Akatori Review: Brilliant Movement, Blunt Combat

Every August the release calendar gets loud, and a 15-euro metroidvania from a small studio is exactly the kind of game that gets buried under the big-budget noise. I spent the weekend with Akatori instead of the blockbusters, and I don't regret it - even if I came out more impressed by how it moves than by how it fights.

What it is

Akatori is a 2.5D action-platformer with metroidvania bones, developed by Contrast Games and published by Games Harbor and Esprit Games. It landed on Steam on 5 August 2026 at 14.99 euros (with a 15% launch discount at the time of writing), and the PS5, PS4, Xbox Series and Xbox One versions follow on 12 August, with a Switch 2 release promised for 2027. You play Mako, a teenage monk raised in the Firebird Temple, sent out to stop the Amber Storms corrupting five distinct biomes and everything living in them.

The staff is the whole game

Mako's transformable staff is the hook, and it earns top billing. It's a weapon, a grapple point, a glider and a pole-vault, and the game trusts you to chain those uses far faster than most metroidvanias would dare. Level design is built around momentum: hook a wall, swing, air-dash, slide under a gap and land on an enemy without ever touching the floor. When it clicks - and it clicks often - this feels closer to a sharp 2D character-action game than to the usual slow, cautious crawl of the genre.

It also looks genuinely expensive for the money. Pixel-art characters over painted 3D environments is a blend that can easily turn into visual mush, and here it doesn't; the five regions each have their own palette and their own personality. The soundtrack shifts with the action, which I appreciated in the moment even if I'm not humming any of it a day later.

Combat is where it stalls

Fighting is Akatori's weak link. The basic staff combo has crunch and the animation work is lovely, but the moveset barely deepens across the roughly ten hours it took me to finish. There are 20-plus enemy types and most of them ask the same question: hit them, dodge once, hit them again. Worse, there's a small stall between combo strings that punishes exactly the aggression the traversal system spends all game teaching you. Bosses are considerably better - multi-phase fights with real ideas, including one rhythm-flavoured encounter I loved - but a couple of them lean on off-screen projectiles and a camera that pulls back too far for comfort.

The technical side is rough at the edges, too. I hit two hard crashes, a handful of knockback bugs that flung me through geometry, and a fast-travel network stingy enough to make late backtracking a chore. Steam sits at "Mixed" as I write this; I like the game more than that number does, but I understand where the frustration comes from.

Who it's for

If you want Hollow Knight's density or a punishing difficulty curve, look elsewhere. If you want a ten-hour metroidvania about flow rather than suffering, priced low enough that a patch-later purchase costs you nothing to regret, this is an easy yes. I'd tell console players to wait a week and read the launch impressions first.

Verdict: a small studio built a genuinely great movement system and then bolted merely adequate combat onto it. That's still worth your evening and your fifteen euros.

Score: 7/10

Image: InclusiveGameLab / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Person_with_PS5_Controller_5.jpg