About This Game THE LAST JOURNEY BEGINS…Downward will let you set off on humanity’s final adventure, to seek out an explanation for the apocalypse that changed the Earth as we know it.Taking advantage of parkour techniques and of the mysterious "anomalies" you will traverse astonishing and dangerous ruins of past civilizations, all to find the legendary artifacts meant to control the deadly calamities that came to this world.You won’t be alone in this, but what can you do? This world is not for humans anymore…FEATURESParkour:Experience challenging first-person parkour action as you traverse the ruins of past civilizations and survive the many dangers you will face.Discover:Freely explore and enjoy breathtaking landscapes, reach secret places to collect useful items and hidden treasures.Struggle:Ancient guardians will wake from their slumber to end your journey, are you ready to face them?Level Up:Collect experience to upgrade your character’s stats and powers, use anomalies to your advantage!Online:Freely access a safe world in an astral plane where you can practice parkour and test your might with numerous challenge and online leaderboards.Shape:Access the Merchant’s Lair to study your enemies, prepare to explore, train and also… lay around. Command the sky to influence the environment, affecting both visuals and parkour."THE COMING"When three stray planets mysteriously begin to orbit the Earth's atmosphere, it spells death, disaster, and the end of an era. Rising from this fall is beyond the question. The only way forward......is Downward. 7aa9394dea Title: DownwardGenre: Adventure, IndieDeveloper:Caracal GamesPublisher:IndieGalaRelease Date: 13 Jul, 2017 Downward Download Bittorrent I'll keep it short (mostly because I'm too lazy to write an extensive review):This is my second favorite parkour game after Mirror's Edge!10\/10 - Would play it again with a friend if it had co-op.. On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and this game simply will not launch. This game appears to be abandoned, at least the Linux version. I was able to play it on a different Windows computer and to be honest the performance was poor with a machine with an i5 and GTX 660.. Honestly this is probably one of my favourite games. I wish it was longer (story wise) and the world was bigger. I hope the creators make a second one with a bigger map. The re-playability of this is good with all the challenges in the challenge world, but eventually even that ends. The story is enough to keep you interested but you play for the game mechanics and the looks and the parkour system that is truly unique. It's better (and longer) than "A Story About My Uncle" in terms of the extent of abilities and the (though limited) open world. It really is a great game and after finishing the story and a lot of the challenges I found myself looking for another game like it, but there really isn't much like it. It's simple and stunning; simply stunning.. I had such high hopes for this game after seeing so many positive reviews and enjoying the demo but, alas, I found Downward to ultimately be a staggeringly-incompetent, monotonous dirge of a game. The demo is a misrepresentation of what the game actually is; the demo presents the game as more of a tightly-knit action-adventure game when really, at its heart, Downward has the hollow skeleton of a shallow 3D platformer. Once you pass the prologue\/tutorial area your, quite literally, dropped into a large, aimless, and mostly-empty area, with absolutely no direction or objective, save for a waypoint on your compass. You're free to wander the game's large areas and visit most of the games locations, well before you're intended to, but there's never anything meaningful to do there until you've advanced the completely-linear main questline to the point where you're actually instructed to go there. As for story, there really isn't one; you play a nameless dude-bro who is incredibly slow to notice anything remarkable about his situation, who just goes along collecting Dry Artificts (the games stand in for Power Stars, Shines, Jiggies, Bolts, or any other 3D platformer collectible) to open doors to new areas so he can collect more Dry Artifacts, all to gullibly help the villain with their blatantly-evil plan for no reason. That's it; that really is all the story you get; the game doesn't even have an ending: when the villain betrays, no surprise there, you quickly defeat her in a rule-of-three boss fight and then credits roll. There is the occasional small attempt a building up some lore about the game's generic, omniscient, ancient civilisation which destroyed itself with its own hubris (how original!) but, in effect, that's all pushed aside so that the game can shoehorn in as many "ironically" bad puns as possible into its corny, amateur dialogue. Of course, the story and writing really wouldn't matter if the gameplay and design were at least competent but, unfortunately, they're not. The game provides the player with a handful large openworlds, accessible early on, but exploration is completely discouraged; nothing good comes from visiting these worlds before you're supposed to so ultimately free exploration is a complete waste of time. Not to mention how dull the worlds themselves are: specifically, the game gives you four main areas: a desert-ruins world (hub), desert-ruins world 2 (yeah there are two of them for some reason), ice world, and fire world. Even those unimaginative themes are worse than they sound because the differences between the worlds are entirely aesthetic: there are no unique gameplay mechanics to differentiate them making them all play exactly the same. I haven't even gotten to the worse part of the game yet: which is, the game's obsession with backtracking. In addition to the game's worlds being bland, too big, and confusingly wrapping around themselves in nonsensical ways: a gimmick throughout the whole game is that there's four "variations" of each area referred to as planets. I stressed "variations" the way I did because the only immediate difference between the "planets" is a change in lighting; there is also an added platform, or anomaly, somewhere but you have no way of knowing where the changes are until you find them yourself and the game gives you absolutely no indication of what was added or removed for a specific planet or what would be added or removed if you switched to a different planet: essentially, the game forces you to backtrack, re-combing through 99% of the area, every centimetre, just to find that 1% difference of a single added platform allowing access to an area only accessible in that specific planet. To put it simply, even with optimal routing, the game requires you to retread through every area at least four times in order to find minute changes to progress. Worst of all, is how utterly apparent it is that this "mechanic" was only added to the game to pad out the play time of an otherwise extremely short game; it took me about 10 hours to finish the game and get almost every achievement (I'll explain the ones I didn't get in a bit*) and, of that time, only two hours were spent actually exploring or progressing; the rest was all just soul-deadening, mandatory, excessive backtracking!On a technical level, the game doesn't fair much better. For a game all about fluid first-person parkour it is way too easy to softlock yourself, most commonly, by climbing up onto a ledge, inadvertently clipping through the world geometry in the process. Fortunately, the game does allow you to access the console which can, sometimes, save you from the game's own ineptness. Graphically, the game's mostly underwhelming: it has average Unreal Engine 4 graphics with an over reliance on post-processing and circumstantially-imperfect frame pacing; strangely, using the double-jump anomaly always causes a sharp stutter despite the rest of the game running reasonably smoothly. The real graphical problems stems from its, quite frankly, terrible lighting\/gamma-correction model: the game loves putting you through scenes that are either pitch black or extremely washed out; there is no brightness setting that offers a nice medium between these two extremes. This is probably the only time I've ever complained that a game was too bright (bright to the point it literally washes out bright colours and light textures making certain areas impossible to navigate if the brightness setting is too high; like with the pale-blue texture used to indicate that a surface is wall-run-able which is often place on a solid-white slate of rock, effectively becoming impossible to discern on higher brightness levels.) and it's definitely the only game to have that problem while also being guilty of having many large maze-like interiors that aren't lit at all, requiring an amped brightness level just to make out even a slight silhouette of the walls and floors. It's absurd. On the audio side, the game is fine: the music is nothing impressive and the sound design relies on a few too little sound effects for the whole game but it's really not that big of an issues; the voice acting isn't great but I'm willing to chalk that up to mostly the horrible writing.*Regarding the achievements: I got every one except for a four achievements which are all just variations of "Use <Move> 5000 times." Even with liberal backtracking over the course of a normal playthrough, you'll get nowhere near the 5000 number required for this meaning you'll effectively just have to find a place you can use the move and grind it out for three hours each! Well, that's certainly one way to add an additional 12 hours of playtime to the game....Pros: - Core movement mechanics are reasonably fun.- Controls are responsive if, always, a little unintuitive.- Okay UE4 graphicsCons:- Expansive but horribly-bland, unimaginatively-themed, and thoughtlessly-designed worlds.- A disgusting amount of forced backtracking which comprises +80% of the game's playtime.- Lack of any story or motivation.- Terrible lighting with every scene either being pitch black or completely washed out, without any compromise inbetween. Seriously, it's worse than you can imagine.- Shallow, simplistic 3D platformer design.- Terrible dialogue.- Frequent softlocking.- Extremely short main quest padded out by excessive backtracking.- Falls short of its high ambitions in most every area.- A ubiquitous lack of direction from when you end the prologue through to the end of the game.- Have I mentioned the backtracking 'cause like, seriously, it's insane; they make you retread every step of every area at least four times if you're interested in sort of completion!Conclusion: Downward has the scaffolding of a potentially good game but, once past the prologue, the game's tedious design, many poor choices, and often-frustrating implementation make it a absolute slog!
Downward Download Bittorrent
Updated: Mar 30, 2020
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