Subaeria Review

Subaeria is a procedurally generated top down puzzle platformer that can be likened (ignoring graphical style) to game like The Binding of Isaac. While I've mentioned it, the graphical style of Subaeria is actually quite nice and colourful.

Subaeria in its simplest form is a platformer where you are only armed with tools that will help you to manipulate murderous robots into killing each other and themselves. Some of these tools include a droid that floats around your character and acts like an extended arm to pick up objects and also to deploy your tools. You can manipulate the enemy robots using perks such as a remote control, which gives you momentary control over an enemy robot which gives you the opportunity to run it into a laser or other enemies to destroy them or their friends. Enemies have a colour system, which means that enemies of the same colour will not damage each other, so to combat that, another tool will change their colours to enable you to get them to kill each other.

There are laser beams scattered around the levels which you will have to jump around and over, but those lasers are also colour coded which means that robots of the same colour as the laser will also not be damaged which means that a handy colour change of a robot can help there too.

The basic mechanics behind the game play are solid and work well for a good puzzle game and lend themselves to have many different ways to solve the same puzzle.

There is a simple story narrative to go with the game play which pits the player as an "outcast trying to escape a world ruled by technology". You fight your way through rooms of puzzles that are generated as you go which is cause for new levels each time you attempt. As you work your way through the underwater city called 'Subaeria', you will slowly work out the great mystery of the underwater world.

There are four different characters that you will play as while your progress through the game. Each character's story will interweave through each other's story and decisions will affect all four characters and their outcomes. Each character's part in the heavily story driven narrative will cost you about 2 hours of game play which pits the whole game to take about 8-10 hours depending on how many times you die. If you're like me, you're looking more around the 10 hour mark, if not even more.

Subaeria looks and feels like a happy go lucky type game but don't be fooled as it's quite hard to get everything right and not have to start all over again at the start. There are no continue points or checkpoints. You go back to the start. Once again, like The Binding of Isaac.

Subaeria is a solid experience that most will like. It probably is a game that would need to be suited to a particular type of gamer because although there's a lot of action going on in the levels, there's no gun play by the main characters at all. It all gets done by the enemy robots. This is part of the games charm, but for me personally, I would have liked to get my hands on a big shiny gun to wreak havoc in this beautifully crafted world. If the screens and videos take your interest then you are likely to get a good load of value out of this. Give it a go. Keep on gaming.

Thanks. Lucas