Since I can safely be considered a vintage gamer, I may have spent a fair portion of my time in my youth playing in arcades. While I had my preferences, I also would tend to try out just about any game at least once, just so I wouldn’t risk missing out on something unexpectedly fun. Perhaps that was a fair predictor for my current hobby, but I digress. Point being, as a sort of renaissance arcade gamer, I’m always intrigued by games that seek to move in that direction, but I’ll absolutely say that retro arcade games in this generation have been a mixed bag. Unfortunately, in the case of Teared, I’d say it’s more of a miss than a hit.

Starting with what positive there is, the game does have a very distinctive look to it, and it’s definitely shooting for a specific visual style. Some of the models and elements in the environment look pretty good, but there are absolutely inconsistencies and some things look better than others. It’s kind of strange, you can tell effort was put in to make elements like fire and water look reasonably good, which is nice, but then you have many low-quality textures and really poor lighting in many sections so visually the results are inconsistent at best. I suppose the music, though perhaps a bit generic, is at least fitting for the setting and type of action.

Then we’ll move on to the issues, and there are quite a number of them in addition to the visual shortcomings already noted. The worst of the bunch are unfortunately in the way the game controls, which would best be described as sluggish, and I’ll even throw inconsistent into the mix for flavor. When I think of arcade games in this general vein, Rastan most immediately comes to mind, and my memory of that title was that you had pretty crisp controls outside of perhaps a floaty jump. Here there isn’t a crisp feeling with your attacks, and worse there were times where I’d try to throw my weapon at incoming enemies and for whatever stupid reason I’d find myself attacking the background. In a similar vein, your ability to evade attacks with a roll is clumsily implemented and the result looks like a mess on-screen, while feeling about the same trying to play with your controller. I really think the game’s insistence on trying to be sort of 2.5D, with enemies coming in from the background and some other distractions, also contributes to some frustrations. Visually it’s very unclear at what point they’re in the same plane as you, so trying to anticipate their arrival to try to take them out before they force you to retreat is tougher than it should be.

The thing is, I’ve played games like this before, and even ones with more issues, but to some degree I’m more inclined to pick on it because of how it tries to push itself on the eShop. In many ways, language like “Teared is not just a game; it is an immersive journey where dynamic 3D landscapes are combined with intense gameplay in the purest retro style” feels plain cynical or at least deceiving, and that doesn’t sit well with me. It actually reminds me of the old days, where you’d find game boxes on the shelf to look through and some companies would notoriously use overblown cover art or even doctored images to try to lure people in, rather than making a game whose quality spoke for itself. Aside from being implemented poorly, Teared suffers in the end from being relatively simplistic and dull, and not even its budget price can make up for those faults.