SWORDS AND SOULS NEVERSEEN REVIEW FULL

That might be one thing if you have an exciting loot system, but right now Achilles does not. Rarely did any of my sidetracking bear any fruit, and when it did, it was just to add a new unremarkable weapon to my arsenal of swords, bigger swords, spears, and shields. Maybe it’s expecting too much of a modest game like Achilles, but this many years after games like The Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild stoked our urge to explore by filling their massive open worlds with points of interest with elaborate side quests or puzzle dungeons, I was disappointed by what I found.

SWORDS AND SOULS NEVERSEEN REVIEW FULL

Contemporary games with randomized dungeons are almost always a linear path from one room to the next, or at least have tools for finding your way through them – and I didn’t know how much I missed those until now.Īll of that aimlessness is a side effect of the fact that the countryside between dungeons is surprisingly large, full of pretty scenery and diverse locations like rugged mountains, dark temples, and rolling hills… but it's also devoid of anything worth walking off the beaten path to discover. This was a maddening and cruel penalty that made what should have been a simple restart take so much longer, and one that could be easily made palatable by a map or wayfinding system of any sort. The second one, the Temple of Cronus, changed its layout every time I died in it – but only slightly, with some sections being exactly how I left them, sandwiched between new sections that I'd never seen before. This confusion can go double for dungeons.

So until I memorized exactly where it is among a lot of samey-looking ruins and rocks, I spent more time searching for it than I did engaging with any of the crafting. As an example of the trouble this causes: when you first begin your adventure, you unlock a forge that’s supposed to be your early go-to location for upgrading and buying equipment… but you can’t teleport to it.

You can eventually fast-travel between shrines, but because there isn’t a proper world map either it’s impossible to know where they are in relation to each other. Doing so was more inconvenient than it needed to be because without a minimap, in conjunction with the great distance between these locations, it's incredibly easy to get lost on the way. From there, I did a bunch of running from dungeon to dungeon, gathering doodads for so-and-sos, all in pursuit of Hades’ big plan – that takes about five hours to hit the current finish line.

Swords and souls neverseen review