ori and the will of the wisps switch review

Ori and the will of the wisps switch review full#

Battles become as much about strategy as skill, but you never feel underequipped. Other creatures develop additional complexities that can push you to your limits. Everything is educational by design: the first rhino/dung beetle is in an open space and you have to wait until it tires out to attack it later, in a confined space, you realize you can lure it to knock itself out on a wall. It’s not just the new and reacquainted skills that get this treatment, but the vast array of new and ever-evolving bad guys you face. You also get three “shards”–gratefully received but ultimately unnecessary bonuses that affect the way you move, do damage and so on, which can be upgraded with Spirit Lights and shaped around your personal approach. You literally map your preferred control style on the move. In this outing, you get your standard skills which slowly assign themselves to controller buttons, but you also have an LT-bound wheel of talents which you can swap out and bind to X, Y and B depending on your circumstances.

Ori and the will of the wisps switch review full#

Before you know it, you’ve learned both old and new skills and you feel perfectly equipped for the full range of complex challenges ahead.Īs with its predecessor, 'Ori and the Will of the Wisps' makes you learn skills gradually. As a happily engaged man with a slowly expanding waistline, I get it–but like Blind Forest, Will of the Wisps is about learning new abilities through carefully constructed levels that immediately put them to the test.

Since the events of Blind Forest, Ori’s happiness clearly made them lazy and as a result, they lost all their powers. In the five years since, Moon Studios has done the impossible: create even more skills without overloading the player. Ori and the Blind Forest felt perfectly balanced, to the point where any additional abilities would have made it intimidating or unwieldy. If anything, you just discover new reasons to keep moving.

Everything feels meticulously planned and paced the narrative is never too intrusive, but you don’t forget your purpose. But just as you’re trying to remember what the hell’s going on, a new character or short cutscene will bring you up to speed. Occasionally, Ori and the Will of the Wisps does appear to take its eye off the story, but much of this is to do with the fact you’ll distract yourself, or die a boatload of times in one section. Other characters in the game are larger than life, often literally.