Excave III:Tower of Destiny Review

You can’t accuse Bergsala Lightweight of slacking on the development front. In under two years, they’ve released three games in the Excave series, all of which have been released on Nintendo’s 3DS. This latest title, starring single protagonist Scarlet, is no exception and is available as a digital download on the Nintendo eShop for £7.19 at the time of writing. Unlike earlier installments that incorporated RPG-like elements, this is a pure dungeon crawler; It’s the basic concept of “walk in, kill everything, walk out with the loot”.

Upon starting the game, I was immediately struck by two things. They were straining to remain contained in Scarlet’s torso covering. I have to say, kudos to the developers as they are clearly dedicated to being environmentally conscious. There was no wasteful overuse of fabric here; the Kyoto agreement is alive and well at Bergsala Lightweight.

Now, you could argue that if the game starts out showing the rhythmic undulations of the primary character’s mammary glands, that they might have something to hide, perhaps they’re trying to distract a player from a lack of good stuff within the game itself, but that might be a little cynical. It would sadly also be quite right as well. This isn’t a deep and fulfilling game at all, it’s a rinse and repeat title with very little to it.

What you see is what you get with this game. There’s very little plot, there’s no narrative or character development. You go into a dungeon, you hit everything that moves, then eventually you leave the dungeon with loot in tow. As is generally the case with dungeon crawlers, you won’t be able to carry everything you find, so you will frequently be ditching things to get the best value from your run. This is where the challenge in the game comes in. As you exit, all your items are stripped down into a monetary score, and then you’re given a rating from F to SS. Replay value will be largely dependant on whether you want to beat those scores or not.

For a portable title, this is often perfectly suitable of course. Take a game like one of the Final Fantasy series for example, with hundreds of hours of story and many entwined threads of narrative, you’d be hard pressed to gain the most out of it playing in 20 minute bursts. This is where Excave III excels: it’s a simple game that you can play sparingly and get some enjoyment out of it. It’s by no means a bad game, but it’s not a game of the year contender either. It’s middle of the road, it’s like plain porridge or Coldplay. If it was a can of paint it would be a functional but uninteresting magnolia. This is a game that doesn’t really take any risks and whilst there’s nothing that makes you want to return it for a refund, there’s nothing that makes you want to tell your friends that they should go download this game either.

Each level can pretty much be completed by walking to the entrance of a room, swinging around whatever sword you happen to have picked up most recently (as generally, there’s very little difference in power between them despite a bewildering array of unexplained stats on most items), then running for the spawn points when there’s nothing left at the entrance to kill. You do this over and over until there’s no more things alive. Sometimes the monsters will change but most of these are cosmetic changes and none of them move that differently. There are a few monsters that have projectiles which mixes things up a bit, but these aren’t welcome as they are invariably shooting you from offscreen, giving you little real chance to defend yourself. There are a few poison and paralysis monsters too, but again, there’s generally little way of avoiding their status attacks so they don’t seem like a welcome break so much as a momentary annoyance until you get to the next point you can cleanse Scarlet.

The game isn’t presented particularly well either. It’s a murky mix of browns, greys and dark greens and large chunks of the screen are often taken up by black nothingness beyond the walls of the cave you are in. I know it’s a cave and caves are dark, but this is a game that really takes the mickey. I found myself straining to see what was going on when playing outside, to the point where I just gave up because it was impossible to work out where anything was on screen, even with maximum brightness on my 3DS.

I did think the music was very nice. It reminded me a bit of some of the old fashioned chip tunes that you got in games of the ‘90s on the Game Boy Advance. Fitting for a game that could probably run on that ancient hardware anyway. Don’t expect any technical miracles here, this is a budget title and you’re not going to get award winning graphics. It doesn’t even support 3D so if you’re one of the seven people left who doesn’t have the 3D switch permanently in the off position on their 3DS, you might be disappointed.

I think overall, it’s safe to say that this isn’t going to be high on my list of games to recommend. What it does, it does in a competent manner, it’s a speedy game with loads of monsters on screen so you can have a decent amount of fun slashing loads of beasties at once, but that will get old quickly and you’ll realise that nothing more exciting is coming along after it.