Indivisible E3 Impression 2

Indivisible is an unusual concept. It’s a mash-up of Valkyrie Profile and a 2D Castlevania game. I didn’t expect that to work out very well, but it shows what I know, because it was one of the best things I played all week at E3.

In Indivisible, you run around exploring a map, but when you run into enemies, you go to a combat screen. Each party member is assigned one of the four face buttons on your controller. You hold each character’s relevant button to block and just press it to attack. Holding up or down on the d-pad while pressing the attack button will cause the character to do one of two different alternate attacks. Sometimes you’ll need to dodge attacks, which is a matter of pressing the corresponding character’s button at the right time, with the screen giving a useful indication of who’s being targeted.

But the combat system doesn’t stop there. Characters each have a meter that fills up to three stages. This corresponds to being able to do one, two, or three attacks. So if you let everyone sit and charge up for a while, you could fire off a combined twelve attacks at your opponents. Additionally, as you attack you fill up a shared special attack meter. Using blocks drains it. This special meter can also fill to three levels. To use it, simply hold down R2 and then press the attack button of one of the four characters. Anyone who has an attack ready can do a special attack. You can spend all three charges on one person (assuming they have three attacks ready to go), spread it out, or save some for later. All of this means a rather deep combat system with lots of choices and builds.

 

 

Oh, and you’ll have more than four people to choose from for your team too. You can swap them in and out of your party at any time outside of battle. Some characters do lots of damage, some lay traps that basically tank for you, some heal others, and some do even more damage, but have drawbacks like needing to spend an action to be reloaded.

Regarding the story, what I gathered is that you’re a girl on a journey to go kick lots of butt. And you meet a lady who helps you improve yourself by storing these red gems in your inner self. Every time you get five of these gems you can improve your abilities in some way. Also, all the characters you recruit somehow live inside you as well. OK, so I really didn’t grasp the story, but at least I knew that I should get more red gems.

As usual with games following the Castlevania formula, you’ll find abilities that let you explore previously unreachable areas. In this demo (which is the updated backer preview), you can find an axe that lets you go through areas previously blocked by plant roots. It also lets you execute a tricky wall-jumping maneuver which was really fun to pull off and will surely be used to hide some good stuff later in the game.

The combat, exploration, and aesthetic all felt top notch. It was really fun to play and my time with the demo flew by. I really wished I could sit there and play for a couple more hours instead of just fifteen minutes. RPGamers should be looking forward to this one, which releases in 2019 for PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

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1 Response

  1. watcher watcher says:

    This has been one of my top games to watch for a long time. Glad to hear it’s still on track.

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