There’s many areas where you can look up from where you’re stood and see the area you had just passed through, upside down, like you’re in an MC Escher painting. The clouds are not flat, they fold back on themselves and twist around, the camera gracefully following the twists and turns to keep you centred and the surface you’re on beneath you. All the devastated chunks of world are connected by clouds that you skate over to get around, but that doesn’t give justice to the world design. There’s six areas to play through, each one made of crumbling sections of land and buildings as they break apart inside the black hole.
#Solar ash opencritic full
Solar Ash is full of bright neon colour and astonishing, impossible vistas in an almost cel-shaded art style. They also look incredible, the twisted monsters contrasting with the gorgeous world that they preside over. You always feel like an absolute badass when you finish one. They’re meticulously designed and just phenomenal experiences. Just like the smaller anomalies, defeating these creatures is forgiving enough to avoid being overwhelmingly difficult, but challenging enough to feel like you’re always just scraping by. These are longer, far more tense versions of the smaller anomalies, but now you’re skating along the bones on the outside of a gargantuan creature as you hit its weakpoints. Skating along their backs and hitting or grappling to weakpoints as they fly around the world is intense. These bosses are by far and away the most thrilling parts of the game, which is a testament to how excellent they are. While this is happening, each gigantic monster is content to ominously wait in the background for you to be done so they can emerge.
It might be straightforward, but skating and jumping past enemies while also efficiently dispatching them without taking any damage while also jumping between platforms is still satisfying to say the least. The combat here is pretty simplistic, designed to complement the traversal system so you can do both at the same time. You’ll quickly find yourself feeling like a skating genius as you bounce between platforms, grind rails, dodge attacks and slice at enemies all at once (that’s what skaters do, right?). It’s a relief then that it feels incredibly fluid and responsive.
Even when you’re fighting off enemies, if you’re not skating around you’re getting hit, so you’ll basically always be skating. Skating is the operative word here, as movement is the focus of the game. The good news is that this means skating around, stabbing some eyes, and then skating along the back of a gigantic monster made of black goo and bone. Unfortunately, there’s some troublesome anomalies in the way that you’ll have to take care of first. Players take on the role of Rei, a voidrunner intending to save the planet by activating a giant machine called the Starseed. An action platformer set on a crumbling world inside a black hole, Solar Ash is an epic and stylish adventure.
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