Dandara is an excellent game and I can’t believe I haven’t heard people talking about it. Its unique movement is accompanied by an equally unique world, soundtrack, and symbolic story that will fascinate lore nerds. While it’s controls may not support the precision combat asks of you, the Salt is definitely a world worth saving.
Dandara is a game all fans of Metroidvanias will want to try. It’s on the PS4, Switch, PC, and even iOS for a mere $12. Its adventure isn’t a super lengthy one, but for a game this unique, the handful of hours you’ll spend with the Brazilian-made game will be more than worth the price of admission. Recommended.
you start the game and you don't realize how close to one of the best gaming experiences you are.
the games looks ok at the beginning but it grows as you level up.
the levels are really challenging and the open world experience is well tuned.
not for gamers that are used to tutorials inside the game, think on super metroid with a very creative – not fool like other clones – environment and playability.
a must play for nintendo lovers.
Dandara is a small pearl that gives new life to the metroidvanias. It offers interesting mechanics, a fascinating game world and the right level of difficulty.
Dandara is an artistic pixel art metroidvania with ideas of his own, like an original control scheme and a little Dark Souls touch. The problem is that, as a game designed to be played on smartphones without physic controls, the gameplay mechanics and power ups tend to be a little simple. But if you love the metroidvania genre, you'll enjoy it.
Dandara has a firm foundation, but suffers from inherent design flaws and a lack of direction. Despite its imperfections, I mostly enjoyed my time with it. It treads a lot of familiar ground with its gameplay mechanics, but those were the portions of the game I found myself having the most fun with.
Although it boasts a gorgeous world, a surreal story, and some unique character designs, Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition ultimately fails to capture the freedom, urgency, and sense of exploration offered by other Metroidvania titles.
While I enjoyed the opening hour or so of Dandara, it soon descended into repetitive, hamstrung gameplay that kept upping the ante before I’d managed to adjust to the original challenge of just moving around and shooting in time. Hardcore gamers might enjoy the challenge, but this reviewer did not.
At first glance a classic Metroidvania with nice pixel art and a well composed soundtrack.
If there wasn't its innovative move-set for such a game, because you can't simply run like in other games of the genre, you have to hop from one salt covered platform to another, resulting in your character standing upside down sometimes.
Unfortunately its move-set is also its biggest flaw, because it's a good chunk less precise than in traditional 2D platformers.
I managed to go through the game without activating cheats, except for the last boss, there the imprecise controls were the most blatant. Coming closer to the end of the battle, you need to move quickly, unfortunately the game registers badly the inputs from the controller.
If controls were more precise, I'd have given the game a 9/10.
So I just finished Dandara, and I feel a bit conflicted. There's a lot of stuff I like, but at the same time I found the game occasionally infuriating.
The pixel-art graphics are great, the levels are varied and have personality. The enemy and boss designs are OK, not great. I did find it a bit strange that the first boss in the game is the humongous head of M. Bison. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I really like the way the story is presented, there are no large exposition dumps stalling the game. All the characters presented (they are fairly few and far between, however) all have a certain individuality that makes them unique. If there are weak points as far as characters go, the two final bosses are kinda bland. The story is intentionally made vague, and the way the story is told through small artifacts found on the ground in random places is intriguing, but I can't say I had any strong feelings about the big bad. The final boss was added in the "Trials of Fear" update, so story-wise it feels thrown in haphazardly.
Though I usually don't care much about music in video games, I gotta say the soundtrack is amazing. I kept being surprised by the music, and every time it changed it was appropriate and fit the settings. Honestly one of the best OSTs I've heard in recent years.
The gameplay is where things start getting a bit annoying for me. I'm probably kinda old by Metacritic standards, and Metroidvanias are nothing new to me. But I've never played a game with a movement mechanic like this. Technically, there's nothing wrong with this, in fact it's a really novel idea that works quite well for level design, which is for the most part very good.
However, after almost 10 hours of playing this game, I still haven't gotten comfortable with the controls, and often end up jumping in the wrong direction. I didn't grow up with analog sticks, so this may be a good part of it, but it was a source of frustration for me. I've often jumped onto off-screen enemies when aiming for different areas. In areas with lots of flying projectiles and enemies, the difficulty spikes and I often found myself unable to aim properly to where I wanted to go, and the unforgivingly short invincibility time when hit often leads to successive hits, and things turn bad really fast. The very short range of the main attack can worsen things, and the shield never seemed to work for me, and especially special skill meter management can a pain.
The last battle is also much more challenging than anything else in the game, and I can see people kinda giving up at this point. The second to last boss is not particularly hard, so the transition is pretty harsh. On the other hand, the final boss did stress me out more than any other game I can remember. If you're looking for intense gameplay, I guess this game has it.
All in all, Dandara is a well-made, original, mostly enjoyable game. The story and themes are interesting and worth checking out, though some frustrating difficulty spikes may be enough to turn some people off.
This game is a bit overrated. It's too difficult for all the wrong reasons. UPDATE: Went back to this and yeah, it's just not fun. I wouldn't drop more than a dollar on this.
I find this game totally unplayable.
I was impressed by the pace displayed in the trailers, as well as the fantastically animated art work, but the final product is about struggling with its awful parameters.
SummaryIn a bizarre universe in which the oppressed are on the verge of oblivion, Dandara has awoken to reshape the world. The world of Salt hangs on the brink of collapse. The citizens, once free spirits, now stand oppressed and isolated. But not all is lost, for out of this aether of fear arises a heroine, a ray of hope. Her name is Dandara.