Developed by Cognitive Forge, ‘Aura of Worlds’ is a creative tactic rogue-lite platformer. Set out and explore the multiple worlds where you must utilize your creative abilities to twist adversity to your advantage. Fight through the challenging, ever-changing death labyrinths using your wits and reflexes.

Aura of Worlds is indeed a very challenging game. Well, for me anyway. Everyone is different. Diving in, you are offered a few different difficulty options; Easy, Moderate, and Hard, each coming with advantages and disadvantages. You’ll notice Easy offers less XP and locks out some Steam Achievements, but obviously, it makes the game easier. I mostly played on Moderate, which I believe to be the default setting, with no changes to earnt XP and everything is unlockable.

Moderate was still really challenging and I found myself lowering it to Easy just to explore the game that little bit more. Hard is a whole nother level, with enemies hitting harder and dealing more damage naturally, but with the added bonus of 30% more XP. Higher risk, higher reward.

The controls and mechanics handle well, with the option to use Mouse and Keyboard or an Xbox Controller. I started on Mouse and Keyboard and later changed to a controller, and after remapping my controls to a more comfortable layout for myself, I felt it is a little easier on the controller.

After playing through an optional tutorial, you’ll be well-equipped with the knowledge of your controls, which are pretty simple with the basics like jump, attack, using your abilities, and most important for games like this, dodging.

With no real story to speak of, you’ll learn Aura of Worlds is mostly about gameplay and challenging yourself, but that’s not to say something might come later down the line with it still being in early access. I think a deeper story would be a nice feature, even if it was hidden behind some lore. I do find that to work quite well sometimes. Even with all that being said, there is still a lot on offer.

With a whole lot of enemies, traps, and bosses to overcome, throughout your adventure, you’ll be challenged with a large variety of enemy types, such as slimes that will attempt to bounce on your head, skeleton soldiers with crossbows, spears, and swords, and even magicians that are so elusive they are hard to chase down and kill, amongst so much more. Enemies aren’t you’re only problem in these worlds. You’ll have to avoid traps, and in some worlds, even run away from rising lava, dodge falling poison, or swim through a constant tide.

Overcoming all this is done with a decent selection of abilities and weapons obtained by buying them with the coins you earn from leveling up, and it appears that this is all that leveling up does. Or, you can temporarily gain them as you progress and survive through the worlds, where most of the time you’ll be given an option out of 2 items, and finally, you can obtain buff potions from fallen foes.

With the rogue-lite features comes a great amount of replayability, especially given you are most probably going to die. Upon each death, you start again with a random selection of load-outs to choose from, and these are based on the equipment you have bought. Although this does add to the challenge at hand, being able to specifically choose my own equipment would have been nice.

Starting a new run will also prompt you with a starting world, and if you have the required money to buy a new starting area, you can skip a little bit ahead, but you can only buy places you’ve worked up to.

This brings us to the design of the game, as there are only around 5 primary world types at the moment. They are each uniquely designed, from dark caverns to icy snow worlds and desert temples. This might not seem like a whole lot, but with each run, these worlds vary, giving you a fresh feel almost every time, especially when there are also over 80 unique enemies and traps to fight, dodge, and conquer on your adventure.

The art style is highly based on retro arcade side scrollers and looks great, and there’s a small amount of customization for your character which allows you to change the colour of your outfit and skin tone. I would have liked to see a few different outfit options to make my little character feel more unique. It does, however, feature a unique musical score and so many nostalgic 8-bit and arcade sound effects go with the art style, with a large range of sounds that made Aura of Worlds feel fresh with each new area I worked my way through.

Aura of Worlds is a very challenging game, with a lot of variation through its rogue-like mechanics and world design offering a great amount of replayability, but an added story or lore would make the game feel a little bit more alive. As how it is now, I believe it’s got great potential and is very well polished, and it comes as a solid recommendation for fans of these types of games.

Written by: MrVibeAU