If a Nothing Burger was a Soulslike
I first caught wind of Asterigos: Curse of the Stars while watching an Iron Pineapple video while eating lunch. IP (as I'll abbreviate it) is a Soulsborne youtuber who has a long running series where he plays Souls-likes and Souls-like accessories that have flown under the radar, are in their demo phase, or look mildly interesting. A vast majority of these games end up as student projects, proof of concepts, or one man game jams that while present themselves as neat in theory, are at the end of the day generally not worth the time. It's not often during an IP video that I see a game being played and want to try it for myself, not because of him, but because the games are as I said usually lower in budget and/or scope. Asterigos was one of very few that sat with me enough to wishlist on Steam and eventually purchase. What I saw in the little gameplay exposition was a Souls-like that seemed fairly fleshed in its mechanics in a world that looked, full. What I ended up getting was true to that nature, however the magic of its intrigue faded almost as soon as you get into the game.
My review for Asterigos will not be that long because it really just plays like one of the games of all time, nothing that I would bug people to throw at the front of their backlog, but nothing I would rush to convince people to avoid. Combat is basic and uninteresting, with Hilda (the main character) capable of wielding two weapons off of four different button inputs. Interesting in theory but as a sword+shield user as my main weapon, I seldom ever found the need to use my secondary. Not only did it feel redundant, but the material and currency upkeep required to upgrade it was too high. I didn't want to grind out multiple weapons and upgrade them at the smithy, as I didn't feel like that would accentuate my combative capabilities enough. Dodgeroll and attacking is the backbone of quite literally every encounter in this game, parrying completely unnecessary, which in the end made me feel like the devs wanted to make a Souls game but didn't want to flavour the soup to turn the combat into anything unique.
The influences apparent as they are in just about every title within this subgenre, but outside of the setting and attempt at a story there was generally nothing new about this title. I'll give the devs credit for putting in a lot of time and effort into creating a story that had legs on its own and that followed the protagonist throughout the entire journey, but the unfortunate part is that they forgot to make it interesting. None of the characters are particularly memorable, their appearances being drab and milquetoast play a large part in this, and the voice acting was largely poor. For what is presumably a lower budget title this isn't surprising, however it does make the buy-in tougher. I recently played Lies of P within the last calendar year and that title from a mostly unknown team outperformed Asterigos in waves with their character design, VA work, environmental storytelling, and plot pacing. Though I had frustrations with Lies of P (mostly due to difficulty spikes,) it was a much better take on the genre in its variety and scope that Asterigos is.
To the mention of enemy difficulty, Asterigos wasn't hard per se, however I felt like every world enemy and boss past the initial sequence (even on max weapon upgrade and a highly leveled attack skill) became sponges. There's a point in fighting redundant enemies in games where I swing my sword, or whatever weapon I'm using, and say "okay I get it" as I swing for the nth time at their body where I realize that it's not going to get any better. That was Asterigos. You fight a very limited pool of enemies of varying degrees of hitpoints, and you use the exact same approach in doing so. Nothing changed from the first five hours of the game to the last five in the way I fought. While not the end-all indictment of a game, it's not a shining mark on a title that already doesn't have too many legs to stand on.
I can't recommend Asterigos to anybody unless they're looking for a resoundingly boring game that they can run through and test their dodge-roll reflexes.
I first caught wind of Asterigos: Curse of the Stars while watching an Iron Pineapple video while eating lunch. IP (as I'll abbreviate it) is a Soulsborne youtuber who has a long running series where he plays Souls-likes and Souls-like accessories that have flown under the radar, are in their demo phase, or look mildly interesting. A vast majority of these games end up as student projects, proof of concepts, or one man game jams that while present themselves as neat in theory, are at the end of the day generally not worth the time. It's not often during an IP video that I see a game being played and want to try it for myself, not because of him, but because the games are as I said usually lower in budget and/or scope. Asterigos was one of very few that sat with me enough to wishlist on Steam and eventually purchase. What I saw in the little gameplay exposition was a Souls-like that seemed fairly fleshed in its mechanics in a world that looked, full. What I ended up getting was true to that nature, however the magic of its intrigue faded almost as soon as you get into the game.
My review for Asterigos will not be that long because it really just plays like one of the games of all time, nothing that I would bug people to throw at the front of their backlog, but nothing I would rush to convince people to avoid. Combat is basic and uninteresting, with Hilda (the main character) capable of wielding two weapons off of four different button inputs. Interesting in theory but as a sword+shield user as my main weapon, I seldom ever found the need to use my secondary. Not only did it feel redundant, but the material and currency upkeep required to upgrade it was too high. I didn't want to grind out multiple weapons and upgrade them at the smithy, as I didn't feel like that would accentuate my combative capabilities enough. Dodgeroll and attacking is the backbone of quite literally every encounter in this game, parrying completely unnecessary, which in the end made me feel like the devs wanted to make a Souls game but didn't want to flavour the soup to turn the combat into anything unique.
The influences apparent as they are in just about every title within this subgenre, but outside of the setting and attempt at a story there was generally nothing new about this title. I'll give the devs credit for putting in a lot of time and effort into creating a story that had legs on its own and that followed the protagonist throughout the entire journey, but the unfortunate part is that they forgot to make it interesting. None of the characters are particularly memorable, their appearances being drab and milquetoast play a large part in this, and the voice acting was largely poor. For what is presumably a lower budget title this isn't surprising, however it does make the buy-in tougher. I recently played Lies of P within the last calendar year and that title from a mostly unknown team outperformed Asterigos in waves with their character design, VA work, environmental storytelling, and plot pacing. Though I had frustrations with Lies of P (mostly due to difficulty spikes,) it was a much better take on the genre in its variety and scope that Asterigos is.
To the mention of enemy difficulty, Asterigos wasn't hard per se, however I felt like every world enemy and boss past the initial sequence (even on max weapon upgrade and a highly leveled attack skill) became sponges. There's a point in fighting redundant enemies in games where I swing my sword, or whatever weapon I'm using, and say "okay I get it" as I swing for the nth time at their body where I realize that it's not going to get any better. That was Asterigos. You fight a very limited pool of enemies of varying degrees of hitpoints, and you use the exact same approach in doing so. Nothing changed from the first five hours of the game to the last five in the way I fought. While not the end-all indictment of a game, it's not a shining mark on a title that already doesn't have too many legs to stand on.
I can't recommend Asterigos to anybody unless they're looking for a resoundingly boring game that they can run through and test their dodge-roll reflexes.