Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster Review (Switch)

Well, it’s been at least five reviews since we’ve looked at a Metroidvania game, so it seems only fitting to give Barbarian Saga a proper look. The game is heavily influenced by the swords and sorcery films of the late 80’s such as Conan the Barbarian and Beastmaster (as your character actually is both a barbarian and a beastmaster). After being forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena you decide to break free and with your demonic soul sucking sword, try to free the realm.

We would love to give you some more details of the plot, but the game is borderline nonsensical due to some poor writing and even worse translation. We often thought that whole sections of dialogue must be missing as characters spoke. This isn’t helped by the amount of text there is. Sometimes showing things is a lot better than reams and reams of text to get through.

The confusion goes for navigation as well as the map only gives you quite basic details with each area somewhat hard to distinguish from the next. There are also no markers or direction points, no way to check the progress of ongoing quests, or even a way to check on the controls for new moves you’ve learned. In a game world this big that is a problem. Even Hollow Knight let you put down marker stones.

The thing that most stands out about the game is how absolutely gorgeous it looks. It has a hand drawn art style and the environments and characters are beautifully illustrated. The cut scenes are equally top draw to look at. Unfortunately, when in motion everything seems blurry and a little undefined. Frequent frame rate drops and juddering also hinder any real ability to enjoy the lavish visuals as they jerk around the screen.

Another let down is that while the game initially seems to let you explore anywhere, you’ll soon find that it is continually funnelling you down a pretty narrow path. A lot of the environment leads you to dead ends without anything of value really being there. Metrodivania games have continually refined and moved away from the idea of pointless wandering in recent times but here there is a lot of level here just for the sake of it. You do get fast travel unlocked from the very beginning at least which is something.

Combat is decent enough. You have a strike and a block and new moves can be learned by finding broken weapons and giving them to the appropriate person. A lot of the new attacks don’t really do too much different though and with the frame rate issues the block can be tricky to initiate properly. Enemies are also varied and interesting to encounter and have a wide range of attacks and patterns. Bosses don’t let the side down either with a challenging yet logical approach to defeating them, the game certainly does some things right.

Overall, Barbarian Saga: The Beast Master has some really nice ideas. The look of the game is beautiful. If it could be updated so that when moving, it doesn’t look like a stop motion movie that would be go a long way to improving things. There is a wider issue with the general level design though and the text translation makes it almost nonsensical. With more time this could have been something a lot better but as it is it’s hard to recommend.

Overall 5/10