[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Release Date: 13 March 2012/16 March 2012
Developers: Humble Hearts
Publishers: Microsoft Studios
Platforms: Xbox Live Arcade
Genre: Action role - playing game
Players: 1

Dust: An Elysian Tail is an action role-playing video game developed by independent designer Dean Dodrill and published by Microsoft Studios.

The setting for Dust: An Elysian Tail is in an fantastic artist world known as 'Falana'. The world is inhabited by many animals, powerful beings and the enemies of the forest. It is a very big world full of amazing sights, puzzles,treasure and secrets locked away you need to adventure to find. The bright artist word makes travelling this game an adventure, the game itself is a joy to play but you can even enjoy the game by putting down your controller every now and then and just look at the sights. Overall i found the setting to be very enjoyable, one of the best i have ever encountered.

The Gameplay for Dust: An Elysian Tail was fantastic. The game is centered around a very powerful being known as Dust. He finds himself in a forest with no idea of where and who he is and the game is based on finding out this information. This make the game very enjoyable as you share the same thirst of knowledge for who dust really is as the character you're playing. Dust has many different attacks, all epic in their own way, he uses a very powerful sword to bring together massive amounts of combos and fighting techniques that can unleash an amazing battle on your screen. The combat system itself has been thought out well with overpowered attacks harming yourself if used for too long and the ability to parry attacks from enemies you would otherwise come to a defeat too. Although this can make the game really easy as you could just button mash your way to the end of the game although the game has a variety of difficulties so you can look good and feel a sense of accomplishment when taking down bosses. The game reminds you of older more punishing side-scrollers with the fact that you can only save through checkpoints and sometimes you go great lengths without checkpoints meaning you may have to do boss battles again which can result in frustration. Overall the gameplay is amazing they balanced many key features of the game with difficulty and button mashing without becoming repetitive and Dust is a beast himself, very good game altogether.

The graphics to this game are brilliant. The artistic design to this game just blew me away it was just so bright and colourful even when you've thought you've seen everything this game has to offer it just comes back with amazing artistry, this game is a delight to look at. The main graphical delight would be Dust, just looking at how good he looks graphically compared to the already brilliant artistry of the background and enemies is just fantastic, this game for an arcade game is groundbreaking.

The controls are like any other side scroller, the analog sticks do the movement and X,Y,B are attacks with A being the jumping method, there are also R1,L1 being used as dashes to evade enemies before they strike and some of the buttons string together to be used later in the game as dust unlocks abilities. Overall very simple.

Overall this is the best arcade game i've played (TWD aside) the fact it was so beautiful to look at while keeping some epic battles and an interesting story. This game blew me away if you have the money i highly recommend purchasing this.