This is a great game for someone who wants intense bullet hell action without the daunting prospect of permadeath like in a roguelike thrown on top. It doesn't touch something like Enter the Gungeon in terms of difficulty, but it does offer a similar challenge in terms of dense bullet hell combat with the confidence that you're not going to lose much progress given there's always a save point close by. The only thing you lose when you die anyway is half the money you're holding but the save points double as teleporters that allow you to quickly teleport to a town and store your money so there isn't even really the fear of losing that, it all depends on how much you want to push your luck.

The environment and enemy variety was a big strength and is what kept me engaged right to the end and the decent amount of item variety encouraged me to explore every room.

I felt the progression was on point, I felt I was always challenged but not impossibly so, with your build dictating just how hard that challenge will be. There's also mini challenges in some rooms that are just dodging 3 rounds of attacks without getting hit. Some of these were brutal but worth doing in my opinion as not only do they give you badges (which give you passives) but hone your skills at dodging attacks. You'll definitely need every advantage you can get for the final boss in both skill and build.

Archvale is fun, but at the same time it is a painfully average game that feels like the developpers just didn't care for it, because there are so many things that seem easy to fix or terrible design choices that could be avoided from the beginning. I have checked the development process of the game and it seems to be a sort of mess, especially now because the main developper acknowledged to not having funds to keep working on it consistently, even though they intended to release a major rebalance patch.

The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.

The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.

Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).

The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.

Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.

The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.

Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.

Short dumb game, got all the achievements in under 8 hours. Sort of a weird mix of Enter the Gungeon and Zelda, but without the exhilarating combat and roguelite elements of the former and the dungeon design and exploration of the latter.
What you're left with is a whole game of going through a completely empty world, killing some enemies, dying a bunch and retrying.
There are absolutely zero secrets to discover, don't even bother. I found a cool shiny Anubis statue, spent like 5 minutes trying to figure out what it does, but found out it was just a random level decoration. What you see on the map is all you're gonna get. Stupidly wasted potential, in my humble opinion.

You'd imagine the bullet hell combat, which is this game's main thing and 99% of the gameplay, would be any good, but it's super wonky. Your dodge-roll's invincibility frames seem to be hooked up to some sort of a random number generator machine, and you'll find yourself saying "How the fuck did that hit me?" pretty often (especially in those mini challenge rooms where you chase a crystal).
Most of the rooms are way too busy with hordes of enemies that spew insane amounts of bullets in random ways, that no bullet-dodging skill is going to save you from taking damage.
The difficulty is all over the place. Most of the midgame is almost unfairly difficult - the Ocean area in particular was the bane of my existence. ..And then I got the "Arch Lexicon +4", which is so incredibly busted that it completely trivialized any challenge and made me fly through the endgame with zero effort. I beat the final boss, which has 3 phases, in under a minute. I kind of felt bad, not gonna lie. Poor guy just woke up.

Also there's a strangely dark story for some reason? The ending made me feel like I walked into the wrong cinema or something.
Play this if you want some dumb fun for a few hours, but you'd probably be better off just getting Enter the Gungeon instead.

It's a pretty funbullet heck style adventure game. There's lots of satisfying ways in which you get more powerful. Has a vaguely terraria feeling progression system. The world is pretty open which is both neat and slightly problematic for balance (since getting materials from hard areas can let you cruise through other areas)

I loved the shrines to get badges. In these you to move around an arena collecting objective markers, while doding all the bullets because you can't get hit once. These shrines did a great job of all having distinct and interesting bullet patterns.

The bullet heck gameplay is definitely the highlight generally. It's really fun, and a lot of screens are chaotic without being unreasonable. You have multiple charges of dashes you can use which is awesome. Fun mechanic that i haven't seen a lot of games do, and it allowed the designers to make the bullet patterns much more interesting.

There's not much here of interest but gameplay. That's fine because the gameplay's pretty good.
I'm pretty mad at the final boss. I spent an hour trying to beat it and then realized i hadn't crafted the most powerful version of my weapon or armour. After i did i obliterated them and went from thinking they're annoyingly hard to annoyingly easy

Archvale feels like Zelda (aesthetically) mixed with twin stick shooters in bullet hell mode. The gameplay is mostly about exploring the land in any order you want, avoid hits long enough to reach the next save point, upgrade or craft new weapons/equipment and collect buffs you can equip. Although you can go anywhere you want, some areas are definitely too challenging if you go to them too soon. I often left areas that were too much and came back stronger after finishing other areas. The sooner you realise this, the better your experience will be instead of getting stuck and dying all the time. I was also ready to give up with the last boss fight until I found out (online) that you can craft a magic weapon that makes things very manageable. Other than that, I had a great time playing this game. It’s a very cool mix of gameplay with nice 2D graphics and soundtrack. Definitely worth playing if you’re into exploration and don’t mind a bit of challenge.

O jogo é bem divertido, tem vários inimigos, cenários, armas, equipamentos, joias e estratégias diferentes. A dificuldade está perfeita para mim, difícil o suficiente para estressar bastante mas nem tão difícil a ponto de ficar impossível. As músicas são boas mas básicas para o estilo.

O jogo tem três partes diferentes, sendo elas, o padrão que é atirar nos inimigos e desviar dos projéteis, o minigame de desbloquear as joias que consiste apenas em desviar dos projeteis tendo apenas uma vida, e o terceiro estilo que consiste nos puzzles usando o dash, esses fatores quebram o padrão da gameplay e tornam o jogo mais dinâmico.

Recomendo bastante o jogo, é muito gostoso de jogar e progredir.

Os únicos defeitos são:
1: Não há localização para o português.
2: Pode ocorrer algum bug e travar o jogo, aparentemente era mais frequente no lançamento, mas agora está reduzido, só ocorreu apenas uma vez comigo em quase 23 horas de jogo.

I just noticed I never ported this review from a couple years back to backloggd. As I guessed at the end, I did not remember much about the game! Anyway, on to the original review.

Archvale is what it says on the tin -- a bullet hell RPG. Basically, take some twin stick gameplay like Enter the Gungeon or Nuclear Throne and wrap it in 2D Zelda-esque room exploration, and that's your game.

The combat is solid. Enemy attack patterns are hectic but rarely feel unfair. There's enough variety in the weapons and build options -- achieved through weapon, armor, and Paper Mario style badge system -- to keep you entertained for the 10 hour runtime. I wasn't a fan of the badge shrines that required you to dodge increasingly difficult bullet patterns without getting hit. The ones late in the game are fairly difficult, but not required, so I just skipped them. I also didn't care much for the platforming portions in the dungeons, since the dodge feels just a bit finnicky on a controller, but they weren't so prevalent to really bother me.

I think the game missed the mark in terms of exploration. You're free to go to zones out of order, which made for some really fun runs of trying to survive long enough to get to a later game town and unlock powerful equipment early. Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of interaction with the environments. There are no hidden areas to look for or puzzles in the dungeons or even bits of lore scattered about, so you just kinda go from screen to screen killing (and very occasionally platforming).

The pixel art and music are well enough done, though nothing was particularly memorable.

All in all, Archvale was an experience I was happy enough to have. I probably won't remember much about it in a year, but it was an enjoyable enough 10 hours.

Archvale was my first bullet hell. And oh boy, what a wild ride it was.

The premise is simple. You are a child with the ability to kill the undying, and you must reassemble the Arch. Fight your way through rooms of enemies, dungeons, and bosses to eventually reach your objective. You get three classes of weapon to choose from, though I stuck to magic almost exclusively.

Here are the pros:
- The game is honestly pretty accessible to people who haven't played a bullet hell before. (like me!)
- The world is vibrant, with unique enemies in each area and different vibes throughout.
- Upgrades are not unbearably grindy to get. If you clean each room out of useful resources on your way through areas, by the time you reach the town of the area, you'll have enough to upgrade your armour and buy health upgrades and badges.
- The soundtrack is great - most of the area themes absolutely slap.

The cons:
- The trials. Most of the trials are fine. They're not too hard, you can dodge the orbs easy enough. Then you get to some that just spit tons of them at you with no rhyme or reason and before you know it, you've touched one and have to start over. These were easily the most exasperating part of the game for me, and I'm not usually someone who has to step away from my system in frustration.

My overall opinion of Archvale is that it's a solid little bullet hell, well-designed for the most part, with a few balance issues here and there. 4/5 stars.

Played from – to: (2021-12-22 – 2021-12-23) – PC keyboard.
‣ 8.5/10 – I am an architect.
‣ Game Audio / Soundtrack - 8/10
‣ Graphics – 8/10
‣ Atmosphere – 10/10
‣ Main Story / Characters – 5/10
‣ Side Activities / Exploration – 10/10
‣ AI – 10/10
‣ Ragdolls / Physics – 8/10
‣ Movement – 9/10
‣ Combat –8/10
‣ Final notes: Archvale is a great bullet hell game that combines elements from Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac and Realm of the Mad God. Anyone who played any of the mentioned games will find similarities that will appeal to them. I honestly don’t have much to say about this game. I beat it in records time and can’t complain. It is a nice quick journey. There are great variety in enemy types and locations you get to explore. Boss fights have their own charm and there are some puzzle jumping areas for those who like a bit of timed jumping. My only complaint is that once you get a strong endgame weapon you won’t switch back, and your gameplay becomes the same. Sure, locations change and so do enemies, but you repeat the same moves over and over again. This could easily be fixed if more than 2 weapons were powerful or useful. For example, a fire staff would come in handy in snowy areas while being useless in others just to give you more options. Overall Archvale is a decent quick game.

Jogo muito da hora, mesmo.

Fazia tempo que eu procurava um bullet hell sem ser rogue-like, pois eu sou ruim, mas ainda assim gosto do gênero kkkkkkk. Bloody Hell fez minha alegria no começo do ano e esse aqui está fazendo também. <3

Recomendo bastante se curte o gênero, combinado aind com uma pixel art maravilhosa e uma gama de armas e equipamentos gigantesca (joga de mago, vai por mim kkkk).

There's nothing particularly wrong about the game. It's a decent fun twin stick shooter that plays well. But at the same time there's nothing that makes it memorable, that makes it stick out.

Or I guess I could say it's memorable because of how colourless it is... It was a weird, confusing experience.

(mid 5?)