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Rating: 6 (out of 10)

Summary:

Underlying beautiful hand-drawn graphics and suberb music, Astal as a game is a fairly standard (and rather short) platformer. For platform games fans, Astal on Saturn is certainly worth a look but for anyone else, the game will probably be deja-vu.

The review:

Following the trend of all CD-based games of this type, you don't have to read the game manual to find out what's the story underneath the game, all you have to do is watch the game's intro. Well, the story goes like this: the world Quartilia was created by the goddess Antowas out of magical gems. From her last two gems, she created Leda, a young girl who has the power of life, and Astal, a short-tempered and strong little guy in charge of protecting Leda. Taking advantage of Antowas' sleep, the demon Jerado plotted to take over Quartilia and change it to his liking. Jerado thus created a powerful warrior named Geist (similar to Astal) to carry out his plan. Leda was kidnapped and in rage, Astal tore Quartilia apart looking for her to finally find her trapped in a crystal at the bottom of the ocean. The turmoil in Quartilia woke Antowas up and she sent Astal to Quartilia's moon in punishment for the mess he caused. Then Antowas took care of Jerado and defeated him. But Geist was still there and taking yet again advantage of Antowas' sleep, he kidnapped Leda a second time. This was too much for Astal. He broke free and headed back to Quartilia. The game starts here.

The game in itself is full of beautifully hand-drawn graphics. Many of the backgrounds look like paintings with many, many colors. Astal, enemies and other characters also have the same colorful attributes and are nicely animated. On the technical side, Astal impresses. Most of all the levels are full of parallax scrolling and warping to simulate depth. On many occasions, the game screen scales in and out effortlessly. And the sprite power demonstrated here in the form of scaling, rotation, size and number leaves no doubt in the gamer's head, this is a 32-bit game.

The music is also worthy of mention. Some may find it too soothing for a game but there's no denying about the quality of it. It really sounds like one of the musical scores you'd find in a typical animated movie from Don Bluth's Studios or Amblin Entertainment (except for the singing, there's none of it in Astal). No kidding. The sound effects are also nice with Astal's various yelps showing our hero is full of personality and the rest of the sound effects mostly accentuate the whole "crystalline nature" of the game.

In terms of playability, Astal fares pretty good. Astal is a versatile character who can run, throw, run and throw, jump, attack in midair, has a ground-shaking attack, can blow his opponents away (literally!) and can even pick up and throw large objects (a tree or a rock). The latter attack is one of the occasions where the screen scales in and out. Surprisingly, Astal is a two-player game. On the first level, you'll have to rescue a mysterious bird which will become your companion in your journey. A second player can then pick up a joypad and join in. The bird also has various attacks (less than Astal though) and can even perform some combos! Whether a second player joins in or not, the bird has pretty the same use for Astal. The bird can either attack enemies, clear a whole screen of enemies (a special attack) or search for/pick up items for Astal.

But where Astal disappoints is in its longevity. Like so many 32-bit games, the game is simply too short. There are some 15 levels or so (bosses included) in Astal but most of those levels are too linear and straightfoward. You can go through most of them in no time. And with virtually no alternative routes or hidden areas to explore, there's no point in spending any more time than necessary in each level.

To be quite honest, I like Astal. I love the feisty nature of Astal himself and the whole game has a "anime" feel that any fan of Japanese cartoons can appreciate. But as a game, I feel Astal doesn't score very high.