Iconoclasts is a 2D Metroidvania platformer about Robin, an outcast mechanic who, by choosing her own job rather than doing what the church assigns her to do, has become a wanted outlaw. But greater things are afoot, and the world itself seems to be shaking beneath your feet…
This game’s story is odd. The premise of the story seems strange, but the game quickly pulls you into theIconoclasts is a 2D Metroidvania platformer about Robin, an outcast mechanic who, by choosing her own job rather than doing what the church assigns her to do, has become a wanted outlaw. But greater things are afoot, and the world itself seems to be shaking beneath your feet…
This game’s story is odd. The premise of the story seems strange, but the game quickly pulls you into the strange world. The One Concern is a military-religious-scientific organization that basically serves as the world government. Led by Mother and her agents, people with seemingly magical powers and supernatural resilience, these people praise Him. This seems like a fairly standard “evil church organization” plot, but in truth, it’s anything but; the One Concern is much more than some sort of bizarre cult, and many of its most important members clearly don’t believe in the benevolence of their god, and have other tasks on their mind.
The characters are armed with guns and explosives of various sorts, and there’s a great deal of advanced technology all over the place. And yet, simultaneously, many of the people seem to live very simple lives. This dichotomy becomes increasingly apparent the further you get into the game, and it becomes increasingly clear that things are complicated. While at first it seems like a fairly simple “One Concern bad, hippy commune folk good” sort of plot, the further you get into the game, the more you come to understand what drives the One Concern, and also how much further they see than their sort of happyish opposition.
The game has a certain sense of humor to it that reminds me of the sillier bits of Final Fantasy 6, and yet it also has a lot of very serious bits to it. This creates quite the dichotomy; the game early on seems fairly lighthearted, but it starts getting darker and darker, and many, many people start dying or being very gruesomely injured. The further you get, the bleaker the story becomes, as everything goes wrong, more and more people start dying, the hope for humanity seems to become increasingly distant, and the end of the world seems nigh.
And then, after all that buildup, the game’s final area is fairly anticlimactic, and the final boss appears with a visual gag introducing them. What exactly was going on is not explained, and the player is left wondering what the point of it all was, as a major subversion of the player’s expectations is thrown out at the last minute, raising even more questions about why the One Concern was worshipping Him in the first place, at which point the game ends.
Thus, it’s hard to say whether or not the story actually delivered; it definitely has some high moments, and I felt bad for several characters, including a few of the villains. Ironically, two of the least sympathetic characters you end up seeing are two of your teammates, who treat other people like garbage and aren’t a lot of fun to be around. All of this is good, and I wanted to see the characters succeed.
But at the end, it feels like the story deflates, and ends rather abruptly and unceremoniously after some quite solid buildup.
Gameplay wise, the game is fine. The overall motion of Robin is quite fluid, and she’s fun to control on the whole. You run, you jump, you swing around on your wrench, you have three different guns (each with their own charge shot), and you can “tweak” yourself to get different bonuses. The game has over two dozen bosses, and they’re quite varied overall – there are a lot of different types of boss fights, from the straightforward to the puzzle boss to the sort of boss where your goal is to survive while doing some other task, and the variety in terms of bosses is very good.
Unfortunately, while the bosses were pretty good, the levels were more of a mixed bag. There were definitely some good areas in the game, but other areas felt kind of tedious to go through; they weren’t difficult, they just required you to go back and forth a bunch of times, and that wasn’t particularly fun to do. The tower sequence in the middle of the game is particularly egregious in this regard. The biggest problem, however, was simply the fact that the enemies didn’t really feel all that interesting to fight most of the time; they were interesting at first, and figuring out some of them was fun, but in the middle part of the game, it felt like the game stopped really introducing interesting new enemies for a while, only to start doing so again at the end.
Overall, Iconoclasts is a decent game. There were a few bits that were quite good, but there were other bits that were disappointing – including the very end of the 14 hour long game, which left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
If you like Metroidvania games, this is a fine game, but there are better ones.… Expand
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