Aarus Awakening

Beautiful and creative, but controls and design issues often drag it from challenging to...

Lumenox states on Aaru’s Awakening‘s Steam Store page that it’s “a hand-drawn, fast-paced 2D action platformer.” The issue here is that there isn’t a whole lot of action to speak of, outside of the occasional enemy elimination through warping, and its trial-and-error nature causes it to be anything but fast paced.

Aaru's Awakening is a tragic example of failure to translate a strong creative vision into an enjoyable final product. Lackluster controls and a lack of polish prevent what is otherwise a game with a strong, unique identity from reaching the heights it...

Yet Aaru's Awakening hints at fun. You fire your teleport orb past a beam of scorching light, teleport again by angling your orb into a thin, winding passage, and an arcing ramp flings you into the sky. What a rush this moment is--a rush then halted when you land in the pool of lava that didn't appear until you were six inches above it.

Good: A solid game that definitely has an audience. Might lack replay value, could be too short or there are some hard-to-ignore faults, but the experience is fun....

Some say that there is no such thing as love at first sight--that initial attraction and infatuation appeal only to our aesthetic pleasures, and that true love only rises when passion no longer clouds our judgment. Romantics and idealists may dismiss the...