Developed by Acme Gamestudio and inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, Asterigos: Curse of The Stars is an action-adventure RPG set in the cursed and mysterious city of Aphes.
Taking on the role of Hilda, a young warrior from the Northwind Legion, it’s your job to investigate the city of Aphes looking for your father, who disappeared during a mission to that cursed city. What has happened to your fellow warriors, and to the city of Aphes itself, will take you on an epic journey to save your father and, just possibly, break the curse on the city while fighting mythological beasties galore.
A kingdom worth saving
It would be easy to say that the meat of Asterigos is its narrative, but while the story may be excellent, convoluted and lengthy, the game’s exploration and combat elements are just as strong.
The game’s story is told through conversations with the few people of Aphes who haven’t succumbed to madness or become monstrosities. There’s plenty of dialogue for you to read through on your journey, which paints the various characters, factions and locations for you to explore. When you’re not listening to others, environmental storytelling will have you overhearing conversations, reading documents and viewing scenes from the past.
Along with the main narrative and missions you choose in the underground shelter the rebels occupy, the world is full of sidequests for you to do, many of which will have you running across districts to complete. Most of them are also worth doing simply for a peek into the citizens’ lives.
Hilda can wield two weapons at a time and flow between them with her combos. This gives you some leeway for a character build as you can mix and match the weapons in any order. Killing enemies fill up your XP bar which then levels you up and gives you points to sink into your stats and abilities. So you can prioritise more health over stamina for instance. The abilities are where it gets interesting. Each weapon has an ability tree along with base abilities for Hilda overall. Outside of certain passive ones, you do have to pay attention as there are caveats to most of them. You could, for instance, change your dodge roll into a dash at the expense of your invulnerability timing. Mixing and matching are what it’s all about. I personally found magic to be OP, which made keeping the staff as my secondary weapon a must.
Killing enemies also rewards you with Starite and, coupled with the chests across the world that give you crafting items, can be used to upgrade Hilda’s weapons, and magical trinkets and craft new ones.
Dark. . .Souls?
There is some light, and I do mean light, Souls-like elements to Asterigos. There are beacons placed across the world that you can respawn at if you die, or rest at to regain health. Doing so also respawns defeated, enemies. Death, thankfully, doesn’t cost you anything or drops your collected Starite at your last location, which is a blessing.
Asterigos also eschews Souls-like conventions by giving you three difficulty settings when you start the game. The game is, also, on the incredibly easy side. Your stamina usage is very generous and refills quickly and, outside of respawning enemies and bosses with far too long health bars, the game only seems to incorporate these elements because they’re expected. Healing potions are in plentiful supply and unless you’re playing truly terribly, more than likely will find yourself barely touching, them as I did. The developers, it seems, have instead created a game that anyone of any skill level can enjoy and finish, rather than one which breaks controllers. Personally, I’m all for it.
Aphes is a large city, broken up into different districts. Scattered across the world are treasure chests to find and pathways that open up shortcuts within each district, along with the passageways between districts. The developers have gone for an imposing sense of scale with the environments and architecture which is only let down by, outside of the monsters, how sparse the environment is. If the idea was to add to the sense of a city well on its way to becoming a ghost town, then the developers have succeeded.
Visually, the game is pretty in a stylised manner. The visual design that the developers have settled on wouldn’t look out of place in an animated Disney movie. Hilda herself is wonderfully modelled and animated with some fantastic details in her clothes. Enemies look and move great as well but the environments are generally sparsely furnished.
PS4 Vs. PS5? Fight!
This leads us to the differences between the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game.
There are no visual options between versions. The PS5 version has the advantage of a high-speed SSD for faster load times and is running at a higher resolution than the PS4 version of the game. The lighting also looks slightly better along with a smoother frame rate. There are more NPCs in the shelter than in the PS4 version and there’s also more world detail present in the form of props in the environment.
The PS4 version does have a lower resolution and there’s definitely a lower frame rate at work here, along with some slowdown in certain instances. And, of course, there’s the lower NPC and prop density. However, these are actually negligible differences between the two versions of the game as they don’t affect the quality and fun of the gameplay at all. Which version you play really doesn’t matter.
There are some small niggles to Asterigos though. The game doesn’t have a map, which can make finding where you need to go after a couple of hours troublesome. Quest tracking is also troublesome. Hilda enters everything in a journal, but it doesn’t track or label quests. And there are no quest markers either which means that you have to keep track of everything yourself while making notes of which door you have to return to when it’s time to complete a quest. Needless to say, if you’ve picked up a request for a uniform from Phalan Academy five hours into the game and only pick said uniform up at hour twelve, good luck finding said quest givers door again, assuming you even remember that you have that quest.
Outside of this small niggle, Asterigos: Curse of The Stars has become one of my favourite games of this year. With a great story, fun combat and difficulty that didn’t have me gritting my teeth, Asterigos kept me hooked from the beginning and only got better as it went along. It may feel like a game from the PS3/360 era of design at times, but it manages to be something that many AAA titles have forgotten to be: enjoyable and engaging. Do yourself a favour and get this now!
Developer: Acme Gamestudio
Publisher: tinyBuild
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows
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