Developer Sand Door Studio has something special with its newest game Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior. On the surface, it may look like your typical hack-and-slash strategy game that is led by action and nothing more. Underneath its hood, it’s far more than just that.
Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior is about finding, collecting, upgrading, and fighting. The latter part features a time shift component that allows you to replicate the attack of our hero, Imë, by going backward in time, re-appearing after Imë dies, and running alongside the original Imë attack to develop a different attack path, while multiple Imës take out enemies. While this seemed like a lot of work at the beginning of the game, this tool of attack soon became apparent that the game forces you, in a good way, to develop an attack strategy to get all Imës to work together to eliminate all enemies in a particular area. There is so much strategic depth to this game.
So, sit back and watch me attack this review…so, sit back and watch me attack this review…so, sit back and watch me attack this review. Let’s go.
Story for starters
Lysfanga’s story revolves around the birth of a warrior called Lysfanga, who is a sworn protector of the land Antala. When the land is in peril, then a Lysfanga will appear, fight for as long as needed, die, and then the process repeats itself. Very mystical.
In this timeline, Lysfanga is summoned by the Goddess of Time when the Raxes, a horde of escaped demons, show up to try and take over the land. As expected, the Lysfanga is called, but this time, Lysfanga turns out to be twins rather than a single person, and our hero Imë is one half of the warrior duo. Her power is the ability to turn back time (cue that song in your head) and replicate an image of herself for multiple attacks during a single battle. Imë must traverse cityscapes to take out all the demons and to ensure Antala’s safety.
The story is pedestrian on the surface, as it’s going through that ‘powerful hero’ structure where a single person can take on an entire army of baddies. This is akin to any 80s action film, and equally entertaining (seriously, they were fun back in the day). While the story is driven by the need to discover how things went south and who survived the Raxes invasion, the real component that drives the story is how Imë uses her abilities to fight, which makes the narrative far more interesting. As the story stands on its structure alone, it’s simple on the surface. The gameplay of Lysfanga is what complicates it all and makes the one-dimensional journey a bit more fascinating.
Gameplay and strategy
The real beef in the Lysfanga burrito is how the enemies are designed and how Imë takes care of business during battle. The story acts as a rhyme to Imë’s reason, but when you’re up against baddies during gameplay, you’re thinking only about strategy and approach. The game seems to make that front and center in its fight to separate itself from other games of this type.
Starting with the enemy design, as Imë continues her journey through Antala, she will run across purple lines which are used as separators between “nothing going on” and “hey, there are enemies here”. Once she crosses the line, the gameplay shifts from exploration to fighting, and the player is locked into this until every single enemy is killed in an area. It’s a very segmented design allows you to explore Antala’s goods a bit while having a defining line to cross to commit to the fight. Once the fight begins, the enemies start to show you how they were creatively built.
The enemies come in a variety of flavors, as some are easily disposable pawns who only require a few hits and don’t really put up a fight, and some enemies move/shift and do their best to kill Imë. Some of the enemies are attached to corresponding enemies who can only be disposed of if the corresponding enemies are disposed of as well, in a certain amount of time. You have enemies with shields, some who have powerful and devastating attacks, and some who are chained and can’t be killed without destroying those chains. You get a full gambit of enemies with unique designs to them.
Each type of enemy is designed differently and comes with unique moves and varying degrees of powerfulness. All of them are designed to thicken the strategic approach of Imë’s attacks and make them more challenging as the game pushes forward. Sand Door Studio did a superb job of keeping the enemies interesting and forcing the player to think through the fight. To add to the intensity and strategy, the devs added a bonus challenge of beating all enemies during a given fight in a set time, which encourages replayability of fights and creates side goals for the player to meet. With enemies and fighting, Sand Door Studio could have thrown in the towel, but they chose to complicate it, make it engaging, and, more importantly, fun. I had to pull myself away from this game so that I could review it. That’s how much fun I was having with this title.
On the strategy side of Lysfanga, the time-shift replay component was something to behold, as I didn’t quite understand at the beginning of this review process exactly how much that single component would have me thinking of strategy during a fight. When I started this game, I figured it would be a Diablo-lite, where you run through isometric levels just hacking and slashing your way through shit, exploring a bit, and then wash-rinse-repeating it all. I was so incredibly wrong on that assumption.
The time shift component, which you can upgrade and grow as you find random upgrades lying around in treasure chests, is so ingeniously implemented with relation to enemy type, that you can’t help but fall into the game and obsess over finding the quickest and most effective way of winning. For example, when you first start, you get three Imës to work with. You go into a fight going in one direction with the first, she can take out X number of enemies, and then a timer counts down which rewinds and activates the second Imë. Once the second one is launched, you can see a ghost shell of the first taking out enemies the way she did the first time you played her. You then take the second Imë, go a different direction, and take out enemies on a different side of the level. Once the timer is up again, the level rewinds, and the third is activated. Your goal is to take out enemies in the fastest, most efficient way possible, while also keeping down the number of Imës you use in the process. As you find more upgrades, and obtain more Imë, your enemies get harder and more complicated, and the fights become a strategy-driven fun fest that will have you thinking before doing them.
Additionally, the Imës can work together to bring down a single enemy, or you can use an Imë to reset an attack and go a different route during battle. Regardless of how you choose to use the Imës, you will find this single repeating time-shift component such a well-designed gameplay element that changes the entire course of how much fun the game can be. It also offers so many different ways to plan your strategy to take down enemies that you won’t have time to get frustrated or feel like you’re getting nowhere. It makes the game fast, furious, and fun.
Beyond fighting, there is a minor amount of exploring for goodies lying around. The gameplay does feature a clever upgrade system, and you can obtain multiple weapons during your playthrough beyond sword and shield, so it’s kept interesting, and you’re given options for fighting. Regardless of goodies, Lysfanga’s main purpose is that it just wants you to fight, get strategically better, and then fight some more. This formula is kept interesting and helped by Sand Door Studio increasing the difficulty of each fight by mixing and matching a varying degree of enemies who require the player to create an order of operation to successfully pass a level. You will always feel like there is a new, stronger challenge awaiting you, and the fun won’t be lost in the process.
Overall, the main crux of Lysfanga’s purpose is fighting, fun, and strategy. The devs definitely deliver the goods in all those categories, which makes this indie game fun as hell.
Other odds and ends
Lysfanga’s only hiccup in its giddy-up is what’s in the world outside of enemies and fighting. One of the components that keeps Diablo interesting is how you can discover, collect, and constantly take a different path to explore a bit. It gives you a reason to not always make fighting the main culprit of fun. In Lysfanga it seems like it falls short in this category just a tad. This is not a dealbreaker, but I want more than just fighting.
Now, the game does offer up a home base of sorts where you can do some minor customization with the space while also allowing some very minor customization with Imë. But it’s nothing extensive and certainly doesn’t distract enough to add another component alongside the action it presents. Again, it’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but it would be nice to have just a little more.
On that note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior from Sand Door Studio and publisher Spotlight by Quantic Dream is a fun action game that is driven by strategy and a sprinkle of good storytelling. The gameplay’s unique ability to offer the player several ways to succeed in a fight keeps the gameplay interesting and engaging, while the challenge to complete said fight in X amount of time will ensure the game’s longevity and replayability.
