This Artis Impact review will discuss the debut effort from Mas. The title has some positives as well as negatives that will be talked through with a focus on how I experienced the title on a Steam Deck which had some optimisation issues.
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Artis Impact Review for PC
- Title: Artis Impact
- Developer: Mas
- Publisher: Feuxon
- Primary Genre: JRPG, Story-rich
Gameplay
The actual gameplay is pretty simple. Explore the regions and then complete battles. I found the battles to be a bit bland, as someone who’s played a lot of JRPG’s this one felt the most bare bones. There was very little strategy or influence, it essentially boils down to whether I was a high enough level or not. Anything other than entering a battle overlevelled was doomed.
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The actual exploration side was also fairly light on actual discoveries. The first maze of the game is fun but there’s at least two sections with bosses so powerful you actually can’t beat them until way later in the game. This kind of issue marked a lot of the gameplay, exploring meant battles which often meant running into certain doom, and without a save-on-the-go feature, that meant retrading my steps.
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I don’t see why there’s no recommended level indicator anywhere or a strong emphasis that you HAVE TO use the training simulator or re-do the first maze to level up, or else one of the very first missions is unwinnable.
Art Style
The art in this game is phenomenal. It’s got this hand-drawn feeling to it with a real lack of overproduction. There are little animations that pop up that genuinely the developer never needed to add in, but they add a lot to the enjoyment of the game. The in-battle stuff looks pretty cool too, my sword strikes were frantic and left a large slash across the screen that gave off a real sense of power.
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The landscapes are often as depressing as they’re depicted in the game. The levels are mostly ruins and they have a slightly ominous energy to them. The developer was able to switch this up in the artifical world where the black/white sheen and digital glitches made it look like a completely different game.
Story
The story is pretty simple. The MC works for an agency and the commander gives missions and then MC goes and does the missions. This is happening amidst an AI assault on the remaining vestiges of humanity. It’s a heavy tone that I found was visualised through the game’s graphical decisions, always making things feel rather bleak.
The story is at odds with a lot of the characters though, everyone has the comedy and quirkiness ramped up to 11. It makes the dialogue more engaging to se ehow these characters interact instead of just being doom and gloom all the time.
Particular shoutout to some of the characters, they’re just so over-the-top that I couldn’t help but enjoy it. Billy, my man, the world is ending, please get over your insane thoughts about women!
Steam Deck Controls
The game runs well on Steam Deck and I had none of the usual issues that can crop up. It wasn’t a battery eater, it didn’t have any visual or audio problems. It performance-wise was perfect. I did have some issues with the controls though, for whatever reason, the controls aren’t mapped perfectly to the joystick, with some commands being impossible to replicate. I couldn’t even bring up the map in the maze…and good luck finding out how to shift.
Artis Impact Review – Last Word on Gaming Viewpoint
Artis Impact is an interesting game that took risks and does things no other game does. For this reason alone it is worth playing. It has it’s issues like the battle system and aforementioned problems with OP enemies being thrown at you without warning but it overcomes that if you grit your way through the first hour or so.
