Verspark Children of Morta Review

8.4/10 “Children Of Morta” is a game that I enjoyed quite a bit, playing by myself as well as with my dad. It is quite a unique game, falling in many genres such as Roguelike, Adventure, Hack and slash, RPG and dungeon crawler. It does most of these quite well, creating enemies with unique mechanics to make dungeon exploring interesting, giving the characters many creative abilities to allow for a diverse fighting system and creating a heartfelt story that explored the characters presented. But the game did not do any of these in a way that was extremely special and well developed. For example, the story was quite a generic story of the “good guys fighting an evil that is spreading across the world and they are the only chance of saving it” with elements of “the main bad guy is evil as his lover went away” and “the evil is called the corruption but not really delved into” sprinkled in as well. I still do like the character building, especially with the small interactions between characters which can be seen when we are looking around their home, developing their own stories as well as the whole family. Despite the tactics that could be formed from all of the abilities given to the characters and the intense fascination that forms in how to best use them, quite a few of the fighting mechanics felt a bit clunky. For most of the game, I used the ranged characters Linda and Lucy who have a much lower chance of being damaged than other characters because of the ferocious nature of the enemies in close combat. It was quite an ingenious idea to make levelling up characters to certain levels also level up the whole family by adding new abilities (e.g. extra dodge), so I also played quite a bit with all of the melee characters, who, after some time, I found to be quite a pleasant challenge to play with. For example, Mark is a character who specialises in martial arts like fighting and has great abilities such as jumping large distances to enemies to land a hit and performing a devastating explosion if his dodge is sacrificed for a while. Even though I thought that he would be impossible to play with at the start because of his vulnerability to strong enemies with a large reach, it was quite fun trying to perfect strategies and the speed of my reactions to specific enemies in specific positions with specific abilities being ready to use. Melee characters still had quite big disadvantages which made me switch back to the ranged ones after a while - the complete inability to deal with some types of enemies. No matter how hard I tried, there was no way to use Mark or other characters with extremely short ranges to attack the slime monsters because of their sudden attacks and instant damage on contact (even when they are not attacking). All melee characters also did quite badly with enemies that could not be stunned and had quick and long reaching attacks. Because of the clunky dodging system, it was nearly impossible to dodge some of these attacks with characters such as Joey who needed a long time to stop their current attack. There are also other enemies which were also made quite shoddily. For instance, there is an enemy that places walls and creates tumors from the ground which hurt the player when touched. Even though this could have been a fun enemy to fight, the random wall placement and the sudden nature of the tumors’ arrival made fights with them much more about chance than skill, especially annoying when they placed walls in places which would trap the player. Yes, the fighting system still has a lot to improve on, but at least it is a blast to play and overcome problems given by the game. Co-op was even better - if you want to do it, be prepared to create a constant stream of exclamations to each other when you spot something important or plan what to do next! The boss fights were fairly awkward, with many of the bosses being quite easy to beat by just running around with a ranged character and the other bosses being so difficult that you have to pray for them not to do certain attacks too much. Even in normal mode, the final bossfight was so easy that I barely lost any health. Nevertheless, “Children Of Morta” still is an exhilarating game with many unique fight mechanics. It might be too hard for children, but it is perfect for gamers with quite a bit of experience in top down fighting games.