In terms of art direction, game design, and story, Creatures of Ava is pretty much just where it needs to be. All of that combined to suck me into its world and push me to explore it to the best of my ability, rounding up creatures, taking pictures, levelling skills, and completing side quests. In a lot of ways it’s a remarkable game that I very much enjoyed the whole way through. But it’s also so janky, so rough and unpolished that it’s hard or downright impossible to ignore many of its faults. As it stands, this is a good game that would have been a great one if its other systems had received the care of its best traits.
Creatures of Ava opens with a beautifully animated short cutscene introducing players to Victoria Hamilton as she’s sent off in an escape pod and her family perishes before her eyes. Years pass and she’s landing on the dying planet of Ava in order to rescue its inhabitants and place them on her company’s Bioark. This is such a fun premise that the game really does a whole lot with, but its all bolstered by high quality world building and often funny dialogue from seasoned writer Rhianna Pratchett. The game often had me laughing and, occasionally, crying, as it can be very emotionally resonant.
The events of the game are divvied up across four biomes, each with its own unique animals and plant life. Granted, there are usually just a handful in each, but it’s enough to make things feel acceptably disparate. Most of the biomes require you to teleport a certain number of each creature to the Bioark, accomplished by means of a flute given to Vic early on. This flute, once the biome’s song is learned, can be used to tame creatures, lead them around much like the Pied Piper, and even task them with helping out. Resultingly, you can briefly play as them to complete various actions, such as opening a way forward, disarming traps, or locating consumables.
However, some creatures are hostile, typically because they’re infected by the Withering – the strange phenomenon killing the planet, or because they haven’t been tamed. While you understandably won’t be actually attacking any animals, there is combat here. At the start of the game, Vic gets a staff called the Nafitar that can clean the withering. This is done by focusing a stream of light on animals or glowing plant bulbs that, once removed, will erase roots blocking the way. Vic routinely gets new abilities that allow her to reach more areas too, which extends to finding power-ups in the world.
These powerups increase health, dodge stamina, and bag space, plus there are logs as well as statues and wind chimes that grant experience. Getting enough experience to level up awards skill points which you can add to Vic’s skill trees. Abilities range from increasing the power of the Nafitar’s stream, slowing creatures and objects, or causing levitation, mostly useful for platforming. You can have two abilities equipped at once, which I disliked. At least three would have been better but it’s functional all the same. Creature of Ava‘s quests are mostly of the “go to the marker” variety, but there are plenty of unique areas and events to see that avoid making the experience feel too fetchquesty.
If the game sounds pretty amazing at this point, that’s because I haven’t mentioned its many issues. The most immediate of these is the movement. Vic feels nearly weightless and moving throughout the game world just doesn’t feel particularly good. It’s a problem that I see a lot in games that share use of the Unreal engine when there wasn’t enough attention paid to ensuring solid game feel. All aspects of the movement just feel janky and unfinished. This extends to the combat and use of the Nafitar. You have to basically attach a beam to whatever you use the Nafitar on and, not only is the feedback for doing so iffy, it can also be a crapshoot as to whether or not the beam will connect at all. Lots of times I’ll go to connect it, only for it not to work for no discernible reason. It’s incredibly sloppy.
These issues extend to the abilities, which just flat-out don’t work some of the time. I’d hit an enemy or object with them and it would do nothing, yet I still had to wait for them to recharge. The dodging gets the job done at least, but the hitboxes on enemy attacks can feel questionable. In the same vein, it’s not uncommon to find geometry with no collision detection or areas where the collision detection on geometry is simply off. In a late game area I walked straight through tree roots. It was often easy to find myself going places where I wasn’t meant to be, requiring me to reload a save to get unstuck.
Speaking of reloading, you can save at any time. If you die, your last save gets reloaded and you respawn where you saved with full health. While you can craft, carry, and use drinks that heal Vic or give her buffs, there’s absolutely no reason to do this if you can just let the enemy kill you and try again with full health. This does keep you from saving yourself into a corner, but it also completely trivialises the challenge. On the other hand, due to the aforementioned wonkiness of the combat, this is a bit of a blessing as well. It’s so easy to die when fighting multiple animals at once. They love to hit you with projectiles that blind you, poison you, or root you to the spot, and some animals can kill you in just a few hits. Without the save exploit, I’d say the game was overkitted in this regard, as the constant threat of death doesn’t really mix well with the rest of the gameplay.
Thankfully the world of Creatures of Eva is very easy to get around, as there are many fast travel portals that can freely be used from the menu. However, one thing that’s irksome is that, after completing all the biomes aside from the first, you can’t revisit them. This makes sense from a story perspective, but is a really poor choice since it turns most of the game’s collectibles into missables, especially considering that finding everything and maxing out the in-game encyclopedia is so front-and-centre.
After completing these biomes, you’re not able to use their fast travel portals. Or you’re not supposed to be able to. In my file, the first of the second biome’s portals stayed active, so I could go back anyway. Exactly the kind of oversight one would expect given the game’s other foibles. I wish there was a bonus mode that let you free roam once you beat the game to clean up anything you might have missed, but alas. Even performance can’t escape, as I had serious frame drops and very poor optimisation, even with a 3090.
I’m torn here. I honestly greatly enjoyed Creatures of Ava, but I did so in spite of its many issues. It needed months of additional polish and some extra work to iron out some of its uneven design. In its current state, it’s messy, but I can’t deny there’s something special here. I found a lot to love in its world, cast of characters, and exploration, which is all strong enough that it’s not too hard to look past the aspects that ails it. Hopefully patches will help make for a stronger game that avoids some of what I’ve laid out, but, as the game teaches us during its 15 hourish journey, some things can’t be saved and we need to accept that.
Creatures of Ava: Unique and interesting, Creatures of Ava would be a real winner if it weren't dragged down by a bevy of unfortunate issues. – Andrew Farrell
Check out more of our latest reviews:
Tomba! Special Edition PC review – Hey, pig | Mars 2120 PC review – Not done terraforming | Earth Defense Force 6 PC review – The same as the last one | Anger Foot PC review – Diving in feet first |
