Drova – Forsaken Kin Review (Switch)
Summary: Drova - Forsaken Kin is a grim pixel art RPG about roaring factions upholding their opposing beliefs amongst a fallen ancient realm. The game's substantial amount of RPG features constitutes and assembles in a thrilling way that will have you slashing and leveling up for hours on end. Dive into the mythic kingdom of Drova and uncover its enigmatic past through solving denizens’ problems and beseeching issues while also not falling to the dangerous creatures in the wilderness.
3.6
Abandoned Connections
Explore and conquer an uncharted tattered world filled with dark mysterious and evil monstrosities! Drova – Forsaken Kin is an old school pixel art action-RPG developed by Just2D, published by Deck13, and released on October 15th of 2024. The game falls into the Grimdark genre and takes inspiration from Celtic mythology while also crafting its own identity through merging elements of classic games like Gothic and Baldur’s Gate. Drova urges you to dive into its lore and gameplay by being incredibly immersive and cinematic. Enter the land of legends, take up arms, and prepare to battle with more than just beasts in an adventure of epic proportions.
Drova’s story is very thoughtful, engrossing, and immediately intriguing. Your created character is part of a struggling tribe despite their laborious attempts of survival. While searching for a solution you come across and start following a pair of Druids who seem to be in the middle of transporting a red crystal. Worst comes to worst when their ritual goes awry and the Druid duo are struck down. Now in possession of this mysterious crystal and stuck in the land of Drova, you are tasked to endure and survive to make it out alive.
The story only gets more absorbing from here with interesting characters, rival factions, and butting interests. The lore of the world feels expansive with characters having history and by there being multiple landmarks littered throughout the landscape. It’s enthralling being able to see this so-called “land of legends” being in possibly more dire straits than the world you were trying to escape from. The characters also express themselves appealingly through reflective dialogue that can at times be surprisingly comical in a great way. There’s a lot of branching paths in the dialogue trees and I liked how you can keep conversations going or finish them abruptly.
Gameplay seems straightforward at first as you bash flying bugs and slay battered rats, but it quickly becomes more complex as more layers get introduced. You can freely move around, crouch, dodge, and perform other actions like interact with objects and pick up items. You can equip weapons like a sword and a shield and attack and block during combat. You can attack in a particular pattern to create combos and charge up swings to unleash deadlier strikes. The more you attack an enemy, the more its “break meter” fills up. Once it fills up, the enemy becomes staggered and you are able to get a few good hits in.
The more you gain experience through winning battles, the more Learning Points you earn that you can invest in your Talents. Talents are different skills that you use regularly like Sword, Craft, and Prospecting. These Talents become extremely useful as not only do you gain a proficiency boost for whatever new Talent you learn, but you can also learn a new skill to use with that particular Talent too. There are also abilities you can learn, like Lockpicking, but you need to find a teacher to teach you first. Magic powers also come into play and you can assign different magic to a wheel that you can access at a moment’s notice to quickly change between magic for strategic decision making.
There’s armor you can equip to nullify damage done to you and you have a couple of weapon loadouts that you can switch between. I usually had a sword like weapon and a shield equipped to one loadout and then a heavy two handed weapon equipped to the other and I could switch between the two loadouts freely and pull off some pretty decent combos while dodging and landing some flashy fire or lightning based magic attacks. There are a lot more mechanics in the game that really flesh out your experience with the game overall. There are ailments and afflictions that you have to keep track of like running into a thorny bush will make you bleed and lose health over time. You can mine for materials and craft items. You can collect food such as berries and meat and cook different meals for better healing effects. You can steal people’s belongings, there are weather effects, a sleeping and night and day component, and plenty of sidequests to tackle. Drova is robust and impressive in its approach to the RPG genre and doesn’t hold back in providing a rich gameplay environment. There is a lot to do and everything blends in together very naturally and flows in an organic way.
Drova is a game that doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to its storytelling or gameplay and it makes the game feel more engrossing. You’re free to explore anywhere on the map, but you will be sure to end up running into stronger enemies. The enemies do not scale to your level either making every fight have stakes and purpose. This also means that when you level up, learn new skills, and just become a better player overall, you actually feel powerful. Feeling your growth and seeing it transpire through your actions in the coliseum or out in the wild presents a great sense of progression.
The game’s beautiful handcrafted graphics wonderfully expresses the mood and dire circumstances. Sunlight and shadows convey the blanketing disposition of the scenario and the water reflections are notably realistic. The environment is aesthetically pleasing and even though a lot of colors are muddy and muted, the world feels dense and lived in. The soundtrack is pretty boring, but serves as a nice background arrangement that serves its purpose musically while you commit to your slaughter of ancient beasts and atrocities. Characters aren’t fully voiced, but they have some sound clips of them laughing or showing other emotions and pounding on enemies has a nice satisfying crunch to it.
I played Drova on the Switch and I ran into a lot of problems. Firstly, Drova doesn’t run well in handheld mode. Frames were constantly dropping and moved at a slideshow pace at moments. Playing while docked fixed this problem mostly, but I did have a noticeable amount of frame drops still. The text in the game is small; I was constantly squinting to try to make out words. There is an option to make them larger, but for some reason that option never saved for me so I would have to go back into the menus to change it every time I started a new session. Learning abilities would turn the screen completely black. Luckily, there is a generous quick save system so all I had to do was reset the game, but understandably, this got annoying fast. A big problem I had was a bug with the dialogue. The text from when characters were speaking would disappear completely and then reset, but only a certain amount of letters would pop up in the text box so often I wouldn’t even know what characters were talking about which is sort of important in a game that doesn’t give you any other clues to find people or locations.
Final Thoughts?
Drova – Forsaken Kin is a remarkable RPG about loss, struggle, and redemption. It’s mysterious and captivating and its story is engrossing. Gameplay isn’t complicated, but all of the game’s mechanics are interwoven in a way that will always have you strategizing and formulating your next scheme. Combat is fun and inventive with multiple ways and facets to interrupt your opposition and take them down. Quests are abundant and it’s entertaining traversing this relatable inhabited world full of colorful characters. While drab, music plays its part well enough and the varied sounds construct an interesting playing space. The abundance of bugs are unfortunate and the convenience of playing this on the Switch is diminished due to the bad framerate. Nonetheless, playing Drova reminded me of the days where I would spend all day in my room playing Champions of Norrath to level up and explore an exciting world. It is a great game that demonstrates an excellent feeling of exploration and adventure through its core gameplay.
About the Author
Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.
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