Apotheon

Few games attempt to re-create ancient history, and fewer still try to do so accurately. Although modern-historical settings, such as World War 2 or the Wild West, are somewhat comfortable settings for developers to use since the setting is generally more familiar to people, the further back you go the fewer games you'll find dedicated to that era. Rewind all the way back to the ancient civilisation of Ancient Greece, and even the slightly the tmore modern Roman Empire, and you'll struggle to find much. Although Rome has the likes of Total War: Rome and the not-so-great Ryse: Son of Rome, Ancient Greece has very little support from video games, and when it does the historical accuracy is somewhat wanting. (I'm looking at you, God of War...) That's why Apotheon's setting and narrative come as such a refreshing change. Apotheon shows a respect and accuracy for its source material (bearing in mind that the source material is mythological in nature, anyway) that does the period justice and, like any good historical setting in a video game should, makes me yearn to know more about it.

The most obvious way in which Apotheon respects its setting is through its appropriate use of an excellent and wholly unique art style. The game's art, which can be best described as "like Ancient Greek pottery", blends that iconic mix of oranges and defined blacks to provide a great presentation for the game, whilst also immediately making you think of Ancient Greece. The art looks fantastic in motion, and is certainly a great eye-catcher. The art isn't the only thing that makes the game stays true to its source material though, the game also takes many cues from Greek mythos and attempts to accurately portray the powers and personalities of numerous Greek gods, from Ares, the God of War, to Zeus, the King of Gods and God of Thunder.

Such Gods play a huge role in the game's narrative, which sees you starring as Nikandreos (meaning "man of victory") as he hunts down a series of Olympian Gods to take revenge on his village, after it is raided by bandits. The Gods, namely Zeus, the King of Gods, have given up on humanity, thus dooming them to inevitable extinction. With the help of Hera, Zeus' wife, sets out on a journey to conquer the Gods and eventually, with the powers he has claimed from the other Gods, face Zeus himself. The idea of a random guy rising up and defeating a bunch of all-powerful Olympian Gods is a pretty cool set-up for a video game, essentially a revenge tale where the perpetrators are Gods rather than simply mobsters or just some bad people. The aforementioned respect for the source material certainly comes into full effect with the representation of these Gods. Each God is superbly-voiced by an all-round great voice cast, and are all depicted as being appropriately enormous and sufficiently mighty and God-like.

As for the actual gameplay, the game's combat is surprisingly deep for a 2D platformer, and intelligently incorporates the game's perspective into its execution. Conceptually, I originally likened to the combat of Dark Souls since there's a big emphasis on blocking and dodging, you always have a shield out, and you have a stamina meter that depletes with every swing, but it only really feels like Dark Souls at first glance. In execution, the game's combat comes off as somewhat awkward and clunky at times, with many encounters quickly devolving into you just blindly swinging and attempting to successfully block. The main problem with the combat for me was simply that the blocking felt extremely unresponsive, which is likely a product of the game trying to account for 2D perspective by forcing your block to essentially absorb the very end of the blow, rather than just absorbing some of the blow (since if you are too close to an enemy, the attack will just go through your shield, effectively). Furthermore, the long wind-up on some of the animations makes the combat feel slow and awkward at times, especially when you run out of stamina and your attacks become little more than pathetic, effortless pokes. In fact, the inclusion of the stamina bar feels woefully unneeded in the end, and serves to do little more than simply disrupt the flow of combat, especially when you are often fighting multiple enemies at once and thus your stamina will almost always deplete every fight. It feels like an unnecessary addition that may have tried to add an extra layers of tactical depth to the otherwise fairly simple combat, but merely hinders it in execution.

One of the things the combat does well, however, is offer you a huge variety of weapons and weapon types to mess around with, the weapons vary from spears to swords, and all have varying ranges and speeds. Such weapons can either be looted from enemies and chests, or purchased from vendors, and will need to be constantly replaced. Like something out of Dead Island, Apotheon has extremely strict durability on weapons and shields that limit use and cause them to break after a short time. Unfortunately, once a weapon breaks it cannot be repaired and must simply be replaced, meaning that if you find a weapon you particularly like then you may want to conserve its use. This over-bearing durability system feels frustrating at first, but you accrue such a huge arsenal weapons and constantly gaining new ones, anyway, so it never becomes that much of a problem in the grand scheme of things.

There are two elements to the combat: melee and ranged. Melee is self-explanatory and, as previously mentioned, involves a lot of blocking and dodging. The ranged combat, on the other hand, allows you to fire arrows, throw spears and javelins, and fire rocks and stones through slingshots. The game uses a rather smart aiming system that gives you full 360 degree control, a trick which is often uses to activate switches otherwise out of reach. The aiming is intuitive when it works, but it can be a little finicky to get right, which is certainly emphasised by a couple of puzzles that require a very tight aiming window to complete and so can become extremely frustrating when the aiming simply won't respond. I personally found to ranged combat to be more enjoyable and a lot less clunky than the melee combat, and often found myself firing arrows from a afar or launching spears and defeating my enemies before they even saw me, which certainly ended up being more consistently satisfying than the melee combat.

Ultimately, Apotheon is a compelling experience with interesting, if a little clunky, combat and an engaging and well-told narrative. Its unique art style and overall presentation make it easier to look past some of the game's larger issues and occasional design flaws, whilst the unique setting and narrative were easily enough to keep me going towards the end.