No Place for Bravery Reviews
Can a game that’s all about fighting and killing… be a critique of fighting and killing? This one is.
The current Switch build of No Place for Bravery is so buried under technical problems that you should stay far away. But if and when the problems are fixed? I wasn’t able to see the end of No Place for Bravery, making it difficult to fully evaluate. It certainly has some good pieces: great art, a strong concept, and satisfying combat. Maybe that’s enough for it to be worth a shot. Still, from what I did see, it’s hard not to feel that with a bit more thought and care No Place for Bravery could have been a much better game than it is.
No Place for Bravery is still a very solid game. Technical issues may mean that doesn't like up to the standards of the games it's trying to emulate, but even so, there's a lot of good stuff going on here, and if you can look past those issues (or even wait for some patches), there's definitely something here worth playing.
Ultimately though, No Place for Bravery is so heavily indebted to its influences that it never carves out a real identity of its own. A game that should lean heavily on its combat, and on telling its story, instead becomes bogged down with frustrating traps and repeatedly going over the same ground. The reliance on opaque systems and too many written lore extracts also detracts from the accomplished visuals and sound. In a market increasingly crowded with games drawing from the same well, it isn’t clear that there is a place for No Place for Bravery.
But in the end, all there is to remember about No Place for Bravery is the red from all his murderous encounters — the bloodletting Thorn has committed from brutalizing his foes, the insurmountable pain of his cheap, repetitive deaths, and the immense frustration of never seeing the game reach its fullest potential.
No Place for Bravery tells a fantastic story about glory and family. Although the gameplay falters at some points and the performance is subpar on Switch, the narrative supports the experience as a whole in a surprising game from Glitch Studio.
Review in Spanish | Read full review