Kill...KILL...KILL FOR ARES!!
I just finished Apotheon, that game designed to look like the side of a Greek urn. This sounds like weak praise, but the visuals are the best thing the game has going for it: the stylistic illusion never broke over the 17 hours I played the title, and it makes Apotheon look instantly classical, instantly distinctive - it gives its tale of ancient Greek gods & men this august, timeless feeling that pixels or more lifelike graphics wouldn't. The artists were also very skilled in creating different environments within the style; they're able to evoke locations like a sunlit forest, an overcast seaside town, and a razed, burning village with only a few colors and silhouettes, and the domain of each god is quickly identifiable and in-character.
The game's been labeled as a Metroidvania, but it's not really; Metroidvanias are marked by your character being able to access more areas of the map as they find & unlock movement-based abilities. The upgrades Apotheon hero Nikandreos gets are just stat boosts (and rather menial ones at that). Apotheon's more like a side-scrolling Zelda, with a larger world with optional subquests to discover & complete and gated, self-contained sub-worlds that house your main objectives, which can be tackled, to a certain degree, in any order.
The game's drawn a lot of fire for its controls, which are very...clamory. You have several classes of weapons - melee, ranged, firebombs - and you switch between them by using the analog stick to scroll through your armory via various icons on the lower-right (or, if x360ce isn't working properly, by just going to the inventory screen). Weapons will eventually break - or just be lost, as your character throws freaking everything, even alleged melee weapons - so you can't really get into a rut of relying on one certain weapon type exclusively or finding one hugely powerful ultra-weapon and just maining that; you have to constantly scour battlefields, dead foes, and secret caches for weapons and just make do with what's available. That approach to weaponry is unique & really interesting, and there's a lot of potential depth to combat (with different proficiency levels for different weapon classes, different trajectories for various ranged arms, special abilities like setting an opponent on fire or doing 8x damage if the target is caught unaware), but it's hard to explore, just because encounters are so desperate and the controls are so scattered & cumbersome. Also because, as mentioned, your character just freaking throws everything; I don't think I got into an actual melee fight once in the entire game. (The developer says that his team meant to evoke the desperation and messiness of real combat, and I guess they do, but a bit of fabulism for gameplay's sake wouldn't have hurt here.)
Now, I wasn't controlling the game completely as intended - I was using x360ce to emulate a 360 controller with a PS2 Dualshock, but the analog sticks wouldn't map for some reason, so I didn't have access to this interesting aiming mechanic that seems to give the player a bit of an advantage: if you aim for the head, you'll do more damage; if you aim for the legs, the enemy will collapse, etc. Perhaps, then, it's a bit unfair for me to impugn the game for its combat controls. I can, though, speak up on the platforming, which is a huge pain: the character's too sticky, and his movement is too jittery and imprecise - he's always overrunning his mark. Now, most of the time, this doesn't matter, since there's not a lot of platforming in the game. Where there is a lot of platforming, however, is the final boss battle, which therefore becomes intensely difficult for absolutely the wrong reason. The biggest challenge in the game - I kid you not - was jumping up while under fire onto a couple small platforms, which my character would consistently overrun, or stick to the wrong part prematurely and slide down, or do any number of wrong and horribly catastrophic things from which I was powerless to stop him. Add to this a couple other completely unnecessary control-related frustrations - Nikandreos falling off ladders; Nikandreos spontaneously choosing to put away or just freaking throw away his shield at a stage of the fight where it's absolutely vital; Nikandreos taking his recovery items and, instead of drinking them or using them to repair his armor, electing to throw them at the boss - and the final boss fight, which should have been a satisfyingly titanic struggle, led to John McEnroe levels of "You CANNOT be SERIOUS!!" and other harsher expletives.
(Also, I said I'd lay off weapon-related control complaints, but I didn't much care for how if you run out of ammo or if your weapon breaks mid-battle, Nikandreos will automatically switch to your very best weapon in that class - meaning that he might just start expending those special projectiles you wanted to save for a boss. It'd be nice if you could input a customized weapon hierarchy or something.)
Where the game does triumph is in offering lots of well-thought-out variety in its gameplay scenarios. There's a siege, where you're leading one band of soldiers against another; there's a battle on horseback, if you want (I opted to go on foot, cause horsie can die if it takes too many hits); there's a seafaring bit where you're navigating & exploring a patch of ocean; there's a stage devoid of enemies, where you have to your way through & over nested layers of rotating terrain. Then there's the absolutely fantastic Grand Guignol Agon of Ares, an arena of catacombs couched in rivers of blood where crazed berserkers frantically try to smash each other with stones, pots, and anything they can lay their hands on, all the while shrieking, "Kill...kill...KILL FOR ARES!!" Each of the divine hideouts is appropriately themed and smartly paced at just the right length to be satisfying yet not overstay its welcome. I've played some skimpy indie titles recently, so it's a relief to report that Apotheon is a good, meaty game that doesn't rely on padding for substance.
The portrayal of the gods themselves, though, is spotty. The story is derivative: Zeus is attempting to purge the earth of humanity out of disappointment in their failings, and it's up to the player avatar to wrest control of the world from your sky-father. Though the acting improves considerably in later stages, early on, the gods are all voiced like Saturday morning cartoon villains (though I did like the fluvial demigod who drily observed that he "never did care for the humans, anyway - always urinating in my river"). While the creators know their mythology, and there are some deep cuts like Otus & Ephialtes and the Kourai Khryseai, the game clearly goes for a largely one-sided "corrupt, petulant children" portrayal when it comes to the Olympians. That's not entirely wrong, and there are some interesting portrayals of gods in the game: Persephone gladly surrenders her powers of renewal, as she has grown weary of being separated from her husband for so long every year; an almost survival-horrorish characterization of Apollo during his climactic confrontation effectively paints him as an illuminated but genuinely scary individual, finding fear and darkness in a god personifying pure light. Overall, though, the characterizations are a bit too one-sided for my liking and elide many of the gods' human qualities. (I was intrigued when I learned that Hera was your patron in the game, thinking that we might get a more nuanced portrait of her, but nope.)
Which brings us to my primary issue with Apotheon besides the controls: in many aspects, this is basically just a God of War game. The title shows such imagination and genuine curiosity about ancient Greece & the world of its myths in its art and worldbuilding that I wish it had something greater on its mind than hunting down the gods & killing them. As your list of divine victims grows, shopkeepers cringe in your presence, everyone cries out as to why you're killing their gods, there's an APB out on you and you can't go anywhere without hate-filled eyes watching you and angry threats being issued (though why Zeus doesn't just strike you down flat-out is never addressed). You can also kill innocent passersby with no repercussions, which is de rigeur in too many games nowadays, but disappointing in what in some aspects is trying to be a more thoughtful title - and the shrieking & cowering fear with which the general populace responds to the violence in their midst only intensifies the sense of wrong. The atmosphere got so oppressive that I eventually stopped trying to explore the world altogether, completing only the tasks that would bring me closer to the game's conclusion. The classical era and barbarism go hand in hand, and the Greeks were not known for happy stories, but this is well-worn territory, and I wish it'd been left to the lesser games that generally trod it. There's a lot of quality put into Apotheon, but in the end, I was honestly glad that it was over.
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