Now Playing: Bastion

Bastion is an action-rpg by Supergiant Games, the developers of Transistor and the upcoming Pyre. Bastion was originally released in 2011 to an extremely positive reception, but I wasn’t as enamoured with Bastion as many others, which is why I was somewhat sceptical of Supergiant’s next game – Transistor.

But if you’ve seen my Transistor review, you’ll know I thought that game was pretty damn amazing. So I really wanted to give Bastion another shot to see if it could hook me now in a way that it didn’t at release. So has it? Unfortunately – no.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Like Transistor, the visuals, animation, music and sound of Bastion is fantastic. The world is interesting, with a subtle attention to detail, history and story. You play as ‘the Kid’ who awakens to find his world shattered (quite literally) into pieces. You need to figure out what happened and how to put the world back together again.

Unlike Transistor, however, the story isn’t quite as engaging as its premise. Like the world of Bastion, it’s a fragmented narrative, that despite the wonderful narration, struggles to make an impact until the very end. The story and characterisation is too threadbare and too shallow to illicit much of an emotional reaction.

Which I wouldn’t care too much about if the gameplay of Bastion offered more than it does. The game is split into small, separate levels that take roughly 10-15 minutes each to complete. There’s a good variety of locations and enemies, but the combat itself is rather one-note regardless of which weapon or ability you choose.

And the game does have a decent selection of weapons and abilities, all of which feel different to use, but sadly none of which encourage a different style of play. You’ll earn experience to ‘level up’ which unlocks slots for various boosts in the form of ‘tonics’, and you’ll find (or purchase) upgrades to your weapons. There are also ‘idols’ which add various gameplay modifiers and can be combined to further increase the challenge.

All of this stuff is fine, but the problem is, it’s all slowly unlocked as you progress through the game. Which sounds like a weird thing to say, as I normally like it when a game continually unlocks new mechanics and challenges as I progress. Let me explain – Bastion’s gameplay is basic to say the least. It’s pretty much just a simple button masher with little tactical depth aside from a ‘counter’ mechanic using your shield. It’s functional, but not terribly exciting.

It only begins to become more exciting as you unlock the various weapons, tonics and idols to mix up the core gameplay. But because each level (10-15 minutes) and the game (about 5 hours) is so short, you simply don’t have the time to properly explore or enjoy these new additions before the game is over. There’s no option to replay levels in a single playthrough. The intention is that you’ll begin a New Game+ with all of these items unlocked and ready to use from the start.

But the gameplay of Bastion just isn’t terribly interesting without applying the various modifiers – which you won’t have fully unlocked until the very end. When your game only becomes interesting to play once you’ve finished the damn thing, that’s a bit of a problem.

I can’t say I didn’t have fun playing Bastion again, but my opinion on it hasn’t really changed. Because the initial playful is so painfully average (in terms of gameplay) I’m not exactly desperate to jump into New Game+ even though I know it’ll offer a better overall experience.

This is something Transistor did brilliantly. It offered a satisfying first playthrough, and an even more satisfying second. Bastion, on the other hand, has an initial playthrough that feels like it exists purely to unlock things for New Game+. But I don’t want to be too hard on Bastion because overall, it’s a decent game. I just find its design so frustratingly backwards.

6/10