After Us Reviews
After Us beats you over the head with paper-thin themes, but between the truly awful platforming and the frustrating level design, it'll be the least of your worries.
There are beautiful moments in After Us worth seeing, but they’re buried in poorly directed levels featuring merely adequate gameplay. There’s not enough to consistently grab onto here to really hook most players. After Us has a lot in common with Piccolo Studios’ last narrative platformer but ultimately doesn’t offer the charm or consistently moving story that made that game so memorable.
After Us is a game with beautiful environment. The game is very relaxing, but feels very empty and aimless at times. It's an okay-ish platformer.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
For better and worse, After Us is yet another beautiful but otherwise boring and overly artistic game that does very little to advance the medium.
With lofty ambitions and some great elements, After Us lets itself down in as many ways as it triumphs. Gorgeous art direction and an admirable anti-pollution message aren't enough to make up for tedious combat, performance issues, and open-ended level design that plays things a little too loose. If you're itching for an experience like this, there are better options out there, at the very least until After Us' performance issues are addressed. There's the core of an incredible experience here, but it's just not ready yet.
After Us presents a strong message about planet conservation and wildlife preservation. However, weak gameplay and hollow-level design make the game a running simulator rather than an engaging platformer.
After Us is gorgeous and has some important things to say about consumerism, but actually playing it isn't always fantastic.
After Us has a wordless story that doesn't effectively communicate its environmentalist themes and platforming that frustrates with unreliable controls, but it does look fantastic.
After Us had some lofty goals and it shows but sadly, they didn’t quite reach those highs. Incredible art direction and a dope soundtrack sadly don’t make up for the ‘tacked’ on combat and the very floaty platforming controls. The design choice to make it open world is also a head scratcher because the game absolutely does a poor job of telling players where to go next. I’m left wondering what could have been with After Us, had the combat been taken out I think this would have been a much better adventure.
Overall, this leaves After Us as a flawed but intriguing 3D platformer. Its moments of brilliance are great to behold, such as its varied, dreadful locales and those moments where its platforming truly clicks. However, its lack of character and story development and its more frustrating sections do mean that it's not a perfect game - but at the very least its heart is in the right place.
This type of game has been done far better before.
After Us manages to deliver an experience that is largely enjoyable despite its flaws. Loose gameplay mechanics, framerate hiccups, and superfluous combat encounters are mostly offset by solid environmental storytelling, a poignant message, fantastic soundtrack work, and almost rock-solid performance and visuals.
After Us may appear to be a game with a profound message at first play, but the deeper you get in, the more its grip lessens on the player between drawn out traversal sections, reptitive puzzling, clunky controls and a profound emptiness permeating throughout. While I appreciate what I think the game is trying to say, unfortunately, I don’t think it gets that message across as well as it would have liked.
After Us has style to spare and its heart in absolutely the right place, yet the maddeningly finicky controls make traversal feel like a chore – a cardinal sin for any platformer.
After Us features a sprawling, desolate world painstakingly crafted to show the destruction wrought by human greed, but its camera controls and level design make the platforming awkward and often frustrating.
There's a fascinating game hiding in After Us. The melancholy tale of resurrecting a desolate Earth makes for an interesting premise, but it isn't told in a way to make you care much about it. The platforming generates some good moments, but it is also clunky in places due to the physics and lack of explanation in the tutorial. The combat is rather unnecessary and unexciting, but it is functional, while the presentation remains fetching. Patches are still being created to tweak the game, and there is some potential to fix the technical issues experienced in the early portion of this playthrough. For now, it isn't a game that you need to seek out and play if there are other options to tackle.
Compared to Arise: a Simple Story, After Us represents an evolution. Despite that, the game fails to accomplish its mission and remains a step back from the modern games standards.
Review in Italian | Read full review
After Us is a game of contrasts. A game where the harsh grays and pollution of its desolate landscapes contrast with the gorgeous rays of light and greeneries summoned by its protagonist. Where its unwelcome setting contrasts with its easy-going gameplay loop. It’s also a game where the decent gameplay loop contrasts with its excessively on-the-nose story.
Unreliable performance and some underdeveloped mechanics do hurt the impact and atmosphere of After Us, but its intriguing post-apocalyptic world and satisfying movement still make for a worthy adventure.
After Us demonstrates its strong personality with a title that plays at modifying its world to be more than just a responsive platformer
Review in Spanish | Read full review