It’s not easy for a country to crawl out from underneath the shadow of a corrupt ruler. All that misused power has consequences and it’s even worse when the ruler can imprison his enemies and curse them with immortality. The king is long gone and the land much happier now, but there’s still a lingering darkness in Archvale’s world. The seven stones making up the arch are scattered across the land and guarded by the Undying, which as it turns out is only a semi-accurate name for them. Time won’t kill the Undying but a good strong weapon might just do the trick, if only you’re able to survive the intense bullet storms and other attack patterns long enough.
Archvale is what happens when a standard action-RPG is fused with a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter. A silent hero wakes up deep in a crypt and sets out into the world, and the only thing we know about them is they’re a child of Archvale in search of the stones to create the gateway home. The dark and gloomy tutorial dungeon equips them with the first weapon, which is a cheap wooden sword that’s still strong enough to send out a shockwave of force several feet past the tip of the actual blade, and then it’s off into the bright and cheerful world above to get the first hints of the challenge ahead. Happy slimes and cute crows aren’t much of a threat, but still manage to toss off a bullet or two, and it doesn’t take long to need to pay as much attention to dodge as attack.
Like any good bullet hell the best strategy is to not be where the bullets are, but when that doesn’t work the dodge mechanic provides a small window of safety. It’s the standard zippy dash covering a decent amount of ground, useful for its small window of invulnerability as well as the being able to cross holes in the stage. Each area of the map is a series of arenas crawling with enemies, and the relatively-peaceful fields of the starting area soon give way to an amber forest, caverns, swamps, volcano, and just about every other biome gaming has seen. While not fully open world, because some areas are tougher than the current weapons and armor will easily allow while others have requirements for entry, there’s usually a couple of different sections to explore at any given time.
What makes this properly impressive is that not only are there more biomes than arch pieces, with a few acting as pass-through areas on the way to the next objective, but that each one has its own set of enemies with their own attack patterns. Add in that each of the arch dungeons has its own enemy set as well, plus a good number of bonus bosses scattered throughout the world, and there’s a huge amount of shooting variety waiting to tear apart an unprepared adventurer. A prepared adventurer, on the other hand, can charge into an area that’s technically too difficult at the moment and gather up enough materials to craft a weapon with more punch than would normally be available. It also helps that death is an inconvenience rather than full setback, with the adventurer respawning at the last save fountain with half the gold but all collected materials intact.
Each area has its own set of materials to gather, some dropped by enemies and others in piles of ore dotting the arenas. Once you’ve got a piece of ore the crafting recipes for everything that use it open up, ready to create at the anvil in the nearest town. If you can survive an area Archvale is generous with its supplies, providing more than enough material to craft everything, but it’s best to focus seeing as inventory space is limited. There’s a good variety of weapons and armor, most of which is craftable while some is only available in shops, and a big part of surviving the crazed bullet patterns is figuring out what kind of build you want.
Weapons come in three varieties: melee, ranged and magic. Armor can either provide a high straight defense or slightly weaker defense balanced with a bonus to a type of weapon damage or other stat enhancement. Finally, badges give special ability perks, such as dropping a bomb after a dash or upping the odds of enemies dropping health when yours gets low. It takes a while for character builds to get properly complicated, seeing as money can be tight in the early stages before finally getting the idea that being able to teleport instantly from one save-fountain to another means that the bank back in town is only a few seconds away at any given time, but once you’ve got a nice collection of stuff you can be a warrior one moment and mage the next. It’s just a matter of equipment, and whether you feel like beating on things with the swoosh-force of a sword, toss throwing axes across the arena, or playing with the huge variety of shot patterns from the various magical staves and books is just a matter of choice. It also helps that the weapon bar holds eight items at once, so even if your gear is mage-centric you can still break out a sword or boomerang if the situation requires it.
The huge variety of everything is what makes Archvale work, whether that be weapons, bosses or monsters, and the writing is a good amount of fun too when chatting with the handful of people in each of the small towns. The gameplay can be a bit too chaotic for its own good sometimes, usually when entering a new room for the first time and not able to form any kind of plan of attack before the bullets show up from every direction, but health is plentiful and there’s usually a save fountain a few rooms back. Save fountains also fully restock health when used while also resetting the monsters, so there’s a constant risk/reward of wanting to push on further rather than retreat to safety and fight back to the current position again. The only real downside is that the inventory system is a mess, desperately in need of shortcuts to send old unwanted equipment to the trash can or logically arrange items. There are shortcuts to equip items or move to storage but other than that inventory management involves a whole lot of tapping, frequently while the stats for one item are overlaid on another.
Closing Comments:
Archvale is a fantastic genre hybrid, easily merging the shooter and RPG elements together to create a ridiculously playable adventure. The difficulty level always feels right on the verge of being hard without actually crossing the line too often, and even if a boss encounter requires several attempts, another chance starting from full health at the save point is right nearby. It’s an inviting level of difficulty that pushes you to be faster, zipping through the bullets with a well-timed dash while throwing the firepower back using whatever options you’ve created with the current loadout. Even if things feel a little much there’s generally somewhere else to explore or a new weapon to craft, and usually a small change is all it takes to get back on track again. Archvale focuses on intense fantasy-RPG shooting action and giving the player all the tools necessary to handle it their way, and the result is a game that’s next to impossible to put down until the last arch stone is collected and even then maybe not. There’s never a bad time to test out Hardcore mode’s bigger maps and denser bullet patterns, after all.
