You get 1-2 Attribute Points when you level up to bump one of three attributes: Precision which increases your damage, Constitution which increases your max HP, and Arcane which increases your Skill Damage and AP recovery rate. You only use Stardust for buying items or upgrading/crafting gear (more on this soon), with XP gained simply by beating your enemies. Instead of dying and leaving behind your Stardust (Asterigos’ Soul equivalent) to collect, you just lose 10% of whatever you had when you died. The concept of the “corpse run” simply doesn’t exist in Asterigos. There’s also new game plus, which carries over your level and some equipment/items while increasing the difficulty to match. It’s by no means a cakewalk, especially towards the latter half, but I did find it more forgiving than other Souls-likes, so if you want that harder difficulty, you’re best picking Challenge. I played through Asterigos on Adventure, and it was never too hard. You can choose one of three options: Story, for those looking for an easy time Adventure, this game’s default and Challenge, which is described as for the player who “embraces breaking self-limits or conquering what others could not overcome”. Thankfully, it does, and it’s within its gameplay that it starts to differ from the Souls-like formula and sets it apart in a sea of similar titles.įirstly, difficulty options. So Asterigos has a great world to explore, but none of that would matter if its gameplay didn’t stack up. The soundtrack is overall pretty great, with some areas having great use of diegetic sound as you head for a boss. It’s also got a great piece of music associated with it. The Shelter is a great hub area that expands with new features, functions, and characters as you progress through Asterigos’ story. It’s where you go to get your main quests, upgrade your equipment, buy items, and talk with the members of The Adherents. It’s outstanding, and I’d often find myself taken aback by how well it connected to the rest of the area.Īll these areas expand outwards from Asterigos’ central hub: The Shelter. It’s also got some of the best level shortcuts I’ve seen outside of FromSoft’s own. It’s packed with charm, and it’s gorgeously animated, too.Īsterigos is loaded with attention to detail in this regard be it character models, environments or its general level design, it all comes together to make Aphes feel like a real place that’s been falling apart for a millennium. Visually it shares a lot in common with Immortals: Fenix Rising or Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Each of these areas is filled with gorgeous architecture and fantastic art design. Like its inspiration, Aphes is one big map of several interconnected areas. It’s not just in its written content, either: the city is meticulously detailed and has genuinely outstanding design. It’s filled with compelling and surprising layered characters, each with their own motivations, histories and side quests to flesh out not just themselves but the world of Asterigos.Īphes is a city full of history, and there’s a ton of worldbuilding throughout conversations and many (over 250) richly detailed documents littered around the place. It’s also where it differs from the Souls game it clearly takes influence from: it’s a story-heavy game, and Asterigos kept me engaged through its entirety. While it starts as a fairly standard setup, Asterigos has deeper themes underneath it throughout its 30-hour runtime that tackle subjects like class/caste systems, family VS duty, survivor’s guilt, xenophobia and political/religious conflicts. Hilda quickly meets with a group called The Adherents, and in exchange for helping them save the city, they’ll help Hilda find her father. The Aphesians have been unable to age the entire time and have lived for hundreds of years under martial law. Upon entering, she finds that the city has been struck with the titular curse for the last thousand years. Set in the Greco-Roman-inspired city of Aphes, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars sees the player controlling Hilda, a young warrior following after her father and his band of men that entered the city but never returned. It’s less Souls-like and more Souls-lite. It’s also become so prevalent that I’ve honestly gotten burnt out by them, especially when so few stand up to the quality of FromSoftware’s titles.Įnter Asterigos: Curse of the Stars, an indie game that lifts the best elements from the Soulsborne series while sprinkling in differing mechanics to feel completely fresh. It spawned an entirely new genre in the “Souls-Like” and inspired a slew of games that try to capture the same feeling those games evoke. It’s no secret that FromSoftware’s Souls series has had a massive effect on modern action RPGs. Is Acme Gamestudio's debut title a star player, or does it crash and burn? The Finger Guns review:
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