Asguaard Reviews

Buy ONLY if cheap. It's not the best Aldorlea game it's 2nd in line to many, but has enough charm to continue on - and yes there's been better free games at times. PROS: main character art is nice, story line is ok mood music is sufficient ok - not much excitement but has a little charm to follow. Supposedly a 100hr game (every aldorlea i've played so far isn't near that, but we'll see). This aldorlea has "Talk" meaning if you forget where you are the game will remind you what to do next, also Field Map. CONS: everything tends to be second rate (compare to the not most exciting area of some better $3 rpg). example - squirrel npc near beginning has blooshot eyes and not very charming in any way - yet the wolves have a little character. But the "gnome art" (people in town) is just lazy bad and prevalent in all towns. most Aldorlea games have many areas of mid-to-large sized maps with many dead ends with difficulty totally depends on "leveling up". this game is no different there. Summary: ok if cheap rpg or aldorlea game is what your up to. otherwise save your money for an rpg with great story graphics music.

I played this game recently and in the end would recommend it with a caveat. Its an old game on an old engine. If you are the type who insists all games run at 3560 x 2440 or whatever the hot resolution is now at 144 fps or whatever, forget it. This game first came out almost 15 years ago before any of that existed, using an engine that had no idea those resolutions would ever exist. At time the original game came out (before the Steam release) the common resolution was 640 x 480, and controllers were still a relic that PC's hadn't gotten good support for. So keep ALL of that in mind before you play. With that caveat. the game overall plays a lot like 80s/90s RPGs. If you play and like those you will like this. Plot is simple and does its job. I saw some complained about flow of the plot and do agree with some of the points brought up, but it didn't detract from the game for me. But I also grew up on games that the most plot it had was Go slay wizard. Battles are old school balance, which means prepare to get your bones ripped to shreds from time to time. However you can set difficulty all the way down to Story Mode at start of game (which is what I did in the end and how come I beat it in 8.3 hours) and turn most fights into easytime. Overall though if you want to play a game like an older 80s/90s RPG or grew up on those and want to play a new game like it, you will like this. Though I might suggest playing it once on Story or Easy mode to get a feel for the game and where everything is first time through as well.

I'm not gonna say that this was the worst RPG I've ever played, but it did make me want to bang my head on the desk repeatedly. While I didn't mind the overall idea and gameplay, the storyline was painful. It often seems as if the dialogue will never end. Plus, it is poorly written and possesses poor sytax making it akward to read. Furthermore, the maps are often confusing and difficult to naviagte and I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it was to continuously have to walk back and forth over multiple maps. Despite this, the fighting is easy if your consistant with upgrading and training and you only end up having to fight about 4 or 5 times a map, so it shouldn't be too overwhelming for someone who is new to the genere (though for someone who has been playing these games a while, the battles get old pretty quickly because of how simple they are). This certainly isn't one of my favourite games, but considering I only paid about 50 cents for it, it wasn't so bad. I definitely would not recommend the game at full price though. Overall, I'm somewhere in the middle with this game. I don't particularily like it, but I don't despise it either.

RPG Maker strikes again! Asguaard is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. This time Andorlea/Warfare/SimProse/whatever other shell account this guy uses to try hide his identity has once more stamped out a painfully generic copy + paste RPG Maker asset flip. It's horribly basic, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, full of stock copy + pasted RPG Maker assets... no real game development has taken place here, this is just a cash grab, it's shovelware polluting Steam for profit. This "developer" has dumped over 100 copy+pasted RPG Maker asset flips onto Steam, and keeps pumping out minimum viable product RPG Maker asset flips as rapidly as possible to try gouge gamers. In line with the other RPG Maker asset flips, there's barely any real plot or interest apart from badly translated high school anime club tier fanfiction writing, sloppy encounter design... this "developer" has pumped out over 100 RPG Maker asset flips, and to nobody's surprise, they're pretty much all the same thing. It's impossible for there to be any sincerity behind someone who's pushed out 100 construction kit asset flip copy + pastes. We must ask why this ongoing pollution has any serious value for gamers or the gaming industry. This kind of cash grab construction kit shovelware from bad actors like Andorlea gives amateur developers a bad name. This pollution takes marketing space away from genuine indie developers who are doing the right thing, and making real games instead of copying+pasting premade assets in a children's video game construction kit. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games. This pollution is harmful to Steam, to gamers and the gaming industry. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Asguaard didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for playing the tutorial, trivial to get, but less than 18 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 18 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Asguaard has the utterly unrealistic price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. For comparison, the $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "X-Com 2", "Borderlands 2" or "Deus Ex: Human Revolution". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Do I recommend this game? I have no idea whether or not to recommend it. But it has many faults, for instance, the ability "Splash All" Learned by Grom, (A dwarf, not an orc) Says it only hits one enemy, but it hits all your enemies. As the name would suggest. The map is abysmal, just a blurry vague mess that doesn't really direct you. When you get to the crystal cave, start sobbing, it's quite early, but you will spend a lot of time getting lost in there, a map would be useful, but.... Direction Keys, you have to use the direction keys, I cannot find a way to change this. Enter is the talk/action button, insert is the menu and exit button. I don't quite understand why it's so awkwardly set up. Other than that, the game is fairly similar to breath of fire (More so than Final Fantasy) Which is good, I like BoF, but it's fairly baddly made, also, the main character is a prick, Name him prick for reference. He's so mean to another one of the characters I just want to assault him. Over all, I'd say buy this game and try it for yourself, but I personally found many faults with it and didn't like it much. But a small part of me is forcing me to play until I get the Unicorn. Sigh.

I bought the game on sale, based on previous reviews. I can deal with annoying characters, but what I can't deal with is extremely frustraing controls, which I did not see mentioned in any previous reviews. Movement is done only by clicking on where you can to go, and if there's an obstacle in the way, you won't get there. The path it takes seems kind of random at times, it'll turn to the side instead of making a straight line. I would have played for longer if the movement was not so extremely annoying - wasd would be so much better. The jagged screen motion that accompanies this erratic movement also gave me a headache. I requested a refund and would not recommend this game.

Asguaard is a potentially-intriguing retro RPG that suffers from a bad case of quantity over quality. It has an expansive world, with no usable world map and several areas with caves full of monsters that will kill you in one hit if you wander into them while going through the otherwise-on-level area. It has sprawling dungeons, with no way to keep track of where you are other than pencil and paper, and where the only healing points inside cost half of your gold (literally, that's how they work). It has hidden areas and bonuses, often completely invisible so no matter how much you explore, you always feel like you're missing out. It has a wide variety of abilities you can learn, by tracking down NPCs scattered across the world (and make sure you track them down in the right order, or you'll just have to come all the way back). It has its fair share of boss battles, which mostly consist of slowly whittling down the boss with basic attacks while desperately hoping it doesn't kill too many of your party members in too short of a time. Beyond some initial stat-boosting skills, you're basically stuck with basic skills unless you want to run out of mana - and don't even think about using real skills against anything other than bosses, or you'll barely get a room into the dungeon before you're out of mana. Combat in general is not a great experience. It has a reasonable amount of dialogue, which you'll likely want to avoid reading as much as possible. It's pretty rough. It contains about four different art styles, interspersed randomly - enemy art in particular often seems to come entirely out of left field. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it does indeed have an 'amazing fantasy soundtrack', but regardless, I can't recommend this - certainly not at this price point.

I feel the need to write this review as a disclaimer since I didn't see any other review touch on it. This game gets everything right when it comes to old school RPG's except one thing, the story. While the general story concept is a cool idea, it was delivered terribly. Characters in this game come off as flat and obnoxious, and at some times completely lifeless. The dialogue is poorly written and your objectives don't usually make sense. Also some of the main plot points are just absurd. However if the story element doesn't bother you I would reccomend this game to any fan of old school RPG's, because despite the story flaws, the game is really enjoyable to play. There are a ton of secrets to find, dungeons to explore, and extra bosses to beat. TL;DR Story elements suck but everything else in the game is solid and true to old school RPG's plus some extra perks. 7/10

While this game is not terrible, I cannot recommend it at its normal price. I purchased it for 75% off and feel like I got my moneys worth. If you see it for a big discount and like old school rpgs take it for a spin but don't expect much. Some issues i had: Main character is sort of annoying Dialogue just seems a bit weak Battle system is generally unimpressive Story is pretty weak Ending is rather bad and short I am sure a lot of work went into this but unfortunately I can't recommend it. I have played other RPGmaker games that were far superior and were free.

This is a hard game to review. A lot of games I don't review, but there are some I do feel the need to, as a personal encouragement or warning to others. Problem is, this game is both. It's a solid retro RPG with very high production values, from art to music to game mechanics. Which may make the faults more glaring, since everything else is just so darn good. I do love the game but yet my recommendation of it is cautionary in nature. For instance, the main hero comes across as whiny and juvenile because other characters get something that he doesn't, so he has to make their lives totally miserable for it. And it does grow very tiresome and damages the storyline. There's a lot of abilities to learn, and they come in three stages, but if you can't find the first stage then you'll never have that ability the rest of the game. The kicker? At an early point in the game you can't return to the areas that have those first lessons so you're completely locked out even though you don't even have your full party yet. Kicker #2 - a lot of those abilities are hidden somewhere on the map and if you don't criss-cross every pixel of the overland map and bump into every wall every step you can miss the hidden area entirely, so no skill for you. Games that have a "too bad, so sad, sucks to be you" penalty on players is a big turn-off. As well as making games deliberately difficult in order to "encourage" the added purchase of game guides. Kicker #3 - Finding the skill-giver is only half the problem. The skills cost gold to learn, per character. So you'll be offered the skill at say 300 gold per character, while you're fighting mobs that drop 2-8 gold per fight, 13 if you're lucky. This is on Normal difficulty. So if you don't have the money and have to leave the hidden area to grind a few hours to build up the bank, hope and pray you can find that pixel again within that huge expanse of open nothingness, or twisty tunnels when you want to return to it. This is why the game may take 100 hours to finish. The male hero's constant whining will make that seem much, much longer. When they say exploration game, they're not kidding. This is both and OCD'er dream and nightmare wrapped up in one. There's enough grinding and backtracking to make Aveyond seem like the length of a comic book.