Legends of Aethereus – Review (PC)

Legends of Aethereus – Review (PC)

Legends of Aethereus has good intentions but is ultimately an excellent reason to be careful with your Kickstarter money.

First impressions of ThreeGates Kickstarted action RPG, Legends of Aethereus, are not exactly glowing. You create your singularly-hideous character from a whopping two character classes – the trigger-happy Inventor or the standard heavily-armoured melee-based Officer, although apparently a third class is going to be added later – and begin your journey. Your newly-spawned character sits on an airship while a woman with a voice like a valley girl on ketamine tells you how good you are at stabbing things, and then you’re unceremoniously dumped in the medieval-fantasy hub city of Nexus. Note how I didn’t say ‘the first city’ or anything of the like; you’ll spend the entire length of the game coming and going into this tiny, miserable little port town with brainless and static NPCs dotted around its alleys.

Look how pretty he is.
Look how pretty he is.

Note also how I didn’t reference any story elements. As far as I can gather, you were driven from your town and conscripted into the town guard, and are sent on various missions for the betterment of the land. Or something. To be frank, I genuinely don’t know. The introductory cutscene was so poorly acted that I spent the duration laughing instead of paying attention to anything, and the way any story elements are delivered to you is so impenetrably dull – with thick blocks of text filled with jargon you are expected to understand apropos of nothing, alongside stereotypical location and enemy names that won’t mean anything to you – you’ll be lucky if you come away remembering why you’re supposed to be doing anything.

A typical session in Legends of Aethereus begins with you walking around the Nexus, realising it’s still just as boring as the last time you were there, and heading off to the dock to embark upon a mission provided to you by NPCs around town. There’s no travel time, save the awfully lengthy loading times: you’re simply dropped into an instanced environment. Typically a forest. In fact, it seems to always be a forest, or a slightly jungle-esque forest, or a slightly swampy forest. Variety and exploration are almost completely absent, as you follow quest markers into a lazily-designed labyrinth of trees and rocks, finish your mission by pulling a lever or killing some random bloke you don’t know anything about, and leave with little fanfare and a long, long loading screen.

You are absolutely just following quest markers, by the way. There’s nothing to find off the beaten track, no secret treasures or easter eggs, no stunning vistas or side-objectives. At the start of your mission you’re provided with a shopping list of objectives and all you do is trudge in the rough direction of your next objective, perform whatever it is the game tells you to perform, and set off to find the next one.

The map is atrocious. You may as well not use it.
The map is atrocious. You may as well not use it.

Let me just interrupt myself with a little rant on game design quickly. The recent trend amongst RPG developers – and for good reason – is to make their game feel as little like an actual winnable game as possible, and make it feel like a world that you’re exploring, or a journey that you’re undertaking. By removing any semblance of natural travel and making quests feel like a mechanical ticking of boxes, Aethereus leaves you constantly aware of the cogs behind the curtain. You are in no position to let the world immerse you and as such you have no link to the environments, no fear of the enemies, and no relation to any of the characters throughout the game.

But perhaps I’m being cynical. This isn’t exactly Baldur’s Gate. To their credit, ThreeGates never said they were looking to make an atmospheric RPG experience. What they aimed for was a deep co-op RPG experience with a wealth of customisation options, with a meaty, physics-based combat system, made on a Kickstarted indie budget.

They only achieved one of these things to any real degree of success.

Let’s get to the combat. Melee combat can occasionally feel nice and weighty, and is actually relatively satisfying at times, but veers off the rails at all of the most important turns. The left mouse button is your basic strike; the right mouse button blocks, parries or attacks, depending on whether you’re using a shield, a two-handed weapon, or a weapon in each hand; and there’s also a powerful charge attack and a dashing lunge. It’s a decent basic foundation for a combat system, especially when coupled with the dodge mechanic mapped to the space bar, but it never grows and each attack on it’s own feels sticky and choppy, with the most basic of attacks often sending you slashing far past your target. There’s not even any way to chain attacks together, leaving you slashing with the same one-off animations over and over again. Ranged weapons add a little variety but the story is much the same there; shooting with a crossbow, a rifle, or even two pistols feels decent for a little while but it doesn’t take long for the same issue to settle in. There’s no variety or challenge outside of statistical advantages, as dumb enemies either stand still and throw shit at you or run at you head on and try to slap you about.

That's a worm enemy, apparently. It makes the same noise over and over.
That’s a worm enemy, apparently. It makes the same noise over and over.

The biggest issue that plagues both melee and ranged combat cripples the greatest strength of the battles. Legends of Aethereus obviously aims to have a meaty and chunky feel to the combat, which is good, but the difference between Aethereus and a game that really achieves that powerful sense of weight in combat like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is the quality of the animations. In Chivalry, your attacks are beefy and have serious impact to them, but the animations flow smoothly into one another without sacrificing the sense of weight they impart. Aethereus has a serious problem in that each animation restricts all other actions and needs to completely finish before you can launch into the next one with no chaining of moves or attacks that ultimately makes the whole thing feel slow, clunky and stuttering — instead of powerful, as was the intent. A little more effort in the often overlooked department of animations would have possibly made the combat the real stand-out feature of the game.

Instead, you have the aforementioned clunky basic attacks and a selection of unique skills that are in urgent need of some balancing work. As an Inventor, I chose to equip my character with a sword and shield and a pair of pistols, but I honestly rarely found myself using my actual weapons after I levelled up a few times and unlocked the ability to fire a trio of rockets at my targets. Your class abilities rely on a combination of magic and Aether pebbles, essentially magical ammo that’s aligned to each of the different elements. You can unlock and cast different variations of every spell available but the differences between using fire rockets, earth rockets, light rockets, and so on and so forth, is negligible at best. All of my various flavours of explosives were so ludicrously powerful that they could handily tear through groups of regular foes with one shot, and were easily capable of stun-locking stronger enemies. The pebbles required to cast these spells were available in shops after every mission and I rarely ran out of ‘concentration’ (Aethereus’ original and imaginative version of mana) before I’d annihilated everyone between me and my next boring fucking quest marker. Between dull and clunky but relatively balanced weapon-based combat and embracing my inner pyromaniac and taking all of the challenge out of the game, the entire meat of the game is raw on the inside, as half-cooked as every other ingredient – perhaps barring one.

The crafting system is actually good. Madness, I know. I was seconds away from recommending to Voletic’s editorial team that they just upload a picture of a puddle of cold sick as a representation of my feelings for this game but I have an exceptionally squishy soft-spot for crafting systems in RPGs, and Legends of Aethereus actually has a great one. Traditional loot in the form of equipment is completely absent which would normally be a huge drawback, seeing as finding loot is one of the prime attractions for action-RPGs. Instead, you find fabrics, minerals, and other materials. It’s not necessarily as exciting as finding a Magical Sword of the Jack Russell Terrier or something, but it’s satisfying enough, because you know you’re going to get to make something cool out of them. These materials can be used to craft different handles and blades (or crossbows or whatever if you’re a pansy) for your weapons using the material of your choice, lending a surprisingly decent amount of customisation to your tools of destruction. If you lack the materials necessary you get an exceptionally handy option to buy the materials you’re missing at a premium if you just need one bit of… I don’t know, dog fur or something, and if you can’t afford your custom brassiere just yet, you can bookmark it for easy access later. Once the whole process is finished you can even take a gamble and risk losing the finished piece and half of the materials required to make it for the chance of increasing its power. It’s a simple system with some really clever original touches that makes me genuinely a little bit sad that it’s so bloody boring to use your pretty little creations in battle. It’s not enough to make the rest of the game feel worthwhile, but ThreeGates do deserve credit for its implementation.

My shiny custom weaponry didn't make the game fun.
My shiny custom weaponry didn’t make the game fun.

Legends of Aethereus just smacks of an unfinished game, and frankly, I have my suspicions that it is, in fact, unfinished. Despite the fact that you can buy this repetitive mess of nigh-identical missions for the fucking absurd price of £22.99 on Steam, the promised Astrographer class – either a serious victim of shit cliche-fantasy class naming or they’ve actually figured out a way to make someone who takes pictures of space into a fearsome warrior – is not yet in the game. There are also a fair few irritating bugs, and I found my frame rate dropping hard at certain times for very little reason, leading me to believe they’ve got a long way to go in terms of optimisation.

ThreeGates have also promised substantial patches and free DLC, which begs the question – what the hell is the difference between this and a beta, apart from the fact that when you participate in a beta you’re not conned into buying it without being told that the game isn’t finished? Still, if they want to release it as a commercial product, it will be reviewed as a commercial product. By all means, check it out, look at the combat and see if you’re the kind of person who can stomach it for long enough to take satisfaction from the crafting system, but for your own sake, take a serious look at that price tag before you take the plunge.

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Pros:

  • It’s at least functional.
  • The crafting system is genuinely excellent.

Cons:

  • Dull environments, washed-out visuals and atrocious voice acting.
  • Clunky and unbalanced combat that makes up most of the game
  • No sense of attachment or importance to the quests, environments, or characters.
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