Dandara (Xbox One)

Games are always looking for something to set them apart from the crowd, and to that end, Dandara decided to use its unique movement controls as its draw. The protagonist of Dandara explores her world not by walking or even flying through it, instead, leaping around and attaching herself to walls, ceilings, and floating objects. Unable to even take a single step to fix her position, Dandara has both the freedom to defy gravity but also the limitations of only being able to move by launching herself at suitable areas, and while an interesting idea in concept, it doesn’t always feel like it’s a good fit for the game we got.

Dandara’s adventure doesn’t really explain why she’s only able to move like this, but it doesn’t go out of its way to give the player many details.  Most of its story isn’t really detailed at all, dealing with vague ideas rather than solid concepts. The setting of the game is a place called The Salt, where one day a controlling force known simply as Oppression throughout comes in and suppresses the creativity and expression of the people living there. Then, Dandara is born from the Crib of Creation to fight against the oppression. Even if you read up on the Brazilian warrior woman from real life who shares a name with Dandara, there isn’t much to further explain the situation, especially since Dandara’s game world is incredibly magical and technological in a way incongruous with the story of a 17th century freedom fighter. Along the journey you do sometimes meet the people afraid to express their artistic ideas and fight those oppressing them, but there’s not much story to latch onto save for either a very basic one or reaching really hard to interpret the world for a shred of plot. It is a visually impressive and diverse world, but what few narrative secrets it does hide don’t really make the core plot compelling.

Not that it needs a strong story, since Dandara’s odd movement controls is bound to be the main focus of any player. From whatever perch she’s resting on or if she’s floating in the air after being hit by an enemy, Dandara will be able to aim her next jump, the cone being a bit short of a full 180 degrees. The jump can only go so far though, meaning that navigating around a room can involve you having to leap deliberately near danger or having to best find the way to bounce between different platforms to get to your destination. Pretty quickly it becomes clear that one issue with jumping in Dandara is the slight disorientation caused by its movement style. After you land, you have an entirely new cone of movement options, and aiming a jump in a hurry can be troublesome. The game tries to anticipate your path of movement, pointing you towards a perch when its expecting some hasty leaping, but this helpful quirk is perhaps perceived to be more reliable than it is. If you try and trust the game to be set up for the next jump, it might not always bring you where you expect, so your movement will become slower to always make sure you’re moving right. Leaping to the wrong spot can lead to trouble because of how slow movement in general can be because, it involving constant lining up and launching, but it is something you will get better at over the course of the game. In fact, this could have almost not been much of an issue, the careful movement not so bad when you’re being tasked with figuring out how to move through a room, but Dandara choose a strange genre to place its action in.

Dandara is a Metroidvania, meaning its a sidescrolling platformer where the map is large, interconnected, and you will be going back to old areas with new abilities to break open new paths. In a game where the entire challenge is pretty much based on the idea that your movement style requires thought and careful movement to overcome a room, having to backtrack through huge swathes of the map isn’t a good design choice. Many of the rooms making up the map are designed to be hazardous as you pass through, enemies with no movement restrictions lunging at you or firing weapons that force you to do some careful dodges to avoid damage. Some rooms instead have gimmicks like moving platforms to ride or long sequences of jumps. Overcoming it is a good platforming challenge and finding new rooms does serve as an excellent test of your mastery of the leaping controls, but when you need to pass through an area again later, what was once an interesting challenge is now a retread. Enemies can be killed with your weapon, it being a gun you need to charge before firing so you have to spend some time standing still on a perch to fire, but even if you clear a room of enemies, they will come back once you have spent enough time away from that room. The game withholds its option to teleport around the map until near the end of the game, so there’s no real remedy for this incongruity between map design and movement. Even when you do get something to open up a new part of the map, it’s often not a new ability. Dandara’s skills only lightly expand over the course of the game, her gun later getting a missile option and a few optional abilities that draw from the same energy source. Abilities are almost more like keys since very few change the flow of action or your abilities, a few just activating platforms that weren’t working before.

The Metroidvania nature of the game isn’t the only complication to your movement. Dandara has a few resting places where you can get a full heal as well as spend a currency you collect from defeating enemies and finding treasures. Here you can increase your maximum health or energy as well as increasing the effectiveness of your health and energy refills. Any time you drop by a camp, the health and energy potions get fully restocked, so visiting one can certainly be helpful, but they’re spaced out quite far. If you do die while out in the world though, Dandara drops all of her currency, the player needing to go back to where she died to reclaim it. Almost all these elements have clear inspiration from how Dark Souls handles its checkpoints and healing systems, but Dandara’s difficulty isn’t on the same level as a Dark Souls title. Enemies do have a movement advantage and a few do have attacks that can home in and thus are difficult to avoid with your limited jumping, but once you’ve found a few treasures and bought a few upgrades, surviving isn’t guaranteed, but much less of a problem. If you do die though, running back to get your stuff as well as just finding your place in the adventure again will feel just like the backtracking, rooms not always allowing easy passage.

Funnily enough, not many of the bosses are too much to worry about, many telegraphing their attacks well enough that you can dodge in time despite them being able to deal devastating damage if they do hit. Regular enemies are perhaps the bigger concern. Boss rooms are designed specifically for Dandara’s movement to match the fight, whereas a regular area tends to mix foes with platforming challenges, meaning that they can come with movement challenges on top of trying to avoid damage. Perhaps what saves Dandara from its major world design issue is that when you aren’t backtracking, its movement does work well together with areas to make play a good bit of reflex puzzling. Leaping to the right area at the right time and using the environment to your advantage does make new areas interesting, making it strange it felt it had to fall back on the old so often. Overcoming an area with some flashy looking movement is deeply satisfying, but doing it again later since its now a glorified hallway is a dull shadow of that initial thrill. Figuring out what’s needed in a new area, fighting the new foes that gradually get better and better at attack you, and honing your jumping skill to quickly burst around dangers shows the potential of the movement design, but Dandara stops pushing you forward at times to drag you back through slow traversal of familiar areas that aren’t as interesting once they’ve been solved and are now old news.

THE VERDICT: At the heart of Dandara is a movement style that can certainly be satisfying and challenging, many rooms serving as excellent locations for testing your ability to move smart and get into a rhythm of leaping from perch to perch. It’s not totally intuitive, but the game does lay out areas that fit the movement type and the important battles are designed to suit it nicely. However, the game went with a Metroidvania world design with few respawn points, meaning that the slow and thoughtful movement through rooms ends up repeated and the thrill of completing the challenges is replaced with monotonously performing what worked last time. The movement is not so reliable you can quickly zip through old ground either, so Dandara’s potentially engaging and stylish jumping system loses its luster when its forced into retreading old ground. Essentially, when you’re moving forward, Dandara can be good or even great, but when it pulls you back or you get lost in the large environments, play gets weighed down too heavily.

And so, I give Dandara for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Dandara bet the farm on its movement style, but it’s hard to really say it won or lost that bet. There are certainly upsides to the movement style, with rooms able to put up unique platforming challenges as you search for the right perches and avoid trouble despite your limited movement range. Fights can be thrilling, especially when placed in an arena built for you to zip about while laying down damage. But then we have the downsides, like the launch angle after landing taking a bit to adjust since the game’s prediction of your next move can’t always be trusted, and that anything done methodically is going to be a bit tedious when repeated, a problem that occurs with a game that requires you to explore a large environment with plenty of rooms you’ll need to visit a few times. Ultimately, while the problems with the movement are a bit glaring, the game is pretty much based around overcoming them, so some of the enjoyment comes from making this control scheme work for you.

Had Dandara been a more linear adventure it would probably deserve being bumped up to a Good or maybe even higher. Metroidvania is an interesting genre to be sure and one that deserves new takes, but Dandara’s movement controls aren’t a good fit for it. A new area can you make you feel like you’re mastering the jumping only for it to send you to an old room where there’s little thrill in having to jump around the room again. There could be hope for Dandara’s Metroidvania design if her skillset did meaningfully expand or the teleporting options came earlier, but the current limitations in place do not really match the idea of revisiting old locations.