devonrv

I remember enjoying games like A Link to the Past, Neutopia, and Golden Axe Warrior (also Neutopia 2 and Terranigma despite similar issues with their final bosses), which is why I was so disappointed to play games like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, Forced, and Victor Vran, only to discover that there’s an entire genre of top-down action games where the challenge is nothing more than waves of repetitive enemies, often without any level design whatsoever. Still, I held out hope: having learned my lesson, I’d carefully check the trailers of top-down games to see if I could find any evidence of level design, and I’d only enter giveaways for ones that seemed to have them. One of those rare games that made the cut was Zwei: The Arges Adventure, and after enough persistence entering giveaways, I finally won it…s sequel.

  • Zwei 2: The Ilvard Insurrection....doesn't "zwei" already mean "two"?

    30 hours playtime

    9 of 23 achievements

Action-RPG. Left stick moves, but jump is mapped to B by default with A being the attack button. After going to the options and changing it to X=attack and A=jump, B became the ‘cast spell’ button and Y does your ranged attacks (which are also technically spells, but the ones cast with the B button are more powerful and consume a different resource). There’s still one problem, though: your ranged attacks are assigned to a different character than your melee attacks, and your first push of either button actually swaps the character instead of attacks, so you’ll want to go into the options again and change it so that Y is a dedicated ‘swap character’ button with X using whichever attack you have equipped, be it ranged or melee. You can also hold L/R to swap your equipped weapon or use an item, respectively, and the game even pauses while you’re making your selection.

Melee attacks are quick when you’re tapping the button, doing combos and getting off the occasional critical hit that stuns an enemy for a moment, but as usual, you can’t move or interrupt your attack to dodge any incoming hazards, and the amount of time it takes for your attack to end is often more than enough time for the foreshadow animation to cycle and hit you. Amazingly, your ranged attacks not only let you move and attack simultaneously, but you can even jump while attacking! There’s even a pseudo-lock on (which I didn’t figure out until the snow level because IIRC the game never mentions it), where if you hold the attack button while shooting at an enemy, you’ll strafe around it, allowing you to keep up the offensive while focusing on dodging. This unprecedented responsiveness is balanced by your magic meter: use too many ranged attacks, and you have to wait 3 seconds for the bar to refill (it only starts refilling when it runs out, too). Ranged attacks also don’t have critical-hit-chances and thus won’t stun enemies, but still, I ended up not using melee attacks that much except to do things like hit switches.

Also, this game handles EXP a bit differently compared to other RPGs. Notably, you can buy items that straight-up give you EXP on use, which is something I always thought other RPGs were missing since you almost always end up with a ton of money and nothing to buy. Even healing items give you some EXP on use. The catch? Items are the only way you gain EXP; enemies only drop some money on death, with just a chance to drop an item. This means you’re encouraged to save items until you need to heal HP, especially since the game lets you trade healing items for ones that give more EXP.

Speaking of EXP, leveling up has a huge effect, at least at the beginning of the game. The first miniboss (which is optional, admittedly) is a giant bat that also has a bunch of other regular bats in its arena; when I first made it there, I only dealt 3 damage to it per attack, whereas it dealt 15 damage (half my max HP!) to me per attack. After it killed me, making me redo that entire section of the dungeon again, I opted to skip the room and go back later after reaching the next save point, gaining one (1) level, and equipping a +2DEF item and a crit-up item; now, I was suddenly dealing 20 damage per attack, and the miniboss only dealt 4 damage to me! Even after I made it to the second dungeon and made sure the only change was the item I used increasing my level by one, my ranged attack went from dealing 70 damage per hit to 100 damage per hit. It helped explain why the game was a little tedious for me after that first section in the first dungeon.


As for that level design I was so anxious to try out, the first dungeon has cannons that’ll aim at you and shoot, some of which are even placed on moving platforms. Your attacks do nothing to the cannons, so you just have to work around them (well, after a few dungeons, I realized you can destroy them with a bomb, but your bomb count is pretty limited at this point; also, there’s a brief delay between letting go of L/R (to use a bomb) and being able to jump again). Problem is, cannons (and all enemies with ranged attacks, honestly), can launch their projectiles from off-screen, giving you little time to react even if you’re using your own responsive ranged attacks. You have to look at your minimap instead of the game field in order to try to spot incoming enemies/cannons, but even then, the game can surprise you by placing cannons (indicated by a small grey square on the minimap) among switches or destructible obstacles (represented by a much-larger white-circle icon on the minimap). There’s also the occasional pit you need to ride a platform across, making it so you can’t easily run from the next group of enemies.

As for enemy AI, the game manages to have both extremes, even as early as the first dungeon. There are the ones that beeline towards you and only attack if you let them, but there are also enemies that can abruptly toss fast-moving boomerang-saw-blades (again, from offscreen, even!). The dungeon’s boss (a giant spider) also has issues: one of its attacks has it jump towards where you’re at, so you have to run away to avoid being stomped, right? Nope; you stay still, its legs land around you, and concentric circles of stalagmites shoot up moving away from where the boss lands, which hit you if you tried to run away but leave you alone if you stood still. Its weak points are its legs, which are immune to ranged attacks, but the boss has a move where it abruptly spawns stalagmites between its legs that move away from its center in a *-shape, hitting you if you don’t stop attacking and run away quick enough. Beating this boss gives you a new spell: a 4-way earth spell that knocks most enemies into the air, meaning you have to wait for them to come down before you can attack again. It’s also shorter-range than your default attack, but more powerful.

The first dungeon’s level design may not have been all that, but the second dungeon expands on this by having zero cannons and zero pits! Just halls, enemies, and the occasional ice-floor at certain four-way crossroads. Actually, there was one room where you have to keep up with spinning blades (one behind you and one in front), but the game deliberately has the second pair move differently than the first with no warning (first goes in the middle of the room after the hall, but the second hugs the wall, moving into the corner, which is where you’d be safe previously, with the new safe point being where you’d be in danger previously). We do get some new enemy types, though: a jellyfish that can toss an electric projectile at you in an arc (also with decent foreshadowing), and a lizard can jump toward you and create a small shockwave where it lands. That last one has a glitch, though: if the lizard ‘lands’ on your earth spell when it does its jump attack, the shockwave’s hitbox keeps falling forward and down, and can hit you even when the enemy itself is out of range. The dungeon’s boss has an attack where water spouts appear closer and closer to wherever you are, but you can’t run away from them; instead, you have to jump away from them, because apparently, jumping causes you to move slightly faster than running. The second-half of the fight turns the platform to ice, so you need to jump even more to keep from sliding off, but the boss shoots projectiles at you from a distance instead of from above or from within the arena, so jumping could still cause you to get hit as you get cornered trying to jump away, with your only remaining option being to jump towards the boss. Clearing this dungeon gets you an ice spell that temporarily freezes enemies and creates an ice crystal in front of them that blocks your subsequent attacks! Frozen enemies can’t be bounced, meaning you can attack with the earth spell more rapidly, but it’s still kinda tedious to switch back and forth, so I rarely used the ice spell.

The third dungeon isn’t that noteworthy; there are some pools of poison water that you have to jump over or ride a platform across, but for the most part, the closest to level design it has are overpasses to make two separate paths look like a four-way crossroad on your minimap (you can’t even jump off the bridge onto the lower path). It does introduce elemental weaknesses, having some green-sphere enemies that take way more damage if you use earth magic on them, but that’s about it. Only other thing I can think of is this is where the game started to outpace me; despite me being the recommended level, enemies started to take longer and longer to die. The boss is a giant plant that gently sweeps its vines across the floor to attack, and it’s arguably better than the previous two bosses, but it still has a couple issues. Notably, the conspicuous mouth-looking vine-head isn’t its weak point until the third phase; instead, before then, you have to attack the ends of the individual vines, which actually stick out past the edge of the arena–past the invisible wall. Also, that third phase has its mouth try to bite you, an attack you can only evade by the speed-increase afforded by jumping, but this chomp is combined by the boss sweeping vines above you, making it extra hard to evade damage since the camera is front-facing instead of downward-facing like in dungeons. This boss gives you the tornado spell upon defeat, which is easily the best spell in the game since it both traps enemies in the cyclone and deals damage until it disappears, at which point you can just toss another one and repeat the process until the enemy is dead. Enemies can still attack you if you don’t keep your distance, and it might also make it harder to see attacks coming, but it still beats dealing with them directly, especially since their ranged attacks go right over your head. It won’t work with enemies that can’t be sent into the air, but for them, you can just use your earth spell rapidly (and for bosses where you really need to keep your distance, there’s always your default projectile attack).

The fourth dungeon reintroduces pits and cannons! Hooray! There’s even one room where two cannons are placed on platforms that snake around the room, meaning they can slide into your DMs field of view and shoot you at any moment. It’s the most dynamic moment of level design in the game (despite how much of the game is left), but on top of the obvious downside of them not affecting the level until those brief moments, there’s also the fact that their platforms keep moving during the cut-aways that show the door unlocking after you hit a switch, meaning their platforms can push you into poison water before you can do anything. There’s also the occasional up-and-down spikes and on-and-off upward-flamethrower, but honestly, they contribute even less to level design and are on par with the spikes from Torchlight, at best just making you stop and wait a second for them to go away. As for new enemies, there’s a red goblin that can block your attacks (possibly the only enemy to do so), so you have to freeze it and then use your earth magic rapidly. It’s the only time I felt ice magic was useful, and this enemy never shows up outside this dungeon. There’s also a Volcano Lotus which normally stays still and shoots projectiles in a tall arc, but it can also abruptly get up and skitter towards you, and it’s also immune to your ice magic and thus can’t be prevented from doing this. Somehow, you can avoid its contact-damage by continuously jumping, causing it to run around you instead of into you. The boss is a dragon that shoots fireballs quickly and with a bit of spread, so you need to be pretty far and jump a bunch to avoid them. If that wasn’t enough to encourage using ranged attacks, the boss can also take flight, even charging at you in a way that’s hard to avoid. You get the fireball spell from this one, but while it’s pretty powerful and has more range than the other unlockable spells (maybe not as much as your default ranged attack, though), it can be kinda erratic, turning around partway towards an enemy and not hitting it (was it because I also turned and ran the other way?). I ultimately went back to using the tornado.

At this point, you can finally go to the castle, which splits into three paths. The rightmost path is the graveyard, where the most it gets regarding level design is a few 90-degree turns with a satellite gun (cannon model swap) in each corner, and one bat enemy among them (but due to the nature of enemies in this game, you can just lure it away if you’re having trouble). The leftmost path–the prison–spices up the usual hallways and dead-end-rooms-behind-locked-gates with signposts displaying humorous charges/convictions and sentences, but there’s also some level design here, too! Unfortunately, this is where even the level design gets cheap hits: normally, you can just hit a switch when you come across one, expecting nothing but good things, but here, hitting a certain switch causes a spike wall to come barreling towards you from offscreen, at a speed you won’t be able to react to if you don’t already know it’s coming, so you get hit and have to wait for it to go back and stop before you can hit the switch and try again. Even when you know what to do and you make it to the next room, which also has a spike wall, the game breaks its own precedent by having the second spike wall barrel towards you again even though that’s where it’d stop if you weren’t in the room. Worse still, that’s about it on the level design front for this part, as the other remaining path (more ordinary castle interior) doesn’t do anything noteworthy.

Each path also has its own boss at the end. The rightmost path’s boss has a forcefield and summons mud zombies, and if you attack either, they all try to dogpile you and reset the boss’s pattern; you just have to stand there and wait for the boss’s forcefield to go away before you can get exactly one hit off, at which point the boss temporarily runs away and summons more mud zombies, except these ones can be attacked and killed, which you’d want to do since leaving them alone for too long causes them to explode into a shockwave you need to jump over. This repeats way too many times. The boss of the leftmost path has some projectiles that can be tough to avoid, but it also has the ability to freeze you in place and attack you while you’re unable to do anything; amazingly, you prevent this by using melee attacks, which can hitstun the boss regularly and quickly (though you’re still in danger of getting hit by the boss’s ground-pound), resulting in one of the few moments where melee attacks are preferable to ranged ones. The boss of the forward-facing path is easily the worst boss in the game: it can just hit you normally to counter your melee attacks, and to counter your ranged attacks, it has a homing-charge attack that’s nearly impossible to avoid. It wasn’t the first time I used healing items to get past a boss, but it’s the first time I’m convinced that’s the only way to get past (except maybe lots of grinding).

Once you’ve beaten all three bosses, you unlock the final, upper path, which also doesn’t have any level design. The most it gets is a riddle involving empty chests, which isn’t too hard to figure out once you’ve gone all around the floor and realize it’s mandatory. After this, you finally reach the boss of the castle, and this part I feel deserves its own section:

Castle Boss (click to expand)

Is anyone even reading this?

Although I'd like you to click, you should probably read the rest of the post first if you're interested

It's a supposed-to-lose boss! Your ranged attacks deal zero damage, and when you approach to use melee, your entire health bar gets zapped and you're sent into another three or four cutscenes.

Then, you go to the snow dungeon! Well, first is a puzzle where you have to rotate some statues so they're all facing forward, but the game doesn't tell you in advance which ones rotate which other ones. No problem, though; just rotate each statue once and see which others move, then you can work on solving the puzzle, right? Not quite. See, if you rotate each statue once…that solves the puzzle! They're all facing forward and you can go into the dungeon! Then the characters gotta talk about how hard it was, like--no, it wasn't hard! I didn't get to solve anything before it was over!

The dungeon itself isn't too noteworthy, just some stationary enemies that explode on death and one part where hitting a switch causes you to get chased by giant enemies (though cannons-on-moving-platforms make a brief resurgence). You also get a new laser-beam spell around the halfway point, but its short range combined with its delay before firing means it still isn't as good as the tornado. The optional miniboss has some moving spike-balls around the edges of the arena, but they make no difference; you can just run circles around the miniboss, constantly using your ranged attack until it dies.

The main boss for the dungeon is a bit unintuitive; attacking its head doesn't deal damage, but unlike the plant boss, its weak point isn't anywhere else, either. Turns out, you have to attack its head with melee to make it vulnerable (temporarily), then shoot it with ranged attacks to deal damage. The second phase has the boss drop bomb items, letting you know that you have to use bombs on its legs to stun it and reach its weak point (the first phase could've used a hint like this). Still, being on its back too long causes you to take damage when you get knocked off, and you can also get hit by the rocks it can toss before you see them while back there.

Like the first four dungeons, the snow dungeon has a branching path around halfway through, with one path leading to the boss and the other path leading to a melee upgrade. I made the mistake of going after the boss first, thinking I could easily go back for the upgrade like I could with the first four dungeons, but nope: beating the boss results in a story moment that causes your fast-travel and your ranged attacks to be handicapped! Now, not only do you only have one ranged attack (that isn't as rapid and doesn't go nearly as far as your original ranged attack), but it also prevents you from moving for a split second per attack! To make matters worse, it can knock enemies into the air in such a way that your subsequent attacks miss! C'mon, the ranged weapons were one of the best parts of the game, and now the game has to go back on one of the things I liked!

You're also forced to keep that sabotaged ranged attack for almost the entire next dungeon, including fighting the only boss in the game that can HEAL ITSELF (I was trying to take my time to see how/if I could avoid its attacks, but apparently I'm just supposed to keep up the pressure and heal myself while taking the boss's hits). Also, that boss shows up at the dungeon's 1/3rd mark; at the 2/3rds mark, you have to refight the worst boss in the game, except now and for the rest of the dungeon, you don't have any ranged attacks! Also, the boss can jump and attack you while you're mid-jump. By the way, did I mention that jumping is your de-facto dodge since there's no dodge button? Once again, I'm convinced the intended way to get past is to tank the hits and spam healing items. Good thing I saved them despite being a level or two below recommended.

As for the dungeon itself? More of the same, no level design. I just started jumping past enemies at this point; combat was no longer any fun.

The dungeon's end boss is a redo of the supposed-to-lose boss from the castle, except now you can actually attack and deal damage without worrying about your health being zapped. Impressively, this boss actually feels like it was designed around the game's melee attacks since its projectiles move slow enough for you to get around them while heading to the boss. However, like the castle's rightmost boss before it, you can only hit the boss once before it goes away and summons some exploding discs around the arena and repeats its pattern. You get your ranged attacks back for the second phase, with the boss alternating invulnerability between ranged and melee attacks. It's not bad, all things considered, though you still need to run away preemptively as the melee character if you want to avoid being counterattacked, even though you could theoretically get a few more hits off before the invulnerability switches over.

You'd think that's the end, what with its outer-space setting and climactic rematch(es), but nope; now another dungeon shows up! You also get yet another spell: a powerful, mid-range attack that drains your magic meter pretty quickly. It's an improvement over earth magic, but tornado is still better in most cases. With my ranged attacks restored, I went back to get the melee upgrade in the snow level I'd passed up earlier, and discovered--unlike previous upgrades--it radically changes melee combat since now you can drive into enemies, automatically triggering hit-stun upon running over them (and you can fly over pits with it)! That definitely would've helped improve the previous dungeon a bit.

As for the level design in this new dungeon, it's still minimal and kinda cheap. Turrets replace cannons, and these ones have rapid-fire, so even when they don't blindside you from offscreen (or from behind your HUD), jumping doesn't always let you avoid them. There are some magnet orbs that try to suck you into a pit below them, but it can be finnicky whether you can run around them or whether they pull you in. There are switches that can move them or turn them off, but one in particular is timed despite there being no indication of this (no ticking sound effect, not even a "time's up" sound effect); you just come across the orb, seeing it turned back on despite seeing it turn off before, and I'm also pretty sure you can only get through in time using the snow dungeon's melee upgrade. There's one part with glass floors that shatter a second or two after you step on them, but the snow dungeon's melee upgrade kinda makes this trivial since you can just keep flying over the newly-formed pit. There are also teleport pads that you just gotta do trial-and-error to see where they go.

The dungeon's mid-boss can prevent you from changing characters, but I was using the ranged character and could literally run circles around the boss, constantly shooting it until I won. The final boss's first phase manages to be even simpler: jump on one of the pillars as they come from the ground, then jump off and hit the boss's weak point when the pillars have risen enough. All the projectiles are shot on the lower floor, and only when the pillars are at their height, so you have very little to worry about. The second phase is mixed; there are some projectile attacks you can react to and avoid in time, but then you've got stuff like the tail-uppercut and the triple-laser-combo that require you to be moving beforehand. The boss also regularly stays so far away that even your default ranged attack can't reach, yet if you're too close when it does its sword-swipe attack, you'll get hit by it, even if you're mid-jump (the transparent floor also doesn't help with judging height).


Overall, I don’t think I’d recommend this one. It started off with potential, then slowly squandered its potential before eventually regressing on one of the things it had done well (EDIT: I was actually still thinking of recommending the game on sale until that point, though the quality did rebound a bit afterward). Can someone who’s played Arges Adventure let me know how it compares to this game? I was interested, but after this one, I don’t know…