Sundered Reviews
A sublime blend of Metroidvania and Lovecraft with beautiful hand-drawn art, tarnished a little by the element of repetition.
Sundered is an extremely impressive Metroidvania-style platformer, mixing together extremely challenging gameplay with beautiful yet haunting graphics to great success.
Sundered takes the 2D Metroidvania platforming formula augments it with some successful ideas that all but reward you for dying. Its procedurally generated levels are hit and miss, as the dynamic parts come off as bland in comparison to Sundered's impressive hand-drawn areas and epic boss fights. In addition, its randomly appearing enemy hordes sometimes lead it to devolve into mere button mashing and random deaths, but the knowledge that I'll come back a little stronger each time makes it hurt less.
Exploring new areas, fighting off hordes of increasingly menacing enemies, and seemingly insurmountable challenges help Sundered stay compelling through the finish, but technical issues keep the experience from greatness
Sundered is an enjoyable journey that iterates upon the Metroidvania style in ways that are both satisfying and substantial.
Sundered has the basic foundation for a metroidvania/roguelike hybrid down pat, but its poor handling of enemy distribution and the otherwise fine combat that comes with it sadly drags it down.
A completely wonderful Metroidvania, but at the same time, another Metroidvania.
Sundered is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys Metroidvanias. It has all the stuff you'd want, including a focus on exploration and finding new abilities. But it's interesting takes on character progression, death, and level layouts come together to make Sundered feel like something new. And gorgeous 2D art and animations back up the smart design.
Sundered is a beautiful-looking Metroidvania with interesting mechanics, let down slightly by performance issues and a difficulty curve that is simply too steep during its opening hours.
Sundered is a metrodvania with roguelike elements and inspiration from Lovecraft. What can go wrong?
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The story of Eshe is confusing and mysterious. Throughout the game there are many questions to be asked about what her goal is or how she feels about her unfortunate predicament. However, these questions fade as the drive to fulfill Eshe's unspeakable goal consumed me. I didn't care why she was doing it, I just knew that it must be important enough to put up with all of this to obtain it and that was enough for me. Parts of me wish Sundered never ended, but I was satisfied with the conclusion which made me look back at the choices I made and wonder: if I did it again again, would I embrace or resist this power?
Sundered fuses a lot of ideas from different games and genres, and the result is a very unique experience, especially within the metroidvania genre. Not all these ideas work as well and some of them can be very polarizing, but if the game "clicks", it's one hell of a journey to the heart of darkness.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Another promising game is ruined by the lure of procedural-generation, which is a particular shame given Sundered's gorgeous animation and interesting gameplay ideas.
A missed opportunity for an artistically inspired metroidvania game in desperate need for a corrective patch.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Writing that such a good looking, clearly heartfelt project isn't an awesome game frankly sucks. Literally just glimpsing these screenshots fills me with wonder once again. But I have to shake off those starry-eyes and remind myself of the fatigue and apathy I felt just halfway into Eshe's journey toward salvation or damnation.
Sundered has not only become a role model for how to capture the metroidvania style with complete ease, but also wins the title of one of the best indies of the year.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
It's not a question of if the player will die in Sundered. They will lose the struggle against the Eldritch horrors that call its world home, and it ultimately comes down to the core theme of resist or embrace. Will the player embrace the challenge, or resist it by giving up? That'll ultimately come down to how much perseverance a person has, but those that do see the adventure out will be rewarded with more glimpses into a gorgeous world and some incredibly tense combat exchanges.
Sundered takes the indie, Metroidvania genre to new heights while showing just how good these types of experiences can be. Great gameplay could have carried this game far enough, but Thunder Lotus once again went for hand drawn art and the result is truly remarkable.
All in all, I feel like Sundered had a great idea in place, but due to the procedurally generated rooms mixed with the nonstop enemy encounters, I felt like I wasn't able to progress enough in a span of time to make me want to keep going.
Sundered is a nice game with interesting bosses and mechanics, which suffers from the advent of complexity talismans, problems with levels generation, long download times and poor optimization on the PS4. Perhaps some of these shortcomings will be resolved by patches, and we're taking this into account with our score.
Review in Russian | Read full review