There’s something refreshing about the way Yello Adventures lays out its map. It’s a Metroidvania that doesn’t mind if you skip chunks of it. See a path winding up through the top of the game screen, and onto a different level? Eh, ignore it if you want. It doesn’t mind if you’d rather take a speedier route through the game.
This is one of several small innovations that Yello Adventures dabbles with. Some of them work, some of them definitely don’t, but we’re glad it’s giving it a rollicking good go. It’s not a game that’s interested in coughing up yet another yawnsome indie platformer or Metroidvania. It’s trying things, and we’d rather more games took this route than the others.
Take the combat. Someone had the fantastic but ultimately daft idea of taking all of the rules and conventions of a first-person shooter, and then stuffing it into a platformer. So, you have a shotgun, and that shotgun has ammo. Rather than picking up crates of ammo to replenish your stocks, the ammo slowly increases over time. And we do mean slowly: you can be waiting a good few seconds before you can shoot an enemy again.
It’s certainly an idea, just not a good one. You are often cornered by too many enemies, having spent all your shells on killing a couple of them. Now, you’re dodging in the hope that you might recover in good time, or you’re backing off and backing off, in an awkward, cowardly dance. The number of shells for your shotgun can be increased, and the damage naturally goes up, but we never received an upgrade that made the sloooow reload faster. In fact, if you’ve upgraded to have more shells, it only takes longer to become fully armed.
Firing is laborious too. Why can’t we hold the fire button and release salvo after salvo? Presumably it’s because we’d be hitting zero shells pretty darn quickly. But it does mean a spot of carpal tunnel as we tap-tap-tap the RT button in an effort to kill an enemy. It’s all tediously manual.
We’ll complain a bit more. The shotgun has a recoil, because of course it does. Except this is a reasonably precise little platformer, so shooting an enemy can often mean that the force of the shot pushes you off your perch. There’s very little that’s as frustrating as killing an enemy, but finding yourself punctured by spikes.
Wait, wait: there’s the bosses too. These are hellspawn – absolute buggers of the highest order. They are balanced to be incredibly hard, and the first one drops in barely fifteen minutes into the game. It’s a fascinating decision, as we hit a wall and it took us a solid week to get over it. We’d pick it up and have a go, pretty much every day, until finally – miraculously – we beat it. Out of curiosity, we checked the percentage of players who beat the boss, and it was surprisingly low for this kind of game. We breathed a sigh of relief: we weren’t the only ones.
But this difficulty sustains pretty constantly through all the bosses. The number one reason for that difficulty is that – for inexplicable reasons – they deal in one-hit kills. If they land a single significant hit on you, you’re kaputski. It doesn’t matter how many hearts you’ve upgraded, you’re a goner – which makes the whole unlocking hearts thing particularly useless. When they’re multi-phased, demanding and often unleashing rounds of bullet-hell projectiles, well, it can get a tad disheartening.
But you know what? For all its flaws, we couldn’t help admiring Yello Adventures. It’s got the courage of its convictions, and it’s going to try new stuff out, even if it gets handed a 3 out of 5 in the review.
As we’ve mentioned, the layout of the levels is fab. It takes a step back and says ‘have at it’, giving you multiple options for ploughing forward. One of them will be the critical path, leading to the boss, while others are more side-questy, with upgrades waiting at the end. Which is which? You won’t know until you’ve rinsed them. It’s a structure that might have completionists crying, but we really enjoyed the lightweight handholding.
Plus the level design is pretty good. There’s nothing sensational in there – having finished Garlic, we’d have loved some of its weirdo magic dust sprinkled everywhere – but it’s just refined, well thought out and clever. There’s a lot of lever-hitting, as you scamper over to the door that has now been opened, and deliberating over which one to hit first. It’s not going to trouble Mensa or get you stuck, but the different biomes are varied enough, new obstacles get stirred in pretty regularly, and there’s plenty of upgrades to find.
On balance, we’d say the positives balance out the negatives. The one-hit kills and reload-recoil combo made us deeply, deeply sad, but there was enough in the level design to tease us onward. We bounced from loving to hating Yello Adventures, which makes for a conflicted recommendation.
If you want more platforming games to take risks, then invest in Yello Adventures. It will return the favour by frustrating the hell out of you, but hey – that’s the price of progress.
