Valdis Story: Abyssal City

A pretty good, but not great metroidvania. Its a game that has a good core, but also has a lot of small flaws that can often make it frustrating to play.

The game uses a surprisingly deep combat system, featuring melee attacks (including air juggling), spells, allies and focus mode. There is a lot of tools at your disposal. The enemies are tought to fight against, as their projectiles and attacks are fast, and they can be troublesome in groups. Which unfortunatly the game likes to throw groups of enemies at you, at times completly stunning you to death. Its also too chaotic to fight enemies when they are in groups, it ends up being mashing rather than anything else.

The level designed is good, with a lot of secrets you need to backtrack to reach. It doesnt feel like a real world though, even towns feel very segmented and gamey. Its not like metroid for instance, in which you are exploring alien facilities so the labyrinthic level design makes sense, but here it doesnt and its jarring. There is also the issue that the transversal mechanics feel unpolished at times. Stuff like hitboxes and grabbing the edge of cliffs and certain wall jumps frequently fail. Another thing that has no excuse is the absence of a true world map, which just sucks.

The game has a lot of fun boss fights, which tend to have huge health pools and challenging. They are the highlights of the game for me, for their diversity and enjoyability.

I have only beaten the game with 1 of the 4 available characters, each one having different stories and wildly different gameplay styles.

Valdis is a solid metroidvania, but its little flaws all add up and cant be ignored.