Thanks to Screenwave Media for the review code
Title: Eagle Island Twist
System: Xbox One
Price: $12.99
Release Date: 05/27/2021
Story
In this action platformer, you take control of two characters, each on their own quest to explore and find the secrets behind the mysterious Eagle Island! Includes both the original campaign, and the stage-by-stage Twist style, which is new to this version of the game.
Presentation
Eagle Island is immediately charming thanks to a gorgeous pixel art presentation, one that doesn’t hesitate to show off whenever it can. From the lovely title screen, the pretty backgrounds, to the fluid animations and cute character design, Eagle Island Twist stands out, and the game making smart use of lighting in underground areas or reflections while underwater are great touches as well, and that doesn’t even begin to tap into some of the cool stuff certain Twist stages do; one reminded me of Donkey Kong Country Returns in a very good way!
The music is pretty solid too, though I wouldn’t call it memorable by any means. The somber title theme sticks around, but most of the stage themes fit better as ambience more than anything blood-pumping that’ll get stuck in your head, and I feel a serene vibe was what the composers were going for, and they definitely nailed it.
Gameplay
Originally released as just Eagle Island, Twist is a new version that adds the titular Twist campaign, thus leading to two takes on the same core concept! The original Eagle Island is an interesting stage-by-stage roguelike of sorts, with a lot of randomized elements and the ability to either play with a fixed seed of stages, or a fully randomized experience to make each playthrough fresh, all connected in a metroidvania hub world.
You clear stages and gain upgrades upon doing so, which open up new stages in the main hub and expand your general capabilities as you progress, though I definitely feel the metroidvania aspects the hub provides are rather light, since a lot of the levels on the official seed at least are a reasonable, linear ramp up in progression and difficulty, with the bird obtaining new elemental feathers that allow for various elemental abilities and attacks, along with Quil gaining new techniques to help traverse the island and reach those newer areas.
There’s a good bit of stuff to do, and the fact these playthroughs can be randomized with varying difficulty options and replay value coming from trying to get those S ranks or secret Ancient Coins leads to the main mode being rather fun, even if the stages can drag at times, especially with how long some of them are, and how crushing it can be to die at the very end of a level after a good five-ten minute trek to that point.
Luckily, there are accessibility options if you just want to breeze through everything with no remorse, including the ability to instantly respawn upon death, but most of these disable the ranking system, and I felt it was more than plenty to just leave the game difficulty on casual for extra pickups while leaving these accessibility features off, since that still allowed me to try and make the most of the ranking system. But if somehow that wasn’t even enough, then you can unlock full blown cheats to mess around with too, making this a remarkably customizable platformer if you want to fully crack it open and go nuts.
Still, the bulk of what you’ll be doing room by room in the main campaign is combat, and you pull that off with your trusty bird friend. Those aforementioned elemental feathers give him the power to do some cool techniques such as piercing through enemies or freezing them, and in order to have any chance of survival you need to master the art of chaining, where you quickly defeat enemies one after the other to increase the quality of their dropped items, which often ends up being the sort of crystals, coins and health refills you need to survive a run. Those coins can then be used to purchase temporary augments for the stage from a shopkeeper bird that’ll swoop in every now and then, ranging from handy stuff like a compass showing where everything on the stage map is, increasing your max HP, producing shockwaves when the bird hits an enemy with the Electrical feather, a counter attack when Quil gets damaged, and many others.
You have limited slots for these items, and gaining the rare Ancient Coins will occupy one of them, so if you’re daring enough to go out of your way to find a stage’s coin (usually blocked off by very tricky platforming challenges in a well hidden path) you’ll do so at the expense of a helpful item. While long, the core Eagle Island levels were pretty fun, and I did enjoy the game slowly opening up over time, even if some later levels were a bit too much for me to handle without a lot of practice. Still, clear a seed once, and you’ll unlock a Rogue mode for even more randomized madness, so this core game has a ton of replay value even if you get bored of the normal mode.
However, the Twist levels were what made this package shine for me, since these go for more of a bite sized, puzzle focused shift on the concept, with plenty of fun levels to traverse, making very clever usage of the elemental feathers and the skills from the main campaign, with a lot of levels just giving them all to you from the get go. Nothing is randomized here at all, making these stages far more creative and enjoyable than even the official seed of the main campaign. It really is fun to go from a level focused on tight platforming or combat to a gimmick stage where you’re stuck only throwing fireballs or bouncing on a spring, as that keeps the variety coming. It also helps that these stages have checkpoints and the gold you obtain within are used to gain extra continues, leading to a lot less frustration if you just want to play these casually.
I actually started out with these levels for a bit before playing through a lot of the main campaign, and even as a newcomer set of stages the Twist levels are a great way to practice mechanics or ease yourself to the core nature of Eagle Island’s gameplay, feeling like a standalone experience that definitely is the more approachable set of stages. It also helps that there’s a lot to do in these 40+ levels, as while your main objective is to gather the blue diamond in each level, the stages also hide a green diamond, usually behind a challenging puzzle ala those Ancient Coins from the main quest. The stages are also interconnected on a world map, with a lot of them branching out once you clear one, so you don’t even have to do them in a fixed linear order, leading to Twist being tremendous pick up and play fun, and by far the mode I got sucked into the most thanks to its simplicity. I also felt the elemental feathers were a lot more fun to make use of here, especially with some stages having level design with them in mind.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Eagle Island Twist is two experiences in one, and both are rather enjoyable, but the Twist levels were the huge highlight for me, being perfect for pick up and play experiences and just pure fun to go through. The main game on the other hand, while fun and sporting a satisfying progression loop with new unlockable abilities, feathers, and stages to traverse, definitely can feel a little repetitive and drawn out at times, and even the randomization elements aren’t enough to keep me too interested in it for long, making it one I just couldn’t click with after a while, especially near the endgame of it.
But the Twist levels? Those are delightful, and the puzzle action they provide is more than worth the price of admission alone. Definitely a case where there should be something for everyone in this package, and if you manage to vibe with the main game more than I did, then you’ll have plenty of bird throwing action to enjoy with these gorgeous adventures, and the Twist content I argue is strong enough to hold up this entire package, and for what was just post-launch DLC? That isn’t a bad sign at all.
I give Eagle Island Twist an 8 out of 10.