Gamer reviews for Auro

The Bumpy Road of Auro: A Monster Bumping Adventure

Behold! This is the adventure of poorly eqipped child-prince Auro. We are introduced to him in this rogue-like strategy dungeon crawler from our friends at Dinofarm, creators of the popular (and ironically not roguelike) mobile game: 100 Rogues.

The game costs $2.99 on the App Store and Google Play, and does not contain any in-app purchases or ads.

In typical arcade-style, the player is tasked with bumping various enemies off of a platform and into the obviously very polluted water to meet their demise. Falling into the murky depths (almost always) spells instant death for all who dare to take a quick dip. There are 14 enemy types and each type has a different method of forcing the young prince to walk the plank. Some enemies attack straight on, but can only attack with a few tiles of wiggle room, while some require special strategy to destroy. Learning the mechanisms of the bad guys is almost half of this game's incredibly steep learning curve. The other half is mastering the appropriate use of Auro's various magic spells.

To aid in the laborious task of reclaiming the hexagons for his own, Auro has magic on his side in the form of spells and single-use candies. The spells either effect the enemies themselves or the tiles at which they are cast and have attacks from ice-type to fire-type and everything in between. The candies can only be used once and a player can only carry two candies into each battle. The player learns new and better spells and is able to withstand more and more attacks, as the levels progressively get tougher.

For fans of the rogue-like genre, Auro can provide many, many hours of strategized bumping, with the ultimate goal of learning new and awesome tricks later on in the levels. For newbies to rogue-like games, Auro might be intimidatingly challenging. It is turn-based, strategy-heavy and has an intuitive difficulty level that gets more difficult as you get better, but some of the mechanics and combo moves might not be intuitive enough for casual gamers, even with the 31 stages that have to comprise the world's longest in-game tutorial ever.

The game's graphics and music are a throwback to the classic arcade era and for this type of game, works just fine. The focus of the game is obviously on usable mechanics and offensive strategy, not awe-inspiring graphics.

If you are already a fan of the genre, jump in and go crazy, but if you are considering this as your first roguelike, you might be happier with a different game. This game takes a while to learn well-enough to give you that "I just killed a freaking monster!!!" feeling to replace the, "Did I just kill that monster or did it die from natural causes?" feeling.