Written by: Ian

 

 

 

The first Topatoi game was a decent attempt at a puzzle/ platformer genre-bender. Nearly nine months on, does the first add-on improve on the game, or does it suffer the same flaws?

 

Hopefully with such a long time between episodes, there will be some tasty improvements to the promising original.

 

 

Annoyingly, "Topatoi: Pillar of the Skies" just begins. No cut-scene, not even any text really, explaining why you’ve appeared- you need to really play the first episode, or if you had forgotten the ending, like me, go back and play it again.

 

Either way, there seemed to be far less story exposition than in the first game, less humour- just less of the story at all, whilst the protagonist, Ralph, is just as silent and lacking in personality as before, something Boolat really should have worked upon.

 

 

I criticised the first episode for having poor controls, and slightly wonky physics. Unfortunately, whilst Boolat has obviously made an attempt to fix things, it doesn’t really make a difference.

 

 

There is a new ‘casual’ mode, but turning it on and off didn’t seem to make a radical difference. The GEMMA machine still controls like a load of bricks in mud, and doesn’t allow for some of the precision that the game demands.

 

Talking of which, episode 2 is also significantly more demanding, which I found to be really annoying to be honest. The game gives few tutorials, again presuming you have completed episode one, and the difficulty has been ramped up to the max. Everything from checkpoint distances, to the narrowness of ledges, and the number of enemies in combat is more extreme than episode one, and it made the experience incredibly frustrating compared to episode 1, which was challenging but fair.

 

There is also a much greater emphasis on combat, another puzzling choice, as it’s really bad. It’s basically like sumo wrestling as you slowly push the bad guys off ledges, or a game of dodge as you let them charge off themselves. AI is still idiotic, but the fighting will still cause you plenty of deaths, again, upping the frustrating.

 

 

The physics seem a little better this time round, and some puzzles and platforming can be fun, but overall, the pointless combat and high difficulty really ruin the promise that the first game had- this feels like one step forwards, but three backwards.