Adore lets you have a unique roster of creatures to fight with the devil.
Nowadays, the craze for online gaming is at its peak, especially with MOBA games, where you have your designated team fighting with special powers and minions. What if you were to, let’s say, make the game a single-player and add the aspect of focus on the creatures only? Well, the answer is Adore, no doubt. The title has been in development since 2020, and it’s finally out with its 1.0 update. The developers are quite firm with their decisions; however, they still take feedback to keep the game tidy.
Adore is a quite fun, 3D isometric game where you control Lukha and have creatures that are unearthly as your weapons. It sounds a bit odd, but once we start talking about the details, it will make sense, we promise. The game starts with a backstory of how the balance between Draknar, the god of good, and Ixer, the god of evil, in Gaterdrik was broken once the evil overcame the good.
And now every creature that exists is cursed with the evil’s mind control plan. It is up to Lukha to revert things to normal, but why exactly him? The answer gets revealed right away as the spirit of the good has fallen onto us once our main character was a baby, and we are tasked with taking care of all the mess. Not many people believe that we have Draknar’s spirit with us, but it becomes clear to all once it becomes more obvious.
The gameplay of Adore revolves around the mechanics we mentioned earlier. We move our character with the right mouse button to the places we want to go, or we can keep pressing the right mouse button for continuous movement. Although it’s much more convenient to have WASD keys tied to movement, the right mouse also works if you’ve pretty much got used to MMORPG or MOBA-style gameplay.
Now we know the movements, and we must attack the evil side that’s been bothering us. For that, we need to capture a creature from the wild with the Particle of Gaterdirk to have it on our roster first. Once we use the Particle of Gaterdirk, the creature is cured, and we can have it in our party for attack or defense. In the first few levels, you are forced to hang out with one type of creature. Once the Particle of Gaterdirk is given out, the game allows you to progress to the next level.
The first few creatures are barebones, only consisting of slash and jump attacks, but as you keep going through new levels, other creatures show up, and you have the urge to try them instead, of course, if you have a spare Particle of Gaterdirk to spend on them. While the slash and jump attacks are basic, the creatures on other levels add extra attacks, such as healing or boost power, depending on their type.
These types are the same ones you could see in Pokémon. In Adore’s case, each creature has its way of special attacks, let it be earth, ice, mystic, or fire. The types come in handy later on with a good take on combat, as Adore lets you combine two different types of creatures’ attacks to create an alternative attack that wouldn’t exist without the synergy between creatures. These range from self-healing to double damage, being able to regain stamina, or faster attacks. It is totally up to the player to create the synergy between the creatures they have.
Adore also offers extra abilities such as food for health restoration and attack speed or being able to take care of your creatures on a farm instead of taking them to a run every single time. In short, the game does not only evolve around running through dense forests and clashing with other creatures.
In other ways, the game lets you advance at your own pace and create the strategy you like with the roster and creatures you catch. Sometimes the game has to have a slowdown to let the players take in the experience of what is exactly going around them, and although this effect is nonexistent in the first few levels, Adore gets slowed down to let you know it’s better to take matters slowly.
Core game mechanics consist of moving the player around, what seems like a MOBA map, and using Q, W, E, and R buttons to summon the creatures you own. They don’t stay around the battlefield much, as they do their main attacks and get back to your cane, in which you store them.
The summon happens with stamina, and at first, you have two bars of stamina to summon two creatures at once, creating an opening for combos. We mentioned earlier that the synergy between two creatures is important, and summoning both of them at once will deliver an extra bit of special attribute that the synergy provides.
As expected, the creatures you have also have a health bar, although the bar can be considered infinite. The developers have come up with a different idea for implementing a health system for creatures and your character. As your creature hits zero health, it won’t die but will become cursed instead.
In this state, the damage that your creature takes will be directly transferred to you, and your character will take damage instead. However, there is a way to cheese this strategy. The left Shift button lets you summon all your creatures back to your cane, and although it’s not instant, during the summon back, they take no damage. Therefore, once the creatures inflict damage, it’s best to recall them immediately while running back to safety.
Although this strategy is okay for one or two enemies at once, things get a bit tougher against boss fights. Boss fights are considered fighting against legendary creatures that exist in certain areas. These areas are divided into five, and you need to conquer all of them before taking the evil spirit alone. Until then, there is a lot of grinding to be done to take them down. Although it seems a bit of a hefty job, trying out different combinations along with capturing new creatures in different areas can open possibilities for very fun gameplay.
Once you collect four creatures that can be used in combat, you might think those four are going to be your deck from now on. But it becomes clear that you can alternatively drop them off at your house to hang around while you are out; adventuring and capturing more creatures is a great way to encourage players to seek out more deck possibilities. During their stay in your garden, these creatures can be modified with the items you can buy from the item shop, renamed, or kept on hold until you need them. If you need more room, you can also set the creature in nature.
One slightly unbearable part of Adore was the narrative. It tried to be explanative and humorous at the same time; however, it was lacking in terms of being a more user-friendly side. Most of the explanation is done through your village’s residents, but they are uninterested in what is going on around them. UI is a bit flat but gets the job done nonetheless. It’s readable and fits well with the theme of the game, though some fonts and icons are very hard to read.
The graphics are okay and do not cause problems in the eye; however, there is one little complaint we had during our gameplay. The creatures you summon are almost indistinguishable in the mesh of fights. The creature you capture from the forests have no difference in terms of appearance; therefore, it is quite hard to pinpoint where your creatures are. This also evolves into not properly tracking your character while trying to dodge attacks from the cursed or legendary creatures.
A suggestion would be to give a different color scheme to your creatures and make them have an outline, therefore letting the player spot what they must do to move accordingly. While at it, let us talk about the soundtrack and sound quality as well. The sound feedback is quite nice, though the soundtrack itself is a bit flawed with high repetitions of songs and usually being mid. It would have been better if new and other pieces were included in the soundtrack.
Overall, Adore is a nice take on both creature-based combat and MOBA-style gameplay. It does execute the ideas well. But, some little nitpicks we had, such as the visual clutter and slow narrative, can be tricky to get through. Besides that, the idea and process of it becoming a proper title with a nice addition is a nice thing to see.
In fact, Adore has been in the development stage, still being updated, and finally getting an official release shows how the developers are still caring deeply about their beloved game. There are some very tiny details we saw that need fixing, but this does not mean Adore is not a game you should skip at all. The art style, charm, and fast but enjoyable progression are quite in sync with each other, and that is what makes Adore a unique title.
