Often you can actually just skip enemies altogether if you’re quick enough to dodge their attacks. Most enemies die in two to three hits, acting more like speed bumps in your skating lines than actual foes. Unlike Heart Machine’s previous Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash focuses far less on the combat experience. This isn’t the most challenging game ever. There are always shields next to checkpoints, meaning that the devs know you will fail and want you to keep trying until you perfect your run. Hitting a line perfectly and tons of gaining speed is always satisfying and highly entertaining but always confined to what the level wants you to do.Ĭheckpoints liter the world, making the game forgiving when you fail.
Solar Ash is a much more straightforward experience that nails the sense of momentum that these games require. Still, you won’t find yourself pulling off fancy maneuvers across your controller in the same way you would a 3D Mario or constantly discovering skate lines like in Sunset Overdrive. Skating is mechanically smooth, responsive, and polished to a shine. What Solar Ash does best is create a fluid, fast traversal system that hits the right notes to create a flow-state gameplay experience.
That’s not to say that Solar Ash isn’t a fun game because it is. Solar Ash finds itself somewhere between Shadow of the Colossus and Sunset Overdrive, with its spectacle boss fights and rail grinding movement mechanics, while never reaching the peaks of either of those games. It’s a game begging to be played on an HDR panel, and when coupled with its fluid gameplay, Solar Ash is a treat to look at. Like Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash utilizes a pink and blue color scheme throughout its character design, worlds, cutscenes, and transitions.Īesthetically, everything about Solar Ash pops right out of the TV.
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Heart Machine knows how to use color and use it effectively. However, the planet would be nothing without the fantastic colorwork on display. Solar Ash features a strong art style of hard-edged geometry juxtaposed with bubbly clouds, making up Rei’s planet’s design. What kept me going was the visual treat that is Solar Ash. Still, you really have to stick through a lot of dialogue that, for a while, feels meaningless to get to the big ending.
Ultimately, Solar Ash does tie everything together in the end with a satisfactory conclusion. Going solely through the main story is confusing at times, and I struggled to find much meaning in what I was doing from it. You will be introduced to side characters with their own mini-side quests that flesh out and explain everything a little better, but to get a much better grasp on the world, you will have to parse through many of the collectible Void logs. Throughout the first act, I felt as if I had jumped into Solar Ash after missing the whole first quarter of the story, and it never does much to explain its world from there. If you’re not careful, story concepts like the Ultravoid can go right over your head. With Solar Ash, Heart Machine presents a much more upfront storytelling approach while still attempting to retain a cryptic nature to their created world, which occasionally did leave me puzzled and grasping for understanding in this world. One of Hyper Light Drifter’s biggest criticisms was its muted and cryptic storytelling, making the game hard to follow. Rei must explore the world to figure out what happened. Her home planet has been overrun by some sort of void ooze, her Voidrunner team has seemingly scattered, and a monolithic structure named the Starseed is at the center of it all. Solar Ash starts with our main protagonist, a Voidrunner named Rei, slipping through a black hole and awakening to her planet in a state of cataclysm. However, it is still a compelling game, both visually and mechanically, that is worth your time should you decide to get sucked into its mysterious universe. Expanding into the 3D realm was always going to be a challenge Solar Ash doesn’t manage to hit the same highs that its influences do. With Solar Ash, Heart Machine wears some new, more contemporary influences on its sleeve, such as Mario 64, Shadow of the Colossus, and even Sunset Overdrive. Their first project, Hyper Light Drifter, was a critically acclaimed homage to the 16-bit era that oozed with influences from Zelda and Diablo. Heart Machine is a development studio that clearly has a passion for games, making games from the games they love.
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