Fallen Tear: The Ascension by developer and publisher CMD Studios and publisher Holysoft GmbH—PC(Steam) review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Welcome to
an adventure across the land of Raoah! Help guide Hira on this metroidvania
quest across a land that is being choked by corruption. Can you help Hira
return peace to Raoah with the help of the companions he meets along the way,
or will the world fall into desolation? Only you can help out in Fallen Tear:
The Ascension!
Fallen Tear is a beautifully crafted metroidvania title filled with a lot of character. From pretty graphics to solid soundtracks, it’s obvious that a fair amount of care was put into Fallen Tear. Fallen Tear has an interesting combat system directed by how you assign upgrades. It also features a fairly unique bond system where you can bring different allies with you to provide both passive and active effects. Combine these two and there’s a lot of customization for your combat and exploration.
Let’s start
out talking about the world of Raoah and our protagonist: Hira. Hira has grown
up in a small village with his mother and brother. One day, when he is taking
the test to become a hunter, a profession of monster slayers, his town is
attacked by demons. Hira then comes across a woman named Runa who tells Hira
his fate is to seek the gods to ask them for answers to his questions. Needless
to say he has to reach them first, which is easier said than done.
As a
metroidvania title, Fallen Tear is very exploration heavy, and there are a
number of abilities and upgrades to earn to help you reach new places, as well
as one of the better systems to incentivize exploration. Ability upgrades are
primarily earned through Ascension skills. These skills can be earned by
exchanging points in your main hub area. When you first check out the upgrades
you can select between different moves. I’d suggest unlocking from left to
right if you aren’t confident in your abilities, but you can choose whichever
you wish. As you get more points you’ll be able to unlock more abilities. These
points are earned every time you meet a new companion and recruit them to your
cause.
Now is when
I’d like to introduce you to an interesting core mechanic of Fallen Tear: fated
bonds. Basically, as you explore the world of Raoah, you’ll come across NPCs
who you can ask to help you out. Sometimes you just need to ask, and sometimes
they have a task for you to fulfill. Once recruited they show up in the Temple
of Oras, your de facto base of operations, and you can bring them along with
you on your journey. Each time you recruit someone to your cause you earn one
of those points needed for ascension skills.
But that
isn’t all that they’re useful for! See you can equip up to three friends to
bring with you. These friends can be swapped out at the fast travel nexus
points, but they all have an active and passive affect. Active consumes SP and
will generally be a form of attack to enemies nearby, while the passive effect
can be a number of different things, some helping with exploration. I will
bring your attention to my favourite partner: Altapi. Her active skill is
really useful in combat, which I will cover a little later, but her other
abilities light up dark locations (yes you’ll definitely want that) and you
will have a glowing pulse when near a hidden passage. Super useful for
exploration, and competent in battle is a great combo. Some other characters may
give you stat boosts or an increase to damage from certain attack types.
Bonds can
also be upgraded, improving the bonus from their passive and permanent
abilities as well as increasing the damage of their active skill, or the affect
it has. Bond level increases are earned by hitting certain benchmarks for
in-game goals. Some may be tied to map exploration and combat goals, some could
be for acquiring a certain number of collectible items, visiting a set number
of locations, or even one greedy bugger that just wants all your money. Once
you meet the upgrade criteria you can fork over a grand in currency to upgrade
their bond.
Fallen Tear
gives you a lot of freedom with what you can do. Basically after the
tutorial-like areas you’re told “here are your main goals, now go do whatever
while achieving those”. I often bounced between different areas while exploring
and didn’t really go straight in one direction. I’d head left on the map and
clear an area, then head back to the temple and go right and clear an area,
maybe I’d go up on the map next. I think this is probably going to be a
sticking point for some people, but you’re literally given free reign over what
order and how you want to complete your tasks with very little direction other
than knowing where the gods you are looking for are. You don’t HAVE to make it
through the super rough area that you’re probably underequipped for, but you
still probably can. You almost assuredly won’t be able to collect everything on
your first go, but you can still get through the area.
A really
handy thing they’ve done for exploration is the ability to take screenshots and
attach them to your map as self made markers. They appear as little nodes and
when you hover over them a picture appears. This is so incredibly useful for
remembering areas of interest and what you needed to do there that I’m willing
to overlook some of the other minor exploration hurdles in the game. I’ll warn
you now, while I did thoroughly enjoy the environments and the exploration, it
wasn’t always…super cohesive. I have a particular umbrage with the wind city.
No, not the underwater segment surprisingly—that I didn’t hate—but the wind
city of spinning blades of migraine inducing platforming certainly wasn’t
great. So what is my issue you ask? Well, it turns out that the camera will
sometimes zoom out to give you a better view, or move in a direction to help
prepare you for future platforming. In an area where touching a spinning blade
sends you back to the start of the platforming segment, you can imagine my frustration
when the camera is too slow to keep up with you in a spinning blade maze. I
literally had to time it and jump and dash off-screen and hope I made it. Was
not amusing.
That being
said there weren’t a whole lot of issues I came across that really dampened my
playthrough other than this. There were a few camera issues here and there, and
dropping down the stairs in Purist Isle is nigh impossible, but otherwise I
found the majority of the platforming to be reasonable. There are a few areas
that are rather sparse in fast travel points, so be aware that returning to
certain places may be a little frustrating if you’re collecting everything like
I did.
Speaking of
collecting everything, you may be asking yourself “why would I want to do that?”.
Well, turns out there’s actually a reason for you to explore everywhere, not
just for completion sake. Hira has “tasks” assigned to him that are listed as “fated
goals”. These goals include discovering certain landmarks, finding all the
items of one type in an area, or defeating a set number of each individual
monster type. Upon meeting these requirements, you can receive the rewards as a
sort of point resource. This resource can then be spent on a skill tree for
Hira called “Masteries”. There are four “tiers” of Masteries and each tier has six
common masteries and two “capstone” masteries. You can have three common and
one capstone mastery equipped per tier and they all provide different effects,
as well as permanent unlock bonuses. They can be mixed and matched to suit your
playstyle and swapped out whenever you need. For example, generally speaking
the six common masteries would include two attack based ones, two defense based
ones, and two ‘other’ ones that are usually some sort of supporting effect.
Similarly the capstones tend to be either offensive or defensive focused. Going
up a tier requires purchasing the current tier Masteries. While I’m not certain
on the particular requirements, unlocking three common Masteries and a capstone
was enough for me to unlock the next tier.
I’ve talked
a lot about exploration and upgrading abilities, both exploration based and
combat based, but I haven’t talked about the actual combat yet. Combat is, for
the most part, pretty dang smooth. You have your standard combo hits, a dodge,
and a counter as your basic moves to get you started. A counter is performed by
dodging an attack at the last second and then attacking. Both enemies and you
have a guard gauge, and depleting it causes a stun effect and increased damage
on that target. For bosses, they regain their guard gauge after recovering from
the stun but most small enemies do not. You have a souls-like healing mechanic
that is based on mana rather than set uses, and you regain mana through hitting
an opponent or countering attacks.
Mana is
also used to summon the teammates you brought along to do their attacks. By
exchanging enough blows with enemies you can also build up a sort of super move
that summons all your equipped teammates to attack in front of you. This attack
also slows down time while being used so enemies don’t move out of range…usually.
The last boss and one particular boss is a little egregious for this, but by
the time you fight either of them chances are you’ll be overpowered enough not
to really care other than mere annoyance. In addition to this, You can also
parry most enemy attacks by attacking them at the same time they attack you,
but there are a decent number of unparry-able attacks, so take that at your own
discretion. A cool thing to note is that any Ascension skills acquired after
the first three can also be used in combat. Furthermore, you can customize
these skills with certain unlocks you get, but how you get them is a little
spoiler-y, so I’ll let you discover how on your own.
Getting in
fights is a weirdly diverse feeling, as common enemies, bosses, and the routine
gauntlet challenges you come across all feel very different. For normal
monsters you can usually get them by themselves or as a group of two, and you
can use the terrain to your advantage. It’s always a good idea to practice the
dodge and parry on the enemies the first time you see them. The reason for this
is that there are numerous gauntlet challenge “rooms” you usually have to go
through. As the name implies, these gauntlet rooms require you to beat a number
of enemies before being able to leave, and this is almost always in flat ground
rectangle rooms where you can’t hide or use the terrain to protect yourself. While
I understand most people tend not to be fans of this, I actually like the
gauntlet style rooms because it feels like a little bit of spice added to the
combat every so often. Bosses tend to have unique mechanics or aspects to their
fights and will usually throw some pretty interesting attacks your way.
Breaking their guard to get the big damage in is always a good idea, but
figuring out when to heal and when to be less aggressive is also important.
While some bosses are basically just larger versions of smaller enemies, none
of them felt particularly stale to me. Other than the one bonus boss in Lilac
Mire and the last boss I didn’t have too difficult a time playing on normal
difficulty, but your experience will change based on your normal playstyle,
whether you’ve been exchanging the collectibles for health/mana/damage
upgrades, and your Mastery and teammate load out.
While you’re
out and about, or even in combat, there is a world mechanic that is a Blood
Moon. During this period monsters become much tougher, demons can spawn in, but
enemies drop a lot more money. Resting at a camp or fast travel point ends the
Blood Moon, so you can always “turn it off” if you’re struggling. Fair warning,
a blood moon can happen during a gauntlet challenge, so halfway through if the
enemies get super tough you know why. Contrary to what you may hear, there is
actually a plot relevant reason for the Blood Moon, and I don’t actually hate
the mechanic. It’s easy enough to end if you aren’t confident in exploring
while it’s going on. It increases money generation while it’s happening, and it
spices things up if you’re re-exploring areas for collectibles.
So let’s
talk a bit about the aesthetic design here. I absolutely love the visual design
taken for Fallen Tear. The animations on characters and enemies seem well
thought out, the background designs are really great and are unique to each
area you visit, and the NPC character designs all have their own individuality.
Couple this with a very well fitting soundtrack that accompanies the theme for
the area you are exploring without being either overshadowed or obtrusive and
you have a great package to present Fallen Tear. Hidden areas are reasonably
indicated by differences in design that are subtle enough to be tricky but not
so invisible you need a guide. A cool design choice involves the use of
foreground art. There can be creatures moving in either the background or
foreground to give a dynamic feeling, and whenever you pass behind something
that would obscure your vision it goes see-through so you’re never left in a
bad spot.
Area design
is also mostly really good. One of the few underwater segments I didn’t hate in
a game, and there were only three areas that really caused me grief, one of
which was reasonable enough to give a shortcut once completed, and wasn’t too
awful to begin with. The Golem Ruins and Zapana were quite rough however. Golem
Ruins could really do with an unlockable shortcut after the “dark room you need
to push switches in” but was otherwise rather reasonable for the nature of the
area, at least comparing it to similar styled areas in other games. I’ve
already outlined my frustration with Zapana’s spinning blades and camera, but
you also need to make sure your computer doesn’t lag in this area. While I
admittedly played this on an older machine, I did have some stuttering which
caused me to restart a platforming section because I touched the blades. That
being said, almost every game I’ve played, especially metroidvanias, tend to
have a few zones that are awful to get through. Sometimes this is due to
challenge, sometimes it’s developer oversight, but it’s really rare to find
games without them. Fallen Tear’s case is fairly tame compared to some other
titles out there, and the developers are very open to feedback so it might not
even be as bad when you play.
As a pre-closing segment before we wrap up here, I would like to be clear that the game is currently experiencing some glitches and issues here and there, and there is a FREE DLC planned for the future that expands the world story. My personal issues apart from the lag in Zapana include:
- crashing when viewing the tutorial for enhancing the Ascension skill that happens after a certain boss fight,
- being unable to upgrade a particular teammates bond because their dialogue for the final boss overrides the option,
- and not playing a cutscene after beating the last boss.
Thankfully I ended up joining the game’s Discord and
could see the final cutscene that way, but I do hope this gets fixed in the
next major patch. I would also like to say that the game felt a little lacking
in terms of the NPC teammates and their stories. I realize it’s tough getting 20+
different fully fleshed out character arcs into a game like this, especially
since doing that for every character would also feel like a drag on the player
as well, but a little more into all their backgrounds and such would be really
nice to see.
Furthermore,
the game ends on a really weird note. It feels like there is more that was
supposed to be there, but stops just shy of reaching the real conclusion. It’s
kind of like getting to the final area of an RPG, beating the miniboss at the
halfway point, and then the game says “ok, we’re done”. Maybe this is meant to
be addressed in the free DLC planned, or maybe it’s supposed to be set up for a
planned sequel, but it does end on a bit of an anticlimax. Still better than
ending poorly, but it did leave me feeling a little disappointed. Good news
though is that the devs are super active in the discord and steam discussion
threads and are looking into all the issues and suggestions players are sending
them. Chances are by the time you read this review many of the issues others
have had will have been resolved.
In conclusion, Fallen Tear: The Ascension is a lovingly crafted metroidvania with rewarding exploration, plenty of unique biomes, a colourful cast of characters, and some pretty fluid combat. While there are a few issues currently being worked through, and the storyline does feel a little lacking or incomplete at times, you can still be drawn in to a fantastically crafted world both visually and auditorily. Despite a few hiccups here and there, Fallen Tear: The Ascension is definitely on my list for recommended metroidvanias.
Score: 9 / 10
