Smelter [Xbox]
Developed by X PLUS, Smelter is an action-strategy hybrid that sees you take on the role of Eve. The garden of Eden has collapsed into nothingness on the back of Adam chomping on some forbidden fruit, and as Eve, you’ll have to search far and wide to track him down. Luckily for you, you’ll quickly meet a strange being known as Smelter (at least, that’s as close to their name as any human mouths can speak) who will fuse with you (known as ‘to Flootipoo’ in Smelter’s lingo) to become your very own living suit of armour, in return for you helping them out - leaving lil’ Smelter in charge for basically the rest of the game.
You’ve got standard side-scrolling platforming sections that are somewhat reminiscent of Mega Man X in terms of the controls and overall style. There are also top-down RTS style gameplay sections woven in, which keep things feeling fresh. This overworld section is known as the Rumbly Lands, and is broken down into three main areas that Smelter and his Zirm army must expand across and take over in order to further unlock new regions, and the skill types within. Enemies will spawn and attack your structures, so you need to ensure that you not only have enough housing available to gain Zirm soldiers, but also Orcharion Shrines to produce apples to keep your armies fed, as well as strategically placed Barracks and Outposts to defend your land. There’s a twin-stick shooter element here too, in that as Smelter you can attack enemies to help out your army - as they can be a tad dumb at times.
In the platforming levels, you’ve got your main objective to hunt down the Doma Runes that are spread out across the world, but as well as this there are collectible apple cores, different coloured gem-rocks known as Moxie Deposits, and Trial Rooms awaiting to challenge you. Completing Trials will earn you tokens, in return for successfully navigating the trial room and achieving the relevant task, whether that is to defeat all enemies, avoid getting hit, or avoid being seen. These tokens, as well as the other currency you gather, can be used to unlock various structures in the Rumbly Lands, such as Forges, Conductors and Blessings, which can earn you further upgrades and skills. The controls are tight, and it feels satisfying to play, utilising the variety of moves in your arsenal as you traverse the levels, bypassing all of the traps and defeating the enemies you meet. You have an ability known as Smelting, that allows you to use a big green, grabby Smelt hand to regain health from checkpoints and some defeated enemies (denoted by a green outline), and this will also be useful in getting around the levels.
The cartoon style intro is fantastically animated, and this translates through to the well-detailed pixel-art, and different styled regions. There’s a wide variety of enemies to come across, differing in their elemental abilities as well as appearance. Some of the enemies you meet are easy to deal with, whilst others put up far more of a challenge. I definitely found the difficulty to increase after learning the Eremagu skills, as the enemies that utilise electric based attacks seemed to do far more damage, knocking me out much faster than others. There’s no voice acting, but the story can be a bit dialogue-heavy at times, with lots, and I mean lots, of the wording being random gobbledegook. Smelter (as a character) has an issue with not knowing the proper terminology, and lacking the ability to care what the actual words are - which is funny, but it can sometimes make things a tad confusing. Thankfully there’s a Glossary, as well as a Skills section, available within the Pause menu for you to view at any time if you need to refresh yourself with anything. The soundtrack, featuring music by Evader, is classic arcade-styled, with fast-paced tracks that perfectly complement the action on screen. The opening and ending themes were done by Manami Matsumae, known for her work on the Mega Man games, as well as more recently, Shovel Knight and Mighty No. 9.
Different skills are unlocked and enabled by standing on shrines within the platforming levels, imbuing your armour with elemental upgrades known as Gurabi, Eremagu and Nutoro, Rock, Electric and Water, respectively; each of which are able to be easily switched between with a tap of the triggers. Skills available vary between Gurabi; such as being able to weigh Eve down so that she won’t be blown away by sandstorms, and a more powerful jump to reach higher - and often secret - areas; Eremagu skills that allow you to do short-range teleporting dashes, and Nutoro skills that allow you to hover with a boosting jet pack type skill. Within the RTS sections, you can destroy rocks and other blockages that are covering the land in order to reach different structures that can be enabled to unlock further skills. The skills across these three ‘types’ have a lot of overlapping similarities, but with elemental differences - and occasions where these will be utilised - so remembering to switch between them during levels is crucial but, at least in my case, easily forgotten - leading to a lot of unnecessary frustration.
Trials can be reattempted from within the Rumbly Lands, instead of having to remember where each one is within the platforming levels, and this allows you to pick up any missed tokens if there are any Trials you had to give up on. If you come across a Trial whilst working your way through the level the first time, it’s always good to go through the door, even if you just come right back out, in order to activate it in the Rumbly Lands. Other collectibles can be tracked from here too, so that you can easily see where you’ll need to re-play in order to pick up missed Apple Cores. There are six blueprint fragments that can be found hidden throughout levels, in order to unlock and build a powerful turret, and you can also find a way to track these down too.
Overall, Smelter is an enjoyable game with a well done hybrid design that appeals to fans of both basic strategy gameplay and platformers. It gives you around 15+ hours of gameplay, with plenty of replayability to go back and gain faster times on the Trials as well as to find all of the various collectibles. So if that sounds of interest to you, you can nab it for £16.74 on the Xbox Store.
In the end, we decided to give Smelter the Collecting Asylum rating of 8/10.
Have you played Smelter yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to DANGEN Entertainment for the Smelter Xbox review code!
