Licensed games have vastly improved in quality over the past decade. In the early days of the industry, most licensed games were considered cheap cash grabs, usually coming out when their film counterpart was released to maximize profits. These games were always rushed, boring and sometimes an insult to the name they carried. Batman: Arkham Asylum completely upped the game (pun intended) for licensed videogames. The game oozed quality and set the bar high for future releases, and showed gamers that with the right care and attention, licensed games can be great. It’s a shame that Windstorm: Ari’s arrival has more in common with the licensed videogames of old, rather than more recent entries.
Windstorm is based on a German film of the same name, about a teenage girl who goes to spend the summer at her Grandmother’s ranch in the German countryside, and learns she has the skills to ride the namesake horse. Ari’s Arrival is a sequel to this, following a young orphan named Ari, a troubled orphan who has a reputation for being extremely difficult with foster carers. Ari escapes from a moving vehicle being driven by one of the workers. Running through the grassy plains, she meets Windstorm and another of the ranch hands, Mr. Khan. We are introduced to Windstorm in a Flashback scene where he is carrying one of his carers, Mika on his back. Mr. Khan explains that Mika is in a coma, and it is affecting Windstorm as well.
Ari begins life on the ranch by doing some menial tasks, and is then asked to ride Windstorm (even though she has never ridden a horse before) and begins to bond with Windstorm. The story is pretty standard, and the characters from the film all seem to appear in the game from what I’ve read. The story is told through character portraits and dialogue boxes. I found this to be a tad off-putting, due to the hit and miss voice acting. The only movement the portraits do is the odd eye movement which is very strange. This, however, is the start of many, many faults this game has.
The game is bright, way too bright. This isn’t too bad when you are riding around your horse at night or at sundown, but it seems like the brightness is to hide the subpar graphics. I’ve seen Ps2 games which look better than Ari’s Arrival. This game supposedly runs on the unreal engine. The original Gears of War ran on the unreal engine and looks ten times better than Ari’s Arrival, and it’s 12 years old. Character models are very basic, but then you barely see them due to the game’s preference on using portraits and dialogue boxes. Think of how the characters looked in Metal Gear Solid 1 and you’ll get an idea of how they look. The character portraits are nice and varied though, which makes each character look unique. Unknown characters are just silhouettes thought, which to me feels a bit lazy considering they are only used around 3 times.
Ari’s game world is a decent size, and you are free to explore it fully after you get by a certain part of the roughly four-hour story, but the whole game just looks blurry. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m playing it on PS4 and the game was originally released on PC. But then I think of God of War and Metal Gear Solid V. Gameplay wise, Ari’s Arrival is all about horseback riding. It’s what you’ll be doing for the vast majority of the game, along with some horseback arrow shooting with your bow and arrow. Windstorm controls well enough, but only when you are on flat ground. Now, when you ride horses in games when you approach a fence at high speed, your horse is likely going to jump over it. Here, it’s a little different.
Windstorm has a dedicated jump button, but when you press it he stops dead in his tracks and then he jumps over the obstacle. Why? He’s a horse with a fearsome reputation. It completely takes away from the flow of riding. Galloping around the game world feels great. It’s probably the best feature of the game. But having Windstorm stop before he jumps it’s just frustrating, to say the least.
It’s through riding that the worst part of the game happens, a scenery sticking glitch. Occasionally, Windstorm will get stuck in the scenery and cannot move forward. To reset this, you need to climb off Windstorm, whistle for him, wait for him to appear behind you and then ride off. However, this happened more than once during the painful following missions, which caused me to fail them at least 4 times. The problem here, as while I was looking online for a solution, it seems the developers are aware of this glitch and suggest doing what I had been doing to counter it. This isn’t practical for these following missions where you only have 10 seconds to get close to your target before you fail the mission. It’s never properly explained to you how the following mission systems work in this game. The first time, you need to follow a horse by staying within the red circle, which covers the ground. End up outside it? You’ve got 10 seconds to get back in, or its mission failed.
The second has you following a car but states you aren’t to get too close. I was within what I thought was a decent distance, but the timer appeared and I then failed the mission. After three attempts, I noticed that there were two circles on the ground, and I was to stay in between those. There was absolutely no indication that I was to do this. The game also crashed three times during my playthrough. Three times doesn’t seem that much, but when it’s only a four-hour campaign it becomes another mark against it. Oh, and there are a good few bugs here as well. My personal favorite was when Ari would get off the horse, the animation would freeze and Ari would get off Windstorm the same way John Wayne walked.
