Achilles: Legends Untold Early Access Review

From then on I’ve been running from dungeon to dungeon a few times, collecting doodads for so and so, all in pursuit of Hades’ grand plan – which takes about five hours to reach the current finish line. This was more of a hassle than necessary as without a mini-map, combined with the great distance between these locations, it’s incredibly easy to get lost. You can eventually fast travel between shrines, but since there’s also no proper world map, it’s impossible to know where they are in relation to each other. An example of the problems this causes: When you first start your adventure, you unlock a Forge, which should be your early go-to place for upgrading and buying gear… but you can’t teleport to it. So until I could remember exactly where it was among many similar looking ruins and rocks, I spent more time looking for it than crafting it.

This confusion can double for dungeons. The second, Temple of Cronus, changed its layout every time I died in it – but only slightly, with some sections being exactly as I left them, sandwiched between new sections I’d never seen before. This was an annoying and cruel punishment, causing what should have been a simple reboot to take so much longer, and one that could easily be palatable through a map or pathfinding system of any kind. Contemporary games with random dungeons are almost always a linear path from one room to the next, or at least have tools to navigate them – and I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed those until now.

All of this aimlessness is a side effect of the fact that the landscape between dungeons is surprisingly vast, full of beautiful landscapes and diverse locations like rugged mountains, dark temples, and rolling hills… but there’s also nothing worth exploring off the beaten path to go discover. Perhaps expecting too much from a humble game like Achilles, but many years after games like The Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild sparked our urge to explore by filling their vast open worlds with interesting side quests or puzzle dungeons. I was disappointed with what I found. Rarely did my distractions bear any fruit, and when they did, it was only to add a new stealthy weapon to my arsenal of swords, larger swords, spears, and shields. That might be one thing when you have an exciting loot system, but right now Achilles doesn’t have that. That being said, a lot of the items you find are different types of health potions or status heals, most of which I’ve never bothered with because (yet) things like poisoning are never presented as a real threat to you.

Top 10 Soullikes

Achilles just waves a blade in the air and then enemies around him fall over.

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Meanwhile, Achilles’ tools for battle aren’t much special. Light and Heavy Attacks can be chained into combos, the length of which is limited by the amount of Stamina you have. They lack a bit of punch though – at times it feels like Achilles is just swinging around in the air with a blade and then enemies around him fall over. I wish a solid punch would hit an opponent that felt meatier more often. There’s a template for that in Legends Untold: adding a run or dash converts basic attacks into more stylish and powerful moves, including the fancy jumping sword Brad Pitt made famous in Troy in 2004. However, it can be difficult to reliably hit some of these unique attacks as it seems like enemy hitboxes are more of a suggestion than a rule.

Countless screens of Achilles Legends

As you would expect from a game in the mold of Diablo, as you level up you can unlock special abilities through a constellation-shaped skill tree. An item lets you throw your shield early, but spending fate (i.e.: souls) gives you things like parries and a weird “stealth” drain attack that allows you to drain life force from unsuspecting enemies from afar, in Style of Legacy of Cain. These have the potential to mix up the combat, but the progression could use an overhaul because right now, unlocking the cool stuff requires a pretty serious investment in this resource, bypassing the grid of points on the various star maps, with lots of upgrades from uninteresting ones Passive skills necessary to progress to the next major active skill. So you can expect to spend a lot of time with what you have before you get the chance to try something new.

In the meantime, there are some disposable items you can pick up and use to spice up your offensive game plan. One of my favorites was the explosive Greek Flame – basically a grenade that deals a lot of damage to enemies in an area while also setting them on fire. I also got a ton of mileage out of Groggus Darts, which slow down enemies and give you wider attack windows. If Achilles had taken these to archery, Paris would have had a much harder time getting that lucky shot.

Speaking of luck, it’s going to take you a lot to navigate Legends Untold’s bugs, which pose a bigger problem than most Early Access games I’ve played. Almost everything about this game is currently janky in some form. Enemy AI is error prone; invisible walls sometimes prevent you from returning to areas you were just in; The lock-on system often ignores enemies within stab range in favor of those off-screen. Cutscene audio cutouts; and (you guessed it) more. Again, this is early access, but the price of playing Achilles isn’t all cash, it’s sometimes a Sisyphean test of your patience. And in its current state, that’s a price I wouldn’t recommend.