Guardians of the Ashes Reviews

An okay ARPG type game. Unfortunately, it's not one I can recommend. I did complete 100% it, but it was quite a slog toward the end. The character artwork is decent, along with the graphics and music. Nothing special. In fact, the entire game kind of looks like a mobile game ported to PC. The combat became droll and uninteresting and very grind-y. The character progression is a mix of Souls-like leveling where you spend points to level a stat, and each point added to a stat counts as a level gained. As such, characters could grow to over level 100, but it doesn't mean much. Character skills, on the other hand, level up based on usage, with each successive level requiring more uses to level up. Each of the five characters has special abilities which are only usable outside of combat, and mainly to throw a switch or move around to break up the repetitiveness. It would've been nice to see the skills used for combat purposes as it would've made the fights more interesting. One of the main gripes is the control scheme. For an ARPG type game, it uses the WASD keys to move around and the mouse to point and attack. Usually these games allow using the mouse for movement as well as interaction. You can use a gamepad, at which point the game turns into using a twin stick scheme for movement and targeting. And since the game is played on an isometric playing field, movement feels clunky. Skills are mapped to the 1, 2, 3 number keys, which makes them a little awkward to press when moving around. The level design is alright, although going through areas with high walls adds to the frustration. Though walls fade away to allow visibility to the characters, they're still counted as surfaces that can be interacted with. So you could be clicking over an enemy, only to have your shots fly off the top of the screen because the game thinks you're clicking on the higher surface. The difficulty also takes a bit of a leap toward the latter half of the game. Enemies are able to quickly drain you of your health with a few hits with attacks taking a chunk of your health bar. It really necessitates grinding to get your characters' health and attacks up. Thankfully, all characters share the same health bar, so it's one less thing to level up individually for each character. There's also some translation/grammar issues with the dialogue, and in some cases, the incorrect character portrait and name is displayed. The story itself is pretty boring. The usual save-the-world stuff. Lastly, if you're thinking of getting this for the H content, don't bother. It's found only in the "Scenes" menu item and the main story/game doesn't have any such content. The game would work fine without it. The five playable characters have two scenes each which get unlocked through "bonding" which just involves using the character. Said scenes do have decent artwork and are voiced, but the quality of the dialog is what you'd expect from such a game. Overall, I don't recommend this game, but if you do want to play it, try getting it at a heavy discount.