Aaru's Awakening
By Chad Sapieha,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Excruciatingly hard platformer could prove irritating.
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Aaru's Awakening
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What’s It About?
The powerful gods of Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night have tried to keep an uneasy peace, but now one of them is upsetting the balance in AARU'S AWAKENING, a side-scrolling 2-D platformer. Players take control of Aaru, a champion of Dawn with a bird-like head who gallops along on arms and legs like a gorilla. Aaru can run and jump like characters in most platformers, but he also has the ability to charge through crumbling walls and teleport anywhere he can shoot a glowing ball. Levels are designed to make the most of his teleportation ability, forcing players to use it to get through narrow gaps and avoid enemies and hazards. Many areas are designed so players need to precisely teleport multiple times in quick succession to avoid deadly traps and creatures. One small mistake is often enough to ensure death, but checkpoints are frequent and there's no limit on lives.
Is It Any Good?
It's pretty clear that Aaru's Awakening was designed for people who enjoy a serious challenge. It's an exhaustingly difficult and unforgiving game that demands skilled movement and precision teleportation while rewarding even small mistakes with death. Lots of death. As in, on some levels you'll probably die 100 times or more. Even those who usually enjoy putting their skills to the test may be turned off by this one. Conflicting controls can make it hard to do what you want to do when you want to do it (the mouse pointer is used to control the direction of both Aaru's teleportation ball and his charged pounces, to much frustration), and some levels are simply devious in their design, bordering on unfair.
It feels great when you manage to carry out all the right moves in a tricky area and reach the next checkpoint, but that feeling is frequently tempered by the relentless parade of failures that come before and after. Aaru's Awakening's imaginative world, along with its hand-drawn animated creatures and plants, is pretty to look at, and the teleportation system is pretty cool, but only the most masochistic of players is likely to make it through to the end. This one's just plain punishing.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about perseverance. Do you relish or avoid challenges? How do you feel when you are finally successful at something that's considered to be really hard? Is it worth the effort?
Families also can discuss the impact of violence in media. How do you feel when your character is forced to attack animals in a game? Do you feel differently if you attack animals to hunt and harvest their resources as opposed to attacking them because they're aggressive enemies? Why, or why not?
Game Details
- Platforms: Mac, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Lumenox Games
- Release date: February 23, 2015
- Genre: Action/Adventure
- Topics: Magic and Fantasy, Adventures, Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
- ESRB rating: NR
- Last updated: October 27, 2019
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