Shu Review

Shu is an action platformer, playing as the eponymous Shu, you must traverse and escape from the ensuing dark ominous clouds with teeth that consume the lands as you try and rescue all of your lost villagers and bring them to safety.

Somewhat generic in gameplay with your standard jump onto platforms and timing them to overcome obstacles, the game shines with its polish, style and music. In a world filled with old “skool” games coming out the woodworks, it’s often hard to find a game that looks as polished as it plays. But with a strong aesthetic choice, Coatsink does that with its mix of 2D and 3D artstyle give a truly stylised 2.5D platformer.

Behold the song of my people!

Controls are for the most part smooth and responsive on keyboard and controller. I could even recommend playing with keyboard controls with the pacing of the game being well thought out that unless you really can’t stand keyboard controls, keyboards are viable. Supporting a wide range of controllers just adds to how much effort was put into the game, even if it’s really just a quality of life implementation with the ability to choose which input is active in the menu. Another quick add whilst talking about options menu, the graphic settings whilst simple isn’t too much of a factor since at maximum on my Acer Aspire R11 it was pulling around 30fps unless it was fx galore which put it at 20fps on average roughly when entering them initially - medium brought it to 60fps for those that care.

I’m a sucker when it comes to really good music and its original score is probably one of the best backing tracks I’ve heard yet, not quite emotionally hitting, more theatrical and interesting. Matching its rather cute and pleasant art style, it helped build ambiance of calm and intensity as if professionally orchestrated to match when I finally reached a checkpoint - after much trial and error.

Whilst level design is great and for the most part near faultless, the spacing of each checkpoint was plentiful at the right place and its use of a five life system before game over helped recover from the silly mistakes (plenty were made, I swear I didn’t try to get the game over achievement).

Unless you pay close attention, this game looks like a 2D masterpiece of art.

Level design for the most part isn’t an issue, the choice of a perspective camera and its use of angles is somewhat questionable though. Normally an orthographic camera is used for platformer games with depth backgrounds and foreground, 2D perspective of 3D space, helps avoid the issue of thinking something is going to land on a platform when really it’s just shy of it by the pixels, or generally hiding something because of the foreground blocking it out. Whilst this wasn’t an issue when playing, its use of 2.5D along with the perspective made the background feel like it was intractable rather than being the background.

But then that’s really the only issue I have with it. Its execution is near faultless, featuring time attack once you’ve beaten a level it also allows for more relaxed gameplay as the previous collected collectables don’t have to be recollected. Its hidden collectables aren’t hiding in ridiculous places and are relatively simple, although collecting them is doable when played initially. Plus the implementation of leaderboards is pretty cool, my only want for the game is to race their shadow but that as an implementation could be difficult to implement effectively.