Wings of Endless was mostly made by a single person. Due to this, aspects of it are pretty impressive considering the game’s decent size and three very different characters. But it also partially explains why the game is so shockingly unbalanced and unpolished. I’ve been reviewing games for about seven years now and have reviewed nearly 500, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that’s quite as badly balanced as this one is. It’s a shame, because with some tweaking this would be a fairly decent little action platformer. Unless those tweaks happen, then this game will remain an incredibly miserable experience.
Despite these sorts of games usually being very light on story, Wings of Endless actually has a fairly in-depth plot and detailed backstory with an elaborate history. The game focuses on three characters, (which you can switch between at will) each with their own small skill tree that grants new abilities, plus there’s some gear and you can even use items to bolster their stats. On the other hand, all three characters mostly have a single thing they repeat at nearly every given opportunity.
Hariku, a young adventurer that fights with a hammer, claims to be a bounty hunter and mentions that he believes himself to be “the best” in nearly every single cutscene. Diana, who throws daggers, can’t go more than five seconds without calling Hariku rookie. Makoto, a mage that uses fire and ice attacks, mostly just stutters through all of his lines. To call their dialogue irritating is an understatement, but it’s worsened by just how much of it there is. While the backstory obviously took a lot of thought and energy, it’s clear that the characters themselves weren’t included in this.
Wings of Endless is sort of like a Metroidvania, but it’s mostly linear. There are optional paths to explore using newly acquired abilities, sure, but there aren’t too many of these (both optional paths and new abilities.) You’ll unlock fast travel via balloons and boats as you progress, plus towns have task boards that you can use to accept quests. These quests are almost exclusively of the “kill x number of enemies” or “find x number of items” variety, so they’re pretty tedious and uninspired. That being said, some of their rewards can be decent.
Problems start rearing their head within the first half hour of starting the game. There’s a poisonous plant that shoots out projectiles in the game’s first area, which can kill a character very quickly. Due to how these projectiles work, this enemy can make navigation a pain. In this way, Wings of Endless is incredibly consistent. Enemy placement feels haphazard and incredibly short-sighted, as it’s not uncommon to find enemies placed in positions that make it incredibly hard to even attack them. We’re talking making a ranged character hug the edge of a platform and still not being able to reach an enemy. Taking unavoidable damage here is also a nearly constant occurrence.
This is severely worsened by the game’s aforementioned terrible balancing. Enemies oftentimes do an enormous amount of damage and similarly take a ridiculous amount of punishment. Honestly, by default, I felt like I was playing the game on an unlockable nightmare mode where the enemy damage output and HP is massively bloated. The dev simply did not balance this game properly and I’m not sure how no one noticed. To be clear, this game doesn’t appear to be trying to be some sort of Souls-like or throwback to NES games and these elements do not at all go along with the game’s mechanics or attributes.
It all gets worse as the game continues on. It wasn’t uncommon for me to reach a new area and then attempt to avoid fighting as much as I could, as the enemies hit too hard and take too long to kill for it to be worth it. It doesn’t help that most of the game’s cookie-cutter, nondescript areas (forest, tundra, desert, yawn) mostly have just two enemy types that seem to be slapped in with zero regard. For instance, a late-game area has a ranged enemy positioned over a pit of spikes shooting at me. Behind the enemy, another enemy healed them offscreen. Attempting to get past the first enemy usually just means falling onto the spikes and resetting. The game has many moments like this that simply don’t seem to have been playtested.
As bad as exploring in the levels can be, the bosses get the worst of it. To put it simply, even if you’ve explored plenty and made sure to level up as much as you can, the bosses later on in Wings of Endless will one-shot your characters. I got to one boss in the volcano area that I had to fight over lava pits. Fall in the lava, your character dies instantly. On top of that, he has a fire attack that will one-shot you, which he can use on you while you’re in mid-air or place underneath you so that you land on it and die instantly. These flames can also pincer you in, leaving you with no way to avoid dying.
Other bosses also leave you with no way to avoid damage, so this isn’t a one-time occurrence. The boss after the one I fought in the volcano, on the other hand, wasn’t playtested properly in the opposite way, as you can literally just stand right on top of him and his attack can’t hit you. He’s not even the only boss that has a glaring exploit! I welcomed this, since these bosses had a huge amount of health making it take forever to whittle them down.
Boss fights are all incredibly simple too, usually only having a couple of moves, so they’re only annoying here due to their ridiculous amounts of damage and HP. Very little of the game feels “hard,” with the boss battles being more ridiculously boring than anything else. Following rote patterns to spend minutes on end hammering away are just not fun at all.
If one character dies, you can revive them with a tiny sliver of HP at any time, or fully revive them with an item. Of course, in later boss battles, most attacks will kill you outright regardless of which of these you choose, so some fights can turn into a tug-of-war where you’re repeatedly reviving your dead party members, just for them to die again as soon as you make the slightest mistake. This is again worsened by how the characters operate. Hariku is the only character that can dash or double jump, meaning that Diana and Makoto have very little mobility and are far less safe to use.
In the previously mentioned volcano boss fight, for instance, only Hariku can actually make it from one side of the room to the other. If the other two try, you guessed it, they die almost instantly. This makes life harder when out in the levels too, as it limits when you can use the other two characters, as they simply can’t reach so many things. Suffice to say, the characters are incredibly unbalanced. Huh, I guess that’s why Hariku won’t shut up about being “the best,” he really is. It doesn’t help that Diana’s damage output is pitiful. With that said, despite using a big hammer, Hariku’s attack range is incredibly low.
Wings of Endless is plagued with seemingly endless issues. From boring level design, poor enemy placement, and a shocking lack of balance, the game is often a miserable slog to play through. It looks cute and harmless enough and its story is more thought-out than you might expect, but unless the dev goes back over the game and balances the characters, enemy placement, and enemy and boss damage output/HP, this is a game you’re better off completely steering clear of.
Wings of Endless: While not inherently terrible, Wings of Endless has the worst game balance I've ever seen, which only makes its bland level design, simple bestiary, and rote combat all the worse for wear. – Andrew Farrell
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