This was a delightfully short but sweet indie title with plenty to offer for fans of the top-down action genre. Granted, the game can be far from short with all of its additional content the game has to offer, but in the age of the perpetual backlog one can't always be asked to spend the extra time on it. The game received high praise for its beautifully crafter maps, and a vast array of weapons, customization options, and additional content. Even after 5 years, the game's style ages incredibly well and works with the environments and the dysmal mood it succeeds in creating. While I wasn't a fan of the narration at first, it certainly grew on me, as well as the excellent voice acting from the supporting roles. I will also say that the soundtrack worked with the game's mood and themes, but I wouldn't have it as a selling point for the game.

Though the objectives of the game can feel grindy or simple, the developers succeeded in weaving an interesting story about the city you're trying to repair (called the Bastion) and the "Calamity" that caused its exhile and near-destruction. The breadth of enemies in this game will also surprise you, and will never make you feel bored or annoyed with their placement or cheap gameplay shenanigans. Combat is fair, and borders on being a bit too easy for seasoned gaming veterans.

This is a must-buy game on sale.

Are you a fan of hand-drawn animation? Are you a fan of isometric games? Do you like whacking the ♥♥♥♥ out of things? Do you like narration in nearly everything?

If you answered "yes" for every one of these questions, this game is for you.

Gifted to me from a friend. Never heard of it before. Was open to try it after reading nothing but good things about it. Once I started playing I fell in love. Think top-down view, Cartoon'y art styled Dark Souls with a very active story and action based combat with RPG elements all expertly melded together. I can't get enough of this game each time I play it.

Its a must own or a great gift :)

One of the best indie games ever. Impressive voice acting, brilliant story, good level designs and an epic ending with an amazing soundtrack. You should definitely play.

This has to be one of the worst games I've ever had the displeasure to play, and it's all because of it's terrible block mechanic.
With a proper block mechanic, I'd have recommended this game.

I know this review will get a lot of negative ratings from fans. I don't really care.
Enjoy hitting that "unhelpful" button without reading.

So in order to appease you fans of this game, let's start with the good:

-The game is gorgeous. Despite how absolutely dreadful some of it's aspects are, art isn't one of them.
-The game's soundtrack is great.
-The narrator is also very good. Actually, the whole sound design (things getting hit, things exploding) is rock solid across the board.
-The game does an adequate job of letting you know where you are and where you need to go without leading you by the nose. There are a couple markers early on. I don't recall too many after that.
-Upgrade materials are placed in intuitive locations; you won't need a walkthrough to find the last upgrade material for a weapon or anything annoying like that. Story bits are also intuitive.
-Game takes a while to complete, which I always count as a positive. Even in games I dislike, like this one, because for those who do like it that means more stuff to do and more entertainment time per dollar.
-Customizable difficulty beyond just "The monsters are stronger!" or "The monsters are weaker!" in the "gods" system; each god can be activated individually, and grant the monsters special bonuses (such as: explode on death, increased damage reduction, regeneration, increased damage etc).

Now, where to start on my list of gripes?

-Let's start small: the game constantly swaps out your loadout whenever you get a new weapon or skill. This is frequent, as there are many weapons and skills in the game. This isn't praise, though, as they're mostly useless.
What this means is that the game will take away your favorite, highly-upgraded power weapon in favor of some worthless piece of unupgraded junk, then tell you to complete a level with it.
This is all the more appaling considering we have TWO weapon slots, but the game will not default to taking away the first or second; melee ones will equip the first, ranged the second, and you can't possibly know what random junk the game will throw at you without reading a walkthrough (which will ruin the whole story aspect of this story-based game).

-Gods are not unlocked from the beginning, and must be earned even when you do unlock the shrine. Also, gods are only for increasing difficulty, not decreasing it.
Players who struggle with the game will realize that it's got no "easier" mode. While I believe the game to be fairly easy when it doesn't cheese, I've been playing for most of my life, and those who haven't and are struggling will be annoyed by this.

-Next up: targetting. How do you ♥♥♥♥ up targetting? Well, if you're bastion you do, because you're "special".
Normally, if I want to target something I indicate those wishes to the game by pointing at it with my mouse. In general, a game will pick up targetting within a reasonable range of the target (and not exclusively on top of it).
Bastion, though, begs to differ; not only do you have to point directly at the target, you also have to keep your mouse on the target to shield from it when faced with multiple enemies.
Where this fails spectacularly is that there are multiple high-speed or teleporting enemies in the game, and they just vanish from your mouse cursor, making your character turn around and target an enemy outside your field of view and who isn't attacking you.

-Okay, perhaps those could be excused (they can't). What's next?
Upgrades. All the upgrades in this game are boring.
They are all "faster reload by X%" or "X% more damage" or "+X ammo capacity". And when it's not that it's "more knockback" or "can now stun" - absolutely generic, boring, and frankly unworthy of a world in which we are constantly on freaking flying pieces of rock.
Couldn't you have invented something a bit more interesting?

-There is no invulnerability frame after taking damage. Dust: An Elysian Tale did this on it's hardest difficulty too, and it was just as stupid there; there, if you touch spikes it's pretty much a game over (across several minutes as the spikes take 1-2 health away per second out of your 700+ total).
In Bastion, if you ever find yourself in a position where you are flanked (and you will, because the game spawns enemies behind and in front of you simultaneously) then because of the aforementioned ♥♥♥♥♥♥ blocking you're likely to have the character try to block a guy who isn't attacking you, take damage, rotate around to the guy who just hit him, take more damage from the previous guy and either die or rotate again... Which means you take more damage. Repeat until either dead, use a special skill, manage to get your mouse cursor over one of them or get out of range and line them up.

-The enemies are stupid. They run around like headless chickens, fall into pits, slam into walls and keep running into them for a fair few seconds.
Bosses? Ones that can move will very frequently just fall off into a pit and die instantly, even if you don't want them to.
A leaping boss fairly late into the game was apparently so terrified of me, he turned right and just jumped off when I approached.

-The story is non-sensical. It's about as stuck up it's own rear end as Final Fantasy XIII 2.
Seriously, I have no idea what the hell am I supposed to be working towards; every time I gather something (shards, cores, whatever) some rampaging plot device comes and undoes my work. Why should I even bother to keep trying again? Because allow me to ask... "Have I ever told you the definition of insanity?"

-Challenges are pointless. Again, unless it rewards you with an upgrade component for your main weapon(s) (which most won't, as two of three of their rewards will be an upgrade component and a skill for them) then they're about as useful as throwing peas at the screen when you see an enemy, because you won't be using them. There isn't even a way to know what enemies you'll find or what the terrain will look like, so you can't know what weapons will be good.

All in all, I give this game a "broken essential mechanic / 10". If you can get over how horrible blocking is, this could easily be a 7/10 or even an 8/10, but I can't.

This game has been out long enough I doubt i could add anything someone else hasn't said, this game is so wonderfully crafted. While short the story is worth sticking around for, the gameplay is smooth and the art & graphics are fantastic. It holds a lot of replayability and there's plenty of options for fighting styles.

My only complaint is that it isn't longer.

just beat this game, honestly one of the best games I've ever played. Everything about this game is amazing, from the weapons to to music to the art style ; i love it all.

oh. my. gosh. DO I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY!

gameplay

combination of simple and tacticle. you unlock weapons as you play and you can only select 2 in the arsonal for a stage. they also can come with special skills. you can also unlock perks in the form of spirits, a special drink.

story

a kid wakes up in his bed to find that his world has fallen apart. he wakes up and heads for the bastion where people were told to go when their is trouble. when he gets their, he finds their is only one other surviver. he tells him that he needs to find special crystals called cores to activate the bastion and rebuild the world.

world building

holy crap...well...its kinda hard to explain it all. the world feels steampunky and mystical and i love it. the lore and world building(litirally) caught my attension the moment i heared the word "callamity". the story is told through a narrator with a cool voice that follows you through the whole game. the game can be seperated into 3 parts. the core segment, where you find the cores that power the bastion, the shard segment, where you find magic shards to fix the bastion aftertaking a beating, and the ura segment which i cant explain due to spoilers. thats about all i can tell without spoilers. i will leave the rest a suprise.

verdict: 10/10

Yes.

Nice gameplay, controls work smoothly and soundtrack is also pretty good. Getting all achievements gives a nice challenge to the game. Otherwise it's not that hard to complete, even in a new game plus.

Some minuses tho'.. For example narrator starts to be pretty annoying when you are running game through for the third time (for the achievements!). You can always mute him but you have to watch every single dialog and that's also pretty boring.

I don't think if this is really a minus but after you finish the game there's no really much to do. New game plus didn't provide almost any changes or challenges.

Even still, overall this is a really good game and I highly suggest to give it a go!