Adore, developed by Cadabra Games and published by QUByte Interactive, is adorable. It is, at its heart, a dungeon-crawling, monster collecting, action role playing game. What could possibly go wrong...
In the beginning the God Draknar used the divine essence to create the world of Gaterdirk, but Ixer the demi-god of the end placed a curse on Gaterdirk allowing him to face and overthrow Draknar. You, the player, assume the role of Lukha, a little boy imbued with the power of the god Draknar. This makes him able to summon and control creatures to fight by his side, and it is up to you to discover a way to right the wrongs that have befallen the world of Gaterdirk since Draknar's demise, help restore him to power and overthrow the evil Ixer.
You achieve this by “dungeon crawling” your way through procedurally generated areas of Gaterdirk collecting and fighting various creatures who have been affected by Ixer's curse. Along the way you will get instruction from other Adores (people who can summon and control creatures.) You will also find or buy artefacts which help enhance your character's different skills, and all of these items can be upgraded by crafting with other items that drop within the randomised areas you explore while capturing creatures.
Most of the missions are simple objective checklists like "fetch this" or "kill that" and the game never seems to deviate too far from this formula. The quest chain is quite linear, you simply complete your current objective to unlock the next…
Now with all that said, I have sort of given up on the game. Why? Well, Lukha likes to get stuck on environmental objects at times, including the portal which lets you enter/exit the various realms and areas you visit. The only way to fix this seems to be to reboot the game and lose some progress in doing so.
Another issue I kept having, since I'm on Xbox, is using the guide button to navigate the Xbox menu and texting friends within the Xbox dashboard while Adore is running seems to randomly cause the controller to stop working in the game, again the only way to fix this seems to be reboot the game and lose progress since your last autosave.
What was mostly an enjoyable time with Adore came to an end after getting stuck no less than 5 times. The subsequent reboot/progress loss, along with 3 non-responsive controller issues, was followed by more reboot/progress loss, a combination of which understandably put me off.
This game definitely has potential, but the developers have to put a little more work into it. If these issues are fixed this game will become the Adorable ARPG, creature-collecting, dungeon-crawler the genre and us gamers deserve.