Plus Ultra: Legado

Lo juego con mi pareja, ambos hispanos, yo peninsular, ella americana. Es fascinante y se le nota el cariño. Música espectacular y un estilo, que ambos jugadores plataformeros de SNES y GENESIS como nosotros disfrutamos. Un acierto rotundo la temática y el enfoque. Por mas juegos así en un futuro. Larga vida al estudio y viva la iberofonia.

Un Metroidvania bastante sólido, de dificultad asequible. Gráficamente es una belleza y la banda sonora magnífica. Interesante cómo plantea el juego [spoiler] la noche triste, convirtiéndola en un scroller [/spoiler] Si tengo que poner un pero es la duración: poco más de 6h para terminarlo. Completarlo serán unas 10h.

This review was initially a negative one for several reasons but the nail in the coffin was getting fast travel too late into the game. Since the devs adressed this and a lot of other things in their latest patch i'll flip the rating to positive. It was close though as the game still has a lot of issues which i'll discuss below, mostly tied to pacing and controls. For starters this game is incredibly nonlinear with barely any handholding, which makes for long stretches without progress. The map is rather large and the paths branch out in different directions so if you pick the wrong way there's a LOT of backtracking to get back on track. Now the game does give some hints, especially with the recent addition of map markers for ability gates but even the critical path has you retreading old ground rather often. I don't think that i've ever played an MV with this much backtracking before, which i normally don't mind. But paired with some other pain points, especially controls, this became tiresome after a while. The controls just felt floaty in general because of 3 main reasons; the lack of proper coyote time, the abscence of ledge grappling and awfull knockback on hit. The first one used to be very obvious but apparantly this has been improved. I haven't verified this for myself as i have no desire to replay this game but props to the devs for the improvements, i'm sure it makes a difference. However the abscence of ledge grappling is still present and was very annoying as this made you barely miss platforms very often. It doesn't help that this game has a very large amount of vertical rooms that can make you fall quite a ways down. If there was ledge grappling this wouldn't be an issue but there isn't, so it IS an issue and probably the biggest contributor to platforming feeling clunky. There's also the final aspect of knockback on hit which also saw improvements but is probably still an issue due to annoying enemy placement to be as inconvenient as possible. The poor platforming is nowhere as noticable as the 'dog' levels... A few hours into the game you find a dog companion which is one of your MV upgrades as it allows you to activate bonus levels to either open a door in a room or find an optional collectible. The former are rather doable but the later are uniquely frustrating and the reason i didn't go for 100% completion. Reason being the dog controls like hot ass, even worse than the stiff main character. At least the MC stopped running as soon as you let go of the controls but that dog has a horrible slide as if he's on ice. Given the fact that this dog only has 1 hp in spike filled levels that send you all the way back you can imagine how annoying this becomes. These levels basically become precision platforming gauntlets and i couldn't be bothered to do them all, even with the upgrade i got that gave the dog 2 hp. It's just wasn't worth the hassle and frustration which is a shame as exploration otherwise was pretty decent. Like i mentioned before the map is very nonlinear and open ended with lots of interconnection and unlockable shortcuts. Given this the level design should be complemented but alas the exploration falls short because there's really not that much to find. You'll find a collectible or some coins every so often but upgrades require a lot of currency so the feeling of progression is very weak. In general doing things in this game felt rather unrewarding as the upgrades were sparse and for some you had to do janky physics based puzzles that weren't worth the hassle. Like i said there's lots of dead ends too so the most exciting thing for me was finding my next upgrade as it finally gave me some options again. That and finding a new checkpoint as these were also suprisingly rare for some reason. This further compounded the feeling of backtracking as it's quite easy to die and getting back to where you were from the nearest checkpoint was still a journey and a half. This might happen quite often as it's pretty easy to die in this game due to how the health system works. Each health pip is a piece of gear be it a helment, shield or bracers but each hit takes one of and you can only have one of 5 each + a final hit. While original and thematically fitting this does mean that at best you have 6 health. With no way to heal other than enemy health drops which is the ONLY thing they drop, once again very unrewarding. This makes you want to avoid fighting enemies but they're placed in the worst spots so you kinda have to fight them. Becoming impatient won't help you either as they'll just chip you as you try to jump past them with your limited moveset. There's also just a very noticable lack of enemy variety, you'll fight the same cheetah, indian or snake a thousand times which gets tiresome. Better yet you'll fight the most annoying bats and birds a million times as this game sure does love flying enemies. It's not that bosses fare any better as most of them spawn lots of adds, and the ones that don't have horrible movesets with no windups or tells. The bosses were so bad in fact that i used cheat engine to give myself functionally infite health. They just are not fun at all and dying takes a long time due to long load times and a lenghty respawn animation, which is the same as the save animation. Again it's cool thematically but it just adds up to a lot of time over a playthrough. The whole game feels a bit like a time waste due to weak progression but also in general slow pacing. The pacing of MV upgrades feels very back heavy with most of the midgame seeing no progression, same goes for the narrative. The story beats are unevenly spread across the game only really picking up at the end. I had a hard time following the story in general because there was so much time between important moments. Also the spanish character names were too hard for me to remember lol. So far i've mostly listed negatives but there's one MAJOR positive that made me give this a thumbs up after the latest patch, the visuals. This game is incredibly, jawdroppingly gorgeous and i'm not just talking about the artstyle and assets alone. The set dressing in this game is so well done it's kinda insane featuring layers upon layers of detail in both the fore- and backgrounds. The great usage of parallax scrolling gave a real sense of depth to the game that helped a lot with immersion. An underrated feature that made this even better were what i call immersive platforms. Many MV's suffer from magically floating platforms but not this one, here every platform is either connected to scaffolding in the background, suspended by vines or part of the walls. This little thing makes the game feel much more immersive, further bolstered by the great ambient SFX which transport you to the jungles and mountains of mesoamerica. The music fit in with the vibe as well featuring some good tracks across the board. Finally on a technical level the game was competent with no major bugs or crashes and mostly steady frame rates. However load times were long in my opinion which can be annoying. As a whole the game has many negatives, which is a shame as i was really into it at the start. Being immediately captivated by the gorgeous visuals but the more i played the more my grievances started to irk me. From clunky controls to a feeling of wasting time the game really became worse the more i played but yet i still enjoyed seeing the sights. All of this to say that i really wish i waited for the latest patch before playing this game as i would have probably enjoyed it a lot more that way. Props to the devs though for a steady patch cadence, maybe eventually this can become a game worth playing for MV enthusiasts but for now it's just okay. I'd still say wait for a sale and a few patches before playing but it's playable now after some much needed updates.

Juegazo, históricamente genial, interesante, divertido, y fiel a la realidad de lo que ocurrió, aunque no case a día de hoy con cierto negrolegendario.

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Plus Ultra: Legado ofrece un soplo de aire fresco, a un “género” absolutamente sobresaturado. Hay cientos y cientos de metroidvanias luchando por ganarse un hueco en nuestras bibliotecas. En este contexto, me produce alegría ver que desde España se lanzan juegos, capaces de abordar temas históricos sensibles. Reseña completa en The Art of Gaming: https://theartofgaming.es/analisis-plus-ultra-legado/

This is a hidden gem. The hand-drawn art and comic strip style are gorgeous. The exploration is rewarding, the setting is unlike anything else in the genre, and I was pleasantly surprised by how historically accurate the game is. You can tell the developers put real passion into both the gameplay and the world. I got stuck once, reached out on Discord, and the developers not only helped me figure it out but also patched a small issue I found. That level of support is rare and deserves recognition. I first played it on my wife's Steam account from my Bazzite gaming rig, and it looks absolutely stunning on a 65-inch TV. I enjoyed it so much that I bought my own copy. If you're looking for a Metroidvania with its own identity instead of another Hollow Knight clone, give this one a try.

Overall i really enjoyed this title. Really would like to see this game get some more exposure as this is a good Metroidvania. This is an uncommon theme and visual / audio style for an MV. Really enjoyed the setting and learning more about the history of this area / period as not one one i know a great deal about. Looking forward for what the developer decides to do next.