Dead Mage and 11 bit studios released Children of Morta on PC last month and now the console version of the title has been released as well. This has been a busy month for 11 bit studios as Children of Morta is not the only title released by them for consoles. Apart from Children of Morta, the publisher also released Frostpunk Console Edition. However, the best bit about both games is that the consoles versions are equally amazing as their PC counterparts. This is our review of Children of Morta console version and we tried the game on Xbox One.
To begin with a little bit of introduction about the game, Children of Morta is a dungeon crawler combined with soft RPG and roguelike mechanics. You play as the Bergsons’ family where each family member is a capable demon slayer and comes with their own skills and abilities. To make your characters even better, you can find and equip different Divine Relics and Devine Graces which give your character passive and active abilities. Each hero also comes with their own active and passive skills which are unlocked via the skill tree every time you level up.
Your main goal is to clear out dungeons filled with monsters, collect gold and relics and defeat the boss at the end of the dungeon to clear the dungeon and move to the next one. Your ultimate goal is to rid the Mount Morta of the evil that has taken hold of it. To do this, you make progress towards the end of the game clearing dungeon after dungeon and leveling up your favorite character at the same time.
Our main focus of this review is to see how much the console release of Children of Morta fairs when compared with the PC version of the game. To start with, let’s take visuals into account. Children of Morta features pixel-art visuals and it is really amazing when it comes to visuals. Despite spending most of your time in dungeons, you will notice that the game still looks pretty well in its unique art style. When it comes to resource usage, it is not very hardware thirsty so it works pretty much the same on consoles as it does on the PC.
To set a performance bar, we tried the game on the first series Xbox One. It was not tested on Xbox One S or Xbox One X for this review and the game performed extremely well on the original Xbox One. There were no visual stutters or anything which shows that the game does not lack in any aspect when it comes to performance and visuals on the consoles. If the game is working fine on the normal Xbox One console, Xbox One S and X would be just fine as well since they come will additional hardware prowess.
Coming to the gameplay itself, the game is much easier to play on a controller than a keyboard and mouse. Since your camera is placed at the top and the character attacks in the direction you aim at, using a controller is extremely convenient as you can simply push the right joystick around and your character will attack in that particular direction. Skill keys are convenient as well. For the best experience, you should play Children of Morta with a controller.
The console edition of Children of Morta comes with all the content of the full PC version. You have access to Bergson’s house however unlike PC where you can move the mouse around and choose different items, on the console version, you must use the joystick to move around however the selectable options are quickly selected. You can also use the right joystick to explore the complete house and its surroundings.
I would like to mention here that if you’ve read our PC review of Children of Morta, I mentioned that I encountered a weird controller input delay. This delay is non-existent in the console version of the title and the controls are extremely crisp and on point making the gameplay even smoother. In short, it retains everything from the PC version and brings it to console players just like the game is supposed to be experienced.
Final Verdict
The console release of Children of Morta is not short of the PC version in any way. It brings the unique art style, the solid RPG and roguelike mechanics and everything else to the table. If you don’t own a PC however you always wanted to play Children of Morta, go ahead and purchase the console version of the game right away because you will not miss a single thing from the PC version of the game. It is the complete package of Children of Morta that we loved on PC and now you can enjoy this brilliant title on consoles as well.
Final Score: 8.8/10
