Despite my creativity gripe, the weaponry shines with things such as The Fang Repeater, a shark-looking weapon - that's right SHARK-LOOKING - and the Breaker Bow - which the narrator tells you after you fall on it - "it breaks his fall, but it ain't broken - is given to you and the narrator professes delicately how they should be used. Not mockingly, not annoyingly, just subtlely with a bit of an onscreen flash of a button tutorial. This is barely half an hour in to the game and you're just riding the wave and the Shabadoo of the experience - that'll become clearer later on . You're just into the narrator's voice and the mood of the game; you just feel like it's right, that the gun or the voice will never steer you wrong...and this is where my first problem comes into the game. Nothing to with the gameplay or the game itself, this is where I'll become mildly analytical and you can tune out till I write the words, 'so the game'. 

The tone of the game is strictly, speaking all over the place. Whilst thematically, there is little to draw on from the get-go, the game's style and over-arching story-based narrator-heavy theme leaves me high and dry sometimes, but the gameplay and humour just slides me back into a forgiving mode. I'm not sure what Bastion wants to say about games or narrative or characters or if the creators wanna say anything at all...all I want to say is that the game is amazing looking, great to play and also structurally beautiful...literally.

So the game does a lot of things amazingly and I've found the testament of a true game is that it keeps me wanting more of it. Resident Evil 4, LA Noire, Plants vs. Zombies and Half Life 2 all have kept me - and a million other gamers like me - wanting more and more like a battered lover. The look of the game just is amazing from the character design, overworld and parchment style menu design, the game has a very distinct style like a mix between nature-based artwork and naturalistic writing.

Like last week's Audio Team for Dead Island, this week's Handshake Award goes to the Design team for Bastion as they have created stunning architecture which is both eye-catching and never boring, some points in the game I feel bad for a micro-second for destroying things with a gigantic hammer.

A repetitious soundtrack - which isn't annoying - pumps in a lovely low bass as I pause the game, continue to type and it doesn't annoy my mate. The game has heaps of tracks and they all do follow a fairly similar progression but it never gets on your nerves. My mate was trying to code quietly and calmly, but when I pause so he can focus, he just grooves and hums along with it. We smile and clink our drinks together and go back to our prospective mediums, his "real work", my....uh...this. The slow strings of a guitar whine in as I enter a saloon, the narration is slow, perfect and much like this sentence ends on a sarcastic but humourous note, damn. 

Falling off is an inconvenience, but is even greater so when dodging an enemies attack. The game treats death like "it ain't no thang", but really that "thang" does become quite annoying after a while when you wish you hadn't destroyed the barrier around the land looking for more crystals to level up your stuff. Aiming can also be a serious pain in the arse. You may be a fraction of a degree off and end up wasting a Fang shot or two or just simply miss a crucial shot instead of healing and it's Game Minor Inconvenience for you, buddy.
Whilst the enemies are fairly varied, they all have two or three attacks and one of them is a strictly "Come at me bro" strategy, to just run directly at you, you can usually expect it, but it does become mildly annoying. 

The voice for The Kid is mildly unfitting, I imagine more of a young Link voice, but he sounds like a whiny 20 year old who just found out he's got a term paper due in a fortnight. There are more unexplained things such as where do my weapons go when I obtain new ones and why couldn't I switch them out with the D-Pad and when I defeat the big Gas guy in the second area how all those guy love me and then disappear...I want them to be mine and to build a posse rather than turning up randomly...well I did free them...maybe I shouldn't have slaves...slaves are bad.

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