Eternal Strands, developed by Yellow Brick Games, wears its copious influences on its sleeve. An action RPG with clear inspirations from just about everything from Shadow of The Colossus to Monster Hunter to Breath of The Wild, Eternal Strands is a hodgepodge of ideas that entertains as often as frustrates.
Set in a world where magic users are blamed for a great calamity, you take on the role of Brynn, a young weaver who’s joined a new Weaverband intent on finding a way into the legendary Dynevron, the city from which the catastrophe erupted. Bathed in tendrils – magic that is harmful to any that touch it – Brynn and her band are looking for the cause of the catastrophe and, possibly, a way to get rid of the tendrils and remove the stigma that magic users have been living under since. But finding the way in is only a small part of the problem. What will they find once they’re inside?
Instead of throwing you into an open-world RPG, Eternal Strands tells its story across a series of large, open areas, some of which are interlinked. You have a base camp where you can get to know the rest of your Weaverband in what is some of the game’s best, character-driven interactions that explore each character’s personality and backstory, while also giving you a deeper dive into the world lore.
There are some light elements of role-play here as you can choose some of your responses, but the game is less interested in letting you make Brynn your own as it is in giving you a cast of characters to care about. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s some really good voice acting powering those performances.
A lot of these interactions tie into both the main story and the sidequests, making it always worth your while to take the time out to talk to them. Within your camp, you can upgrade each character’s workstations, for want of a better term, which helps you out in the field, from unlocking new powers to upgrading and crafting higher weapon tiers.
You’ll also pick up most of your quests here, be they main side or monster hunts. While you can complete multiple objectives per area, the game’s quest design feels like sending you out to sortie, especially since you can only change equipment at base camp and have to return each time to continue the story or complete an objective. There’s no traditional day/night cycle but you can explore the areas during the day or the night.
With magic so heavily infesting the land, an element of randomisation is added to the areas with which monsters are currently in it to the extreme weather systems at play. An area that was just sunny can be filled with tendrils at night, or completely frozen over. In theory, this should let you plan out your expeditions, but you can just sleep your way to the right environmental and monster conditions for you.
What doesn’t change are the game’s base monsters per area and the resources you can harvest. And harvesting resources is a massive part of the game as it plays a big role in upgrading your camp and all of your equipment. There’s no levelling here for Brynn and her stats never change. Instead, it’s her equipment stats that matter, which are determined by how you craft and upgrade said equipment.
All in all, there are probably far too many crafting materials here, with each piece of equipment requiring four items from different categories to craft. And each piece of material affects your equipment’s stats differently. Materials are ranged in rarity as well, with the titans you hunt given the best crafting items so if you use lower-tier items, you’ll have weaker gear.
Luckily, you can recraft items with higher-tiered resources, giving you a bit of give and take between starting off with weak gear, levelling it up and then completely recrafting it when you’ve picked up some rarer stuff.
One of Eternal Strands great joys is its exploration. It’s a lot of fun exploring the large levels and finding the few secrets and recipes strewn around. A lot of that comes down to the games visuals and overall polish which is quite stunning.
The stylised visual design may not be new, but it is certainly gorgeous here with a wonderful use of colour in the environment design and many of the game’s particle and visual effects. From the shimmering look of the magic fog rolling over everything to the changing colours on Brynn’s weave as she swops between abilities to the high quality mesh design. One thing I can say for certain is that Eternal Strands is a perfect working showcase for Unreal Engine 5’s nanite mesh system.
You can’t talk about a lot of Eternal Strands various bits and bobs without talking about the physics system driving it all. To say that physics plays a huge role in Eternal Strands is an understatement as it powers just about everything, especially the game’s various magical abilities and the movement system. And that’s because those abilities play just as large a part in exploration as they do in fighting.
As with a lot of games now, Brynn has a stamina bar for all of her actions be that climbing or swinging a sword. She can block attacks, parry and counterattack and roll away from combat. But her major arsenal is in the magical abilities she uses, powered by “Strands”. Brynn, and most of the enemies, have access to fire, ice and kinetic abilities, all of which are physics-powered and can produce interesting results both in and out of combat.
Ice is useful for freezing enemies in blocks of ice so you can get in much-needed hits. It can also be used to put out fires and build bridges between platforms and gaps.
Fire is as fire does, setting both enemies and the environment on fire. Kinetics lets you throw objects at enemies or suck them into an area to create an explosion. Out of combat, you can use that same explosion to rocket jump Brynn across gaps.
These abilities don’t just affect enemies or the environment in a damage ratio but also in what resources they drop. Set a wolf on fire for instance and it will drop a higher quality, tempered version of its base drop. Set rocks on fire and you can change the material they break down into.
And then you have the Eternal Strands Monster Hunter/Shadow of The Colossus inspiration: the giants you have to fight for better materials and strands to either unlock a new ability or level up existing ones. They’re beautifully designed and animated and play out a little bit like a puzzle in first meeting them as you have to figure out where their weak spots are and how to break off parts of their armour or scales.
This though, is where a lot of Eternal Strands issues rear their heads. First up is the combat system which, while fast, lacks a lot of precision. Eternal Strands struggles to swap between enemies a fair amount of the time and ask you to juggle multiple enemies with a system that doesn’t feel as tuned for that as it should. It doesn’t help either that the physics systems get in the way as much as it helps here.
From getting knocked for yards to either climbing surfaces when you’re trying to run away or just not climbing them at all when you want to. With the Titans, it’s even more frustrating as you’re liable to get stuck under a wing or a piece of armour just as much as you are making a successful jump from one body part to another.
The Telekinetic throw, which you can use on enemies as well as objects, became my fall-back move for everything by kiting enemies to a cliff and then just chucking them off because it was easier to do that than struggle with fighting them. As did throwing things at the Titans instead of climbing them unless I absolutely had to. Even here the control system is finicky which makes precision a bit of a chore. I can see what the developers were going for, but a lot of the time, especially when concerned with how Brynn moves, it just feels off and heightens the sense of unrealism.
Another of the game’s issues stems from repetition and forced grinding that feels like padding, which also leaks back into combat. You’ll find yourself trekking through the same areas at least half a dozen times to fetch this or kill that, either for the quests or just to upgrade your equipment. At first, it’s to make low-level equipment and then later to reforge that equipment and then level up that version to deal with the bullet sponge enemies. Couple that with waiting for the right time to sortie or fight a titan and you have a screeching halt on story progression.
Even fighting the Titans isn’t adverse to repetition. Not just because you’ll use the same techniques over and over or fight the same ones over and over, but because even using those becomes repetitive. Because you can’t upgrade Brynn’s base stats, your stamina will only take you so far, putting you into a circle of climb, break or damage a body part, drop off and repeat until dead.
There’s also a fair amount of frustrating enemy placement as well, particularly with regards to firebomb-lobbing enemies that never seem to miss.
A lot of my frustration with Eternal Strands comes down to the combat system, the physics interfering more than helping and the high level of repetition and resource grinding that could have benefitted from some streamlining.
That said, it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying Yellow Brick Game’s debut title which is visually beautiful with wonderfully designed locations and a well-written story and cast of characters. That it is – those few issues aside – one of the more polished games we’ve seen released in the last couple of years in terms of visuals and performance, is a sign of how developers ought to be releasing their games.
Eternal Strands – Launch Trailer
Read more awesome reviews >>here<<.
The code was provided by the distributor.
You must be logged in to post a comment.