Now, I have to start this review by saying I am not a fan of side scrollers or directional trigger games (Dead Nation, Helldivers etc etc); however with that being said, Seraph has become the first exception to this rule. It combines a unique blend of RPG and Action Platforming to create a beautifully crafted but seriously mental gameplay style.
You begin the game after selecting your difficulty between three choices; interestingly enough, you can also pick the option to speedrun any level (if thats your cup of tea), or you can choose to stream the game allowing your viewers to make the decision on how badly they would like to aid or destroy you! I never tried this out, however it seems like a crazy cool feature for anyone who enjoy streaming. After a couple of tutorials explaining basic combat you are thrust into the high octane gameplay.
I would recommend EVERYONE play this game with a controller attached to their PC. It’s easy to incorporate using various steam features, and playing this game with a keyboard is interesting to say the least. You start off with one ‘miracle’ which are the abilities that you can see at the bottom of the above picture. These have varying effects such as healing, AoE damaging effects and high damage targeters. These become massively crucial moving into the later game when the games difficulty slowly increases.
Yes, you heard me, this game gets harder the further you progress. What a surprise! The difficulty scaling, as seen in the bottom left of the above picture will increase as you complete each ‘Deck’, which is randomly generated every time you load. You can choose to start the game on a 1.0, 3.0 or 7.0 depending on how much of a challenge you would like from the get go. Obviously, this is where the levelling system comes in handy; this will give you different ‘blessings’, which are basically passives for each level, and also allows you to start using better weaponry.
You start the game with basic pistols which you take from a dead guard (always found something very satisfying with that), and as you progress through each deck you will find chests with different weapons. You will require components to create these, which are found throughout chests and off of enemies through the game. These will also have set amounts of ammo each deck, until you pick up more. This really makes you choose your moments for when you need to bring out the big guns, which in my opinion is great; this doesn’t mean that I can go with the whole ‘Well I have the biggest gun now so I will just use this’.
You will also see bosses throughout the game, which again are randomly generated into each deck. These are possibly the most frustrating and most rewarding thing that this game has. The main focus of the game is all around how well you can use your acrobatic expertise as opposed to how big your guns are and the bosses make you really test that theory.
All in all, Seraph is a great RPG Platform Shooter; if all side scroller shooters were like this, then I would probably pick up a lot more of them! The fact that you don’t have to aim at anything, and the game is much more based around how well you can avoid and dodge enemies really appealed to me. It sets aside the norm and really breaks any mould or pre concepts that I have had with these sorts of games, and brings a great graphical art style too, which in the later levels really gets shown off! I will 100% continue to play this and maybe even get confident enough to stream it soon…
An all around fun and ballistic RPG Platform Shooter – 9/10 – Pyro