[h1] Review - Schatte ～The Witch and the Fake Shadow～ [/h1]
[h1] RATING: 4.0 / 10 - Magical Loli Walking Simulator[/h1]
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[h1] Overview [/h1]
Schatte is a 3D adventure / platformer game where you will impersonate a Shadow Witch on a quest to find the evil Shadow Demon and seal it again, because apparently someone broke the seal (duh) and so now horror and untild terror has spread through the land, also changing its inhabitants and creatures into vile monsters. Pretty much, an old school inspired platformer, but in many things overly simplistic and bland; the mechanics the developers have thaught are somewhat brilliant, but they are not fully used to their potential and that is the main reason this game falls quite short.
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[h1] Gameplay Analysis [/h1]
[b] General Gameplay [/b]
In Schatte the main gameplay will consist of traversing various stages filled with enemies and environmental obstacles, using your magic abilities to overcome them all and proceed. The distintive feature this title has is its "shadow manipulation" mechanics: the protagonist will always be followed by a sentient, pretty annoying lantern bat which casts a large light on the battlefield, said tool is used to project shadows of objects and enemies for our heroine to use.
Magic skills used this way are: Shadow Stomp, which basically is a jump which if used inside the shadow of an enemy damages him, and the only form of damaging attack at your disposal, then we have Shadow Walk, which allows Schatte to traverse inside shadows in the form of a magical glowing sphere, rendering her immune to all damage and consuming Mana for the duration, next we have got Shadow Daggers, which are knives she can throw inside shadows of enemies or moving obkects to temporarily freeze them in time, and last there is Shadow Puppet, that allows Schatte to take control of a defeated enemy and use its abilities until Mana runs out.
Levels in Schatte are not at all complex as you could expect from a modern platform with such price tag, but instead are really streamlined and piloted, there almost is zero side-exploration and secrets to find, you just have to roam around the level, defeat enemies for more Xp and less annoyance, solve some puzzles with your abilities (said enigmas are simple and quite boring) in order to gt to the end of the stage. The only form of loot are some manuscripts and rare Experience Potions that will give you respectively, some lore to read or a great boost to your next character level, which by the way only enhanches your HP/MP and Shadow abilities slightly, with no other form of Skills or direct progression whatsoever.
[b] Combat System [/b]
I will be quite blunt, the combat in Schatte is not really on par even for a platformer. Reasons are simple: first of all, you can stun any enemy quite often with the Dagger ability, usually the stun time is around 5-6 seconds, that is an awful lot of time to jump 2-3 times in its shadow and defeat it without a sweat; Abilities consume few mana points so they can be used almost indefinitely, given also the fact each enemy defeated gives some supplies like Health, Mana and XP; Enemies are weak and slow, can be kited around without effort and just stunned again and again until defeated.
So far the only 2 boss fights encountered were bland and boring, bosses being little more than normal enemies, with a unique model of course and a lot more health (around 10 jumps), but slow and dumb all the same, resulting in easy and bland boss fights, deprived of any special rule, unique enemy skill, or anything challenging put into them.
Defeating enemies becomes a chore and annoyance, even the XP reward that should stimulate character progression is meaningless, because leveling up is automated and thereare no skill trees, statistics or any other form of character development manageable by the player.
[b] Content [/b]
If we talk about longevity per se, the game should last around say, 5-6 hours, it depends a lot how much you die since checkpoints are at the beginning of each stage, so you gotta do it all from the beginning if you manage to die, which can happen but is quite hard. Oh yes, also, the biomes and tiles for environments are ALWAYS very similar, so transitions between various environments and levels are not very marked, it will always get you the feeling of being in the same place.
If we talk about gameplay content, we are on very bad levels, there is no loot system, no direct character progression system, enemies are basic and dull, no secrets or secondary map paths, really borderline insufficent.
[b] Balancing [/b]
The player is ridiculously overpowered compared to enemies, that is pretty much it.
[b] Challenge [/b]
The biggest obstacles are environmental ones, in some bad luck you definitely can die in the middle of a poison lake because the shadow you were traveling on moved faster than you, but challenge from enemies? That is not even found.
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[h1] Technical Analysis [/h1]
[b] Graphics [/b]
Textures are barely sufficent on the main character and models in general, there is an evident lack of polish and low-quality in environmental textures, also a lack of any advanced mask or shader to speak of. Light effects are alright and that is good since the entire game mechanics revolve around shadows cast by light sources. Meshes and model complexity is also barely decent, main character is decently done as her companion, enemies are sufficent, while environment and props are in some cases low quality. There are no environmental effects, partciles, or anything like that, the environments in fact look dead, stale and not at all alive and atmospheric.
[b] Sound [/b]
The soundtrack is one of the most annoying i heard in the recent years, and without any option in the menu to individually decide SFX, Music and other audio options (actually there is no Audio panel at all, i got to use the Windows mixer!) it can really become annoying. The sounds of enemies and other stuff are barely decent and in some cases comical.
[b] Performance [/b]
Nothing to report, runs quite fine.
[b] Stability [/b]
Nothing to report.
[b] AI [/b]
As you can expect from a platform game, enemy Ai is a simple chase and attack script, no big deal here, Boss AI could and should have been better to stimulate challenging and exciting fights, but that is not the case.
[b] Quality of Life [/b]
Controls are quite ankward even with a gamepad, you can definitely get a hang of it, there are no particular Quality of Life problems to speak of.
[b] Bugs / Issues [/b]
You definitely can run off the map if you really try and climb some mountains. Apart from this, nothing else.
