing I found was game-breaking. Despite the rough edges I still loved my playthrough of Batora: Lost Haven.
Story
Batora: Lost Haven centers around the main character Avril and her adventures with her friend Mila. In the recent past, large sections of Earth have been destroyed due to a cataclysm of unknown origin. Living in her destroyed city, Avril begins to hear strange voices in her dreams which lead her to a strange alter of godlike beings known as Sun and Moon, who gift Avril their powers and blessing and send her on a mission to different planets in order to restore the balance and heal the Earth. Mila gets dragged along, and the two adventure through different planets as Avril grows and matures while being forced to make extremely hard decisions that challenge her and the player’s morals.
A large focus of Batora: Lost Haven is on the choices the player makes to progress the story. When Avril is confronted with a decision that will affect the story it is presented as one of two karmic paths; that of the Defender or the Conqueror. The game makes a point that there are no good or bad choices as some on either side will seem wise or stupid, but both will change the story of the game. Choices affect Avril’s Karmic balance and will tilt her towards one or the other which will affect the ending of the game as well as Avril’s future choices. The game does offer you the chance to reflect on your choices before you make your final and biggest choice, but your past choices will still affect your ending even if you choose the opposite karmic choice of your current leaning at the end.
Gameplay
As mentioned above story and karmic choices have an effect on the story but your choices will also affect gameplay. Avril can equip runes that increase her stats with her karma points, which she gains based on the choices she makes. Runes are easily changeable for on-the-fly adjustments to character build, but the options are limited by what runes you buy, find, earn through story actions, and what karma points you have. All karma points are earned naturally as the story progresses. As Avril levels up her base stats do go up, but most of her advancement is a part of the rune system.
Aside from using runes to affect your character build, combat is a key part of the game. Avril is empowered by the deities Sun and Moon, and as such switching between her sun and moon forms is the basis of Batora: Lost Haven’s combat system. Avril’s sun form is orange-themed and focused on melee combat whereas her moon form is purple and focused on ranged combat. Each form has four abilities with cooldowns, each has a dash, a basic attack that combos, a shield, and an area-of-effect (AoE) attack. In addition, the sun form can jump and slam in a specific area for huge damage, whereas the moon form can create a vortex to damage and drag enemies. Aside from her basic abilities, Avril can heal and buff herself after hitting enemies enough, and there are a few special runes that upgrade specific abilities.
In regards to actual combat, it is fast-paced with multiple playstyles. Basic enemies come in three varieties, orange, purple, or both. Orange enemies like Avril, are melee and take more damage from Avril’s Sun form and less from her Moon form, and purple enemies are ranged and do the opposite. Enemies that are both colors take equal damage and use both types of attacks until they are at low health, where they swap to the opposite color from whichever of Avril’s attacks took them over the threshold. In addition, Avril has a health bar for each of her forms, and if either one falls to zero it's game over. Orange enemies and orange attacks from mixed-color enemies will damage her orange health bar, with the opposite for purple. Avril will also take more damage from enemies that are the opposite color to whatever form she is currently in. All of this adds up to fast combat with frequent changes of form leading to quick and skill-intensive changes from melee to ranged combat and back all while making use of separate skill cooldowns for each form.
There are also short puzzle sections that are generally solved by timing and switching between forms that serve to break up the gameplay and add some variety and calm to the game.
The UI is quite easy to use although there are a few harmless display bugs on the PS4 version at least that don’t affect gameplay. In the UI you can equip and unequip runes that you have bought from various shop owners or earned yourself. It is easy to use, but the codex tab has a visual glitch with the mouse pointer. The most annoying part of the game, on PS4 at least, is that the loading screen after death is rather long and annoying if you are stuck on a boss or part of a level.
Audio and Visual
Sound effects for combat and fighting are clear, easily convey effects and timing, and sound great. The background music isn’t the most detailed or expressive and a lot more could have been done with it considering how focused the game is on storytelling. On the whole, the music is largely forgettable or absent. Batora: Lost Haven is however fully voice acted with great attention paid to the quality of the voice acting, the only complaint I have is the dialogue and design for one of the alien species you encounter can only be described as cutesy lizard Jar-Jar’s, but with a weird mix of jungle native and Asian stereotypes. The portrayal isn’t anywhere near as offensive as Jar-Jar thankfully, and really comes across as what Italian developers think of giving a level a vaguely Asian theme. There are no accents or speech patterns that resemble anything offensive but the word choice will be purposefully silly unlike any of the other aliens you meet.
For visuals Batora: Lost Haven, is a beautiful game with lots of attention paid to the environment and characters. The 3D style of the world is complemented by the 2D character representations that appear next to dialogue boxes while characters speak. There are some aspects of the visuals that are particularly rough, however. The sandstorms and wind in the desert level look particularly egregious as well as similar mist graphics that appear later. Thankfully these are limited to very small parts of the game, and on a whole, the game is gorgeous and artfully designed.
Replayability
Batora: Lost Haven is designed for replayability, after you beat the game, New Game+ begins as you start the game again but at your previous level and karma points. Runes earned from story choices are kept and all abilities and skills are unlocked from the start. Enemies are scaled to your level and combat difficulty is harder. You are able to completely redo the story and your choices, and the game also shows you which choice you have previously made. Batora: Lost Haven is designed for the player to play through multiple times to see how different actions would affect the outcome, while still challenging the player and increasing the difficulty without forcing them to start from level one over and over again if they wish to see different endings.
What It Could Have Done Better
Honestly Batora: Lost Haven could have spent some more time with the QA team, as some bugs and visuals are annoying and still clearly rough compared to the rest of the game. It’s is not however terrible or game-breaking so I can see why it was released. I’m not fond of the weird mix of stereotypes that the lizard aliens are, I assume it’s from a game design choice where the team wanted to give the level a Chinese or Asian mythology theme, and pulled from various existing sources to create it. But as a game made by a group of Italians, it just comes off as strange.
The one big thing that happened was halfway through the epilogue of the game, I couldn’t proceed to the next dialogue box of a discussion despite the game still being able to pause and unpause. Luckily I was able to reload to the scene after I defeated the final boss but before the current bugged scene, as any time I reloaded the current bugged scene, whenever I got to the same dialogue box it glitched again. By reloading to the pre-epilogue scene I was able fix the bug by presumably having the game load a separate instance of the scene from my previous save. In the end, the bug was easily fixable, but it does need mentioning as it could theoretically happen to other dialogue events, although I believe it's limited to those specific circumstances.
Verdict
For the price of $25, or $20 with the current sale, I would say Batora: Lost Haven is an absolute steal! I got 9 hours of gameplay out of it in just my first playthrough, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Batora. The twist and turns of the story combined with the addicting combat and clever puzzles left me wanting more and I can’t wait to see if we get a sequel sometime in the future. For now, I will have to satisfy myself by trying out all the other story routes.
Batora: Lost Haven is available now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S consoles, and will be coming to Nintendo Switch at a later date.
