Community Moon Diver Review

By iorilamia — April 9, 2011
Tags: moon-diver psn review square-enix xbl

Is the $15 Hack n Slash with RPG elements worth your time and money? Find out in the review.

Moon Diver is a side scrolling platformer with plenty of action. There are 4 characters Seyfert, Hitori, Tolb and Ourion. All of these characters can be lvled up by killing stuff and find new abilities to use.

STORY:

It's bad, but thats ok, this is a hack and slash with some leveling up. The entire game is basically story-mode but the problem is how they try to tell it to you. The story is made up of really akward soundless custscenes with awkward text not explaining much, and cut-out pictures of characters floating around. As I said earlier this game doesn't need a story, but they didn't really try much on delivering it. But heres the story anyways- A boy named Faust controls something called the "Mephistopheles", which allows him to bring anything to life (this explains you fighting hordes of machinery and lasers). Faust wants humanity completely raped and to be some sort of ruler. But a special group of ninjas called "Moon Divers" have gotten orders to save humanity and stop him.

GAMEPLAY:

Easy and fun for anyone. The game is very straght forward with jumping and atacking. Every character can unlock a large amount of special moves to use (you start with one, the rest are found in levels, kinda making it a free for all to see who gets it first). Once you start collecting these specials, you can equipt up to 4 at a time, using them during battle, (they do drain your magic meter though). The great part is the many variations of moves to be found, AOEs, blinding enemies, freezing, boost defense, projectiles, all great fun.

Your Characters get 1 point to use everytime they level up. This point could be put into HP, MP or Power. Out of the 4 characters their stats start out differently, but this doesn't stop you from building them the way you want, in the end they could also have the same magic attacks aswell, what really differs is in their atack speed. -From fastest to slowest, the slower swinging charactrs start with more attack power anyways- Hitori, Seyfert, Tolbi and Ourion.

The levels are nothing too new to a playformer. Run a long distance killing stuff, jump on some platforms, have a bottom-less pit somewhere and lasers. But they did do a good job cramming ridiculous amounts of enemies into some akward areas, actually making you think about how you will go on about your killing (the game definately gets harder every level, even with a full team). Only bad part is that sometimes the game feels like a repetitive grind, but like any game, you have to keep going to experince new hazards and monsters.

Teamwork in this game is neccesary in higher levels. Voice-chat is available but people don't use it. When prompted, teamates can use a special move together (if done at same time), and this pulls off a awesome magic move that you may not have. A problem with being on a team are stuborn people. If one teamate is falling behind, or if someone wants to go in a different direction, the furthest team member will be injured/ slowly be teleported in some instances ; extremely annoying. Also knowing when to use your special moves instead of spamming them saves the team alot. Perfect example is when my team ONLY passed the level because someone had the "freeze all enemies for a short time" move, and he used it perfectly everytime, without that it would have been 100% failure. Also when you die, you float around slowly being able to control your movement. You have 10 seconds for a teamate to "break the chains" which is slashing you until your free, if this doesn't happen, you die for reals and wait for respawn. Game is over when everyone is dead.

CONTROLS / MOVEMENT:

All respond perfectly fine. You only use one button to attack , and can hold it for a stronger charge atack. You have another button only use for special moves. Another one for jumping/double jumping. And a button for dashing/air dashing and another for crouching. Attack speeds differ but all characters run the same speed, which flows perfectly fine with the game. Besides running around swinging, you can atack while jumping, dashing and even can perform a sort- of aeriel dash down attack. Also to climb and hold onto ledges, you simply jump to it, and getting down or jumping to a lower level is holding down+ attack. The game is definately simple and can be jumped into and enjoyed by anyone.

ONLINE:

Since the entire game is story-mode driven, playing alone sucks if you don't have a few other friends. Lukily they did a AWESOME job with the online lobbys, simply love it. The search engine is simple and detailed. When looking for a room, you can search for difficulty, the level range of players are what level they are playing on. It then displays the host name, # of players in room and level they are on. Like any online game there is lag, but it is rare (and I live in Hawaii, probly barely any lag for you people in the Mainland).

GRAPHICS:

Are better than I expected. The game just looks like it was made by Square-Enix. Everything looks good, especially huge explosions and beams ; dazzling stuff. The game does a good job with a cold industrialized look being splashed with awesome lighting effects. What suprised me the most was the awesome amount of detail found in some levels. Also, they did a really good job with shadow effects in this game, wasn't expecting that much depth.

Brief Summary-

No Real Story - Just some dude trying to wipe out humans, and your group of badass ninjas are gonna save the world, but who cares about a story in a $15 hack n slash? Just have some fun.

Gameplay is simple fun- Kill stuff, level up, realize it atually does get dificult and enjoy a decent game. A leveling system with 4 characters fits in just right.

Graphics fit well- The game looks really good for a cheap DLC.

Controls are Easy- If your bad at this game, I don't know what to tell you

Online is where it's at- Constantly finding games and as you get to higher levels, you find less dumb people, making the experience all that much better.

BUY IT! It's not expensive and has plenty of fun. 4 characters allows you to experiment with different builds and have different gamestyles at your disposal and finding loads of special moves to use adds more playtime.

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Community Moon Diver Review

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