Adore Review – Creature Summoning at Its Finest

Adore’s combat is groundbreaking, intuitive and different from creature summoning games that have been needed for a long time. The latest update and full release have shown a polished strategic pet summoning game that has ARPG elements, rogue-like elements and something different than turn-based pet combat. If you’re big into pet games, you shouldn’t take my word for it and head on over to the Adore steam page to start checking the game out yourself – we recommend it.

You summon a team of four creatures who fight for you. Your main character can’t actually engage in battle directly, only dodge and you don’t have absolute control over your summons. You’ve got to involve a lot of strategy and tactics to get through combat and what appears to be simple gameplay unravels as you move deeper into the game.

If you played the game early in early access, you will want to give the game another look. Creatures are now persistent and collecting them is no longer part of the rogue-like loop. The game’s launch is highly polished. So be sure to give it a return if you already have the game.

Gods and Creatures

You take an ARPG and replace your skills with creature summoning and collecting. That’s Adore in a nutshell, but it’s a lot more than that. The creatures feel like skills at first, a departure from the game’s origins, but it honestly makes for a much more exciting experience. Not being a beast tamer and having to be strategic in how you use your pets makes for a much more satisfying experience.

While they do operate a lot more like skills than free roaming creatures, they still have their own independent AI and still take damage – something that a skill normally doesn’t do. You have to know where to summon, how to dodge, when to call your creature back and so much more as you go further into the game’s story.

There is a story, though without voice acting you’re left to just the beautiful music that accompanies the game to go along with the text. The one thing about the story that I personally like is you start off directly interfacing with the God’s of the world. They aren’t left to be overly cryptic.

Underrated Gameplay

The aforementioned updates to the game over its history has resulted in a genre defining masterpiece that has gone a bit under the radar. Adore’s gameplay is deep, crafted meticulously and the combat is tight and fluid. The movements of your character, along with creatures and the AI work seamlessly in a unique way that I haven’t seen yet in other games. Figuring out synergies, collecting pets and a rogue-like that doesn’t punish you for death is just very satisfying.

The world design is also very delightful. There’s often a series of rocks, rubble and other debris to help you kite monsters around as you try to fight or tame them. There’s cooking, artifacts and many other mechanics along with your four creatures to make fiddling with the various gameplay elements a must in order to optimize and keep clearing the maps.

The tutorial is actually useful and builds up slowly giving you abilities and training as you move through the early parts of the game.

A Few Nitpicks

No review is perfect without balancing the hype. The game’s graphics are hard League of Legends. I’m reminded of Summoner’s Rift every single time I do anything in the game. The cutscenes, while beautiful, don’t feel as polished as the gameplay itself is.

It feels like some of the earlier art made it into the final build too. The fidelity of some of the art, at least to me, looks mismatched. As if different formats were used and different compression. Nothing jarring, but a small bit of polish missing in otherwise gorgeous gem.

Conclusion

If you want to see something truly unique with creature summoning, ARPGs and rogue-likes then please try the demo of Adore. The full launch now includes the entire content of the game and years of community feedback and polish. It’s well worth the price of admission if you find that the game is something you’re into.

I really hope more developers are brave enough to make games like Adore. It’s truly a masterpiece in its own right and truly shows what indie development is capable of.

We received a key from the developer (or affiliated entity). This review follows our review guidelines.