First Impressions: Garshasp The Monster Slayer

The story behind my purchase of this game should be a familiar one by now. It's a minor indie game which was heavily discounted in the Steam Summer Camp Sale. It looked quite interesting and it also had a special achievement for an entry in the competition. I'd never heard of this before which I suppose is one of the reasons for the promotion. The concept is pretty simple, it's an action beat-em-up style game in a fantasy world. You must fight your way though hordes of monsters to avenge your brother death by killing the evil dude and reclaiming a magic mace thing. The combat is quite fluid and controls reasonable well. There are a variety of different attacks and combos. You learn more as you gain experience. I had a couple of issues with the boss enemies until I realized that the symbols appearing on the screen were Quick Time Events. Once that was understood things were much simpler. I must have missed the explanation of that somewhere. The environments are nice looking and the monster models are well designed. There is however one major problem and that is the camera. You do not have any direct control of the camera in the game (which is a valid option). Except here the directional controls for the character are relative to the camera angle. Again that's fairly standard, but here the camera is constantly moving and changing position, sometime cutting to a entirely different angle. Each time that happens your movement reference changes and what was 'left' a moment ago is suddenly 'up'. You have to pay close attention to were you're going especially where small ledges and long jumps are involved. For the price it is worth a try but the camera lets it down from what would otherwise be an excellent game.