Asterigos: Curse of the Stars PC Review

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is the first game by Acme Gamestudio, and it is a hack-n-slash, open-world RPG with some mild soulslike influence thrown in. The game is a good first attempt, but it has various issues that make it just a little too weak overall.

Before we get to any of that though, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is an action RPG with a good set of weapons to choose from right from the beginning. On the one hand, this is great because it means that there is a good sense of diversity in the combat, but it also leads to the first real issue of the game. This is best explained through an example.

 

Most games, including RPGs, typically start you off with one or two weapons because they want you to grow accustomed to them. You then gain new weapons as you play, and those weapons allow for more variety as time goes on. The point is to get you to start in the shallow end of the pool and make your way to the deep end. It’s a very common tactic in most games to ease the players into things. Well, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars doesn’t do that.

In this game, you start with six weapons and are expected to try them all out within the first thirty or so minutes to see which you want to focus on because you’re only going to want to focus on two at a time once you get into the game properly. You see, unlike an arcade shooter like Doom, you don’t get to easily swap between these weapons on a weapon wheel or through hotkeys. Instead, you can only equip two at a time, and you also upgrade them separately. So, you might as well only focus on two weapons, but which weapons you focus on could be a personal error.

For instance, a weirder weapon like the gauntlets may not be something you immediately use because you’re not sure how to use them, but rather than introduce them to you slowly; they’re all thrown at you at once. This likely means that you will stick to the ones you’re most used to using in other games, like the sword and shield or the daggers.

 

This is unfortunate because Asterigos: Curse of the Stars has a good combat system overall. Each weapon plays very differently, and they all have their uses. You do at least get to equip two at once, so you can alternate between two, but with a focus on two, you’ll probably ignore the other four. And you might as well ignore them too, because the weapon upgrades are applied to individual weapons, and the weapon skills, which is a separate upgrade system, are learned independently of other weapons too. So, you may as well focus your attention.

However, there are at least character upgrades that allow for increased damage, health or dexterity across all weapon types. And you’ll need them too because Asterigos: Curse of the Stars doesn’t know what exactly it wants to be.

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is an action RPG, but it also dabbles in soulslike gameplay. You find checkpoints in the game that replenish your health while bringing back all the enemies, but these checkpoints are also not the only means of saving, seeing as you can also manually save. Now, to anyone familiar with soulslike games, this isn’t how it’s generally done. A checkpoint system and a manual save system? Why would you ever use the checkpoint system then?

 

Well, whenever you die, you go back to the checkpoint. However, you may ask: “well, what about just reloading the save instead?” That doesn’t really work either though, because you still go back to the last checkpoint you visited when you reload a save, but because you saved manually, the enemies do not respawn. So, manually saving forces you to run through an area with no enemies, while checkpoint saving forces you to run through the same area with enemies.

This game doesn’t really know what it wants to do. Is it a checkpoint or a manual save game? To further complicate matters, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is an exploration-heavy game. You can find various items and potions as you play. This is great. However, whenever you use a potion, it doesn’t replenish at the checkpoint. So, if you use the checkpoint system when, for instance, fighting against a boss that kills you several times, you’ve just wasted potions. The potions also don’t reappear in the environment, so using the checkpoint system is pointless and makes the game harder.

If the developers had either committed to manual saves or checkpoint saves, it would have worked far better. However, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is also soulslike in its combat. The exploration allows for the discovery of shortcuts you typically find in soulslike games. Still, the combat has the same kind of dodge-oriented flow where enemies hit hard, potions take a while to consume, and every enemy has telegraphed attacks.

However, the big difference in terms of combat is that Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is not as subtle with its enemy telegraphing as many soulslike games. The enemies are very cartoonish in design, and they flounder around very dramatically. So, enemies are easy to read. You’re probably not going to die as often as you may in a soulslike, and so the game has soulslike gameplay with much of the difficulty stripped out of it.

In addition, bosses are highly telegraphed, and you need to learn their movements to win. So, you may end up dying a few times. Which would be fine, but bosses also have unskippable cutscenes. And those are always unforgivable.

But what about the story behind it all? Well, it’s fine. Asterigos: Curse of the Stars has an Ancient Greek/Rome influence, and you even fight things like minotaurs and harpies. The city is also very Roman in its presentation with Roman-inspired architecture, but with a cartoonish flair to it. The cartoon-y style also makes all the enemies and characters look somewhat generic, and that is not helped by the narrative presentation.

 

The narrative is presented through rather bad voice acting, but the voice acting would be forgivable if the developers hadn’t, for some inexplicable reason, decided to highly animate characters while they speak. The protagonist flails her arms around while she speaks like a community theatre actor who doesn’t quite have the chops to become a pro. It’s as if the developers don’t know how real people use their arms when they speak, and once you notice this, it’s incredibly distracting. Not to mention the protagonist’s inner monologue-style voiceover, which is not great either.

It’s also interesting that Asterigos: Curse of the Stars sometimes doesn’t have a voiceover. Many games do this, especially JRPGs, and have limited voice acting at key moments or just entirely remove voice acting and make you read the dialogue. But this game seemingly stops the voice acting randomly in the middle of a conversation that was voiced, and then the ending will be voiced again. It’s a jarring experience.

 

Lastly, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is not the most stable game. It’s generally fine, but on occasion, the game stutters to the point where it becomes unplayable, and this happened several times while playing it. During those moments, you just need to run away from enemies because you will not be able to fight them when the frame rate drops to single digits, but luckily, it does stabilize soon enough.

So, should you play Asterigos: Curse of the Stars? It’s a solid action RPG with a good set of upgrades and combat capabilities that are rather generic, but it should keep you entertained for some time.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed