Hasta La Muerte Windows Phone
Hasta La Muerte is a visually arresting game from Pohlm Studio, with an equally arresting premise: taking control of a red-skinned grim reaper, it’s your job to harvest the souls of newly-dead, while avoiding lost souls and the living. It’s been a long time coming, and was finally released as an Xbox Live title last week.
The game is fairly simple, mechanically speaking: wandering a strange, abstracted world, you wait for the living (black stick figures) to approach the end of their mortal lives (turn blue), while avoiding vengeful lost souls (angry black bipedal… things). Accidentally brushing a living figure will slay them, turning them into another lost soul to avoid, while reducing the number of potential souls to collect in the level. Touching a lost soul, meanwhile, will hurt you – three such collisions and Death gives up the ghost, as it were.
Complicating things are the ‘soulpets’ you accrue over the course of the game – these allow you to move faster, to evade the notice of enemies, to attract souls, and to pass over hazardous objects. Once collected, each can be used in earlier levels, necessary to get the highest scores and access different areas of them.
In all, it has the makings of a decent little action-puzzler, with harder levels having you work hard to evade enemies as you juggle your soulpets’ abilities in order to herd and capture the requisite souls – some requiring you to lure the living into areas that cause them to ‘prematurely age’, allowing you to harvest their souls; or to lead souls into special areas in order to unlock gates. Because of all this, the early levels can be a bit of a drag, but as things build up it turns into a surprisingly rewarding game. It even has the occasional ‘boss fight’ of sorts – which amazingly turn out not to be awful, really pushing the skills you’ve accrued over the game in order to win.
So, in all, it’s a nice little game. Only…
I don’t like to continually repeat myself, but I don’t really have much of a choice here. Controls matter. And Hasta La Muerte’s have to be mentioned, for all the wrong reasons. For some reason the developers seem to have decided that the best control system for an omni-directional top-down game is not to use a virtual stick, but instead tilt controls. They do at least have the good sense to allow you to recalibrate the game’s ‘flat’ position (unlike a few other games), but that’s not enough to prevent them from being maddeningly vague and cumbersome. I’m not a huge fan of virtual sticks, but in a game where you frequently need to make sharp u-turns, and make precise movements to avoid enemies, they’re infinitely superior to the broad strokes of tilt control. It’s a bizarre decision on behalf of the developers, and one which only harms the game.
And there’s also the fact that, for every cleverly thought out, challenging level, there’s a dull, overlong one which seems to have been put in just to increase the length of the game. A large amount of content is nice to have, but in this case I think a smaller, more focussed design would have benefitted the game. This despite the fact that, even with all its content in place, it’s unlikely to last you much more than an hour.
Which brings us to the price. This is an Xbox Live title, and it has a price-point to match – and sad to say, at £2.29 it doesn’t really seem worth it. It manages to be short, even as it bulks itself out with lower-quality levels, and it has a deeply ill-suited control system: the unique art style and more interesting levels just aren’t enough to make up for these shortcomings. If it ever drops in price (and if the developers ever see fit to add alternative control methods to the game) it might well be worth a punt, but in its current state I can’t really recommend that anyone purchase Hasta La Muerte.
Hasta La Muerte Xbox Live Achievements
- First steps (5 points): Got A+ Rank.
- Those dear delicious ravens (20 points): Got all the ravens.
- A scrawny harvest (5 points): 10 freed Souls.
- Crab cage (5 points): Me-Crab beaten.
- Leave in peace (5 points): 1 freed Lost Soul.
- My name is Nobody (10 points): Cyclops beaten.
- Never Again. (10 points): Mech-Ange beaten.
- An acceptable harvest (10 points): 50 freed souls.
- Emissary wannabe (10 points): Got 20 A+ Ranks.
- Collateral damage (10 points): 20 corrupted Souls.
- First collect the weeds (10 points): 30 freed Lost Souls.
- Deus Ex Machina (20 points): You let the Scientist escape…
- Combine harvester (20 points): 300 freed Souls.
- Almost perfect (20 points): Got 25 S Ranks.
- Monkshood (20 points): 100 freed Lost Souls.
- United we stand (20 points): Got all the Soulpets.
Hasta La Muerte Gameplay Video
Hasta La Muerte Screenshots
Version Under Review : 1.0.0.0
There is a trial version available and the full version is available for $2.99, we are not sure what the limitations of the trial version are.
Our Rating for Hasta La Muerte
What do you think of this WP7 Game ?
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Hasta La Muerte ( Review )
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Shame to hear about the controls though I do love the art style! Hopefully they’ll fix the controls and have the game on DotW and I may just buy it :) [Posted from the 1800PocketPC app]
Well written review , I did not expect this standard in review for a mobile game, very well done Sir. You have earned a new fan.
Thanks for the kind words – I believe that mobile gamers deserve at least as rigorous reviews to advise them as any other, and so try to give every game that passes my way a thorough critique; I’m glad that you think I’m doing a good job of it!
correction, great job ^_^
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