Seraph

Introduction

 Seraph was released on Steam as an early access title and today we’re going to be reviewing it.

What is Seraph? An action platformer with a clean cut focus on skill-based acrobatics and shooting is the best way to describe it. I will say from the get go that Seraph has no aiming elements: it automatically picks your target while you focus on dashing around and looking cool. Many have been skeptical of this approach, but the team ensures that the movement based elements of the game are complex enough not to make this a very simplistic title. It also has a sliding scale of difficulty that changes based on how well you’re performing. Neat idea and I’m hoping that its implementation is as solid as Dreadbit claims.

Anyway, let’s load up and frag out, shall we?

Prelude & Setup

Seraph is pretty chunky installation at 2.7 GB, but the download is just 363 MB – that’s some pretty stellar compression! While I waited for the download, I checked out the community page on Steam. The latest post was a development roadmap that basically outlined how Seraph is going to transition from early access through to full launch.

Future content planned for this game includes additional miracles (I imagine these are similar to ultimate abilities), blessings (passive bonuses that increase with each level), more boss attacks, daily challenge modes and localisation for more languages. Complete introduction of all game elements is due in about 3 months.

The Twitch features aren’t something that I can really utilize, but it does have a box available for your webcam so that if you plan to stream Seraph, you’ll have an easy time doing so. Additionally, streamers can also bring an element of viewer interaction with various buffs and debuffs made available via chat inputs. I should also point out that the controls for Seraph are more suited toward using a handheld controller. You can still play with a keyboard though!

Sadly, no windowed borderless is available and no quality options are provided. What I will say is the transitions on the menus is really smooth and as far as design goes, they’re quite pretty.

Gameplay

The game has five modes to pick from when you start: standard, hard, extreme, speedrun and Twitch mode. I picked standard mode to begin with and played through the tutorial. My first impressions of the game are positive at this point: it looks clean, the controls are easy to follow and the tutorial gives just the right amount of information to give you an idea of how the core elements of Seraph work. It takes about 10 minutes to complete, so run through and you’ll have no issues figuring out how to play.

You’ll eventually hit the first level of the game and have the chance to kick some ass. There’s a mixture of simple enemies, medium-level and of course, bosses to encounter. After each level, you’re presented with the following screen that displays a heap of information about how you performed.

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Throughout levels, you’ll be opening up various environment elements that provide you with different drops. I actually found a new weapon in the first level, but it had a limited amount of ammo (unlike the starter pistols, which were unlimited). Some crates also provide you with health, so if you do make a snafu, getting back on track isn’t impossible.

The auto-aim feature is quite enjoyable. I played an MMORPG a few years back called TERA, which basically had its selling point as being skill-based, with a lot of benefits afforded to those that were capable of dodging enemy skills. I feel that this game has the same spirit: you’re rewarded for watching what’s going on around you and making sure that you position yourself accordingly to maximize damage and of course, survivability.

When you hit level 2 you’ll be able to select a blessing and you should have enough Shards available to unlock a few oaths. As far as I can tell, you can only get to the oath page by going back to the main menu: I think that this could be redesigned to be available between levels to make it easier for players to understand the progression of the game. For some, they might completely miss this aspect of Seraph, which would be a big mistake. Anyway, because I was getting chunked a little, I decided to put my first shard points into the defensive tab to help boost my HP. You should also check out the Transmutation tab while you’re at it. This is another type of currency you collect in the game to unlock the ability to craft things using drops from enemies in the levels you come across.

It’s actually quite hard to get screenshots of battle, simply because taking even a second to stand still and stop shooting to hit the print screen button is going to set you back. I soon started to appreciate just how important movement is in Seraph: getting hit is incredibly punishing. In a lot of shooting games, killing the enemies as soon as possible is the ultimate aim, but in Seraph, I elected to just take my time and make sure that I was avoiding death above all else. This means that you’ll be jumping around a lot and dashing through anything that looks like it’s about to send out a deadly attack.

The crafting system isn’t fully implemented yet, but I did upgrade a few weapons over the course of playing to make things a little easier. Contrary to my previous claim of not wanting to get killed, I did focus on the shotgun and had a blast getting as close as possible to some enemies and hitting them right in the face.

Every day, Seraph has a Challenge mode option where players enter a seeded level that basically has you surviving for as long as possible. There’s a high score table and rewards for those that finish well. I’m not too sure what those rewards are, but an educated guess would suggest crafting materials.

Other

The scaling difficulty in Seraph is a great feature. You’ll actually get better drops as you get deeper into the difficulty levels and it will work with you to ensure that the enemies are a suitable difficulty for your skill level. The game’s graphics are nice and the resource usage was quite reasonable given how pretty it looked. The music is good and as far as I can tell, it adjusts itself in terms of loudness and intensity based on your difficulty level and current position. It’s been done before, but the implementation here is solid.

I was racking my brain trying to think of what’s not so hot with Seraph, and the only real thing I can come up with is that this game features many elements that show it’s going to be a port. A PS4 version will be developed, and a lack of PC-based elements is a little disappointing. It’s not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination, but still something to think about.

As I mentioned in the gameplay part of the review, I’d like to see better management of the upgrades and character development system. The tutorial is good, but it feels like it glosses over these elements of the game without really explaining them to you. Ideally, having the tutorial walking through the process of playing around with the upgrades menu would be groovy.

Conclusion

For an early access game, Seraph doesn’t feel too shabby. More skills would make the dynamics of playing the game a little more interesting, but this is a great starting place that I think the team is really going to improve on. I don’t actually play a lot of action platformer games, but Seraph was really enjoyable and did the whole auto-aim thing justice. I can already tell from how the PC version plays that those using controllers will have a whale of a time.

I’d also like to stress that the speedrun and challenge elements of Seraph, alongside its Twitch.tv integration, is what we need games in 2016 to feature. It’s great to see a company fiddle around with their game and bring a fresh breath of air to basic design principles. Gaming is a lot more than just one dude sitting in his mom’s basement now, and having that dweller be able to compete against others and stream is a step in the right direction for the gaming community.

Seraph is available for purchase now via Steam for a price of $12.99.