The current trend in fantasy–literary, visual, and game-ary–runs towards darkness and grittiness. No longer do heroic men and women bestride the world slaying evil. Instead, we stay down in the muck and everything sucks all the time. Ash of Gods: Redemption takes its cues from this genre of dark fantasy. The Banner Saga is an obvious influence, from the storyline to the grid and turn-based combat, but Ash of Gods goes even grimmer in pursuit of the grimdark.
Ash of Gods: Redemption
Developer: Aurum Dust
Price: $24.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed) and Mac
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
There was a Reaping several hundred years ago. Now the Reapers are back, spreading some kind of plague. Ash of Gods gives you lots of information but very little context for it, dropping lots of nouns but explaining none of them. Point is there was a plague, it’s back, and that’s bad. The story beats frequently read like so:
“So there’s this plague going around!”
“Oh no!”
“And everyone is dying!”
“Oh no!”
“Your family is all dead!”
“Oh no!”
“That guy in your party? Just died!”
“Oh no!”
“The village you were trying to get to? Everyone’s dead!”
“Oh no!”
“Oh, but there’s a pregnant lady you can save!”
“Hooray!”
“She died in childbirth”
“Oh no!”
Ash of God’s: Redemption’s story follows disparate groups of people through this grimdark world where everyone’s dying of the aforementioned weird plague. This presents another problem, in that hopping around between 3 different groups makes it hard to bond with or care about any of them. Adding to this, the character interaction is the kind of writing where everyone is a dick to each other for no reason and swears a lot. Why would I like any of these jerks? One of the advertised features is an Ironman-type mode where the story continues on even if main characters die. And it does happen, but adds to the disposability of the characters, plotwise. You’re more likely to miss them for their combat abilities than charming personalities.
The combat is thoroughly drenched in Banner Saga, with a CCG element that can add buffs or heals or other little effects for an element of randomness. However, the combat tends to be thoroughly joyless. All characters have HP and an energy bar. Skills use energy and HP is your health. Clear so far.
But when you run out of energy, you take double damage to your health bar for some reason. I guess because you’re tired. If you want to do more damage using a special skill, you can also burn HP to do that. Which means if you’re not careful, you can basically kill your own characters before they get to grips with the bad guys. You can also choose which bar you’re targeting when you do an attack, HP or energy. Though given Energy powers their skills and draining it does double damage, there’s no real reason not to attack Energy every single time.
Likewise, given the fact that you can easily bring your own characters to the point of death by using too many abilities, there’s no real reason to use abilities, except in dire circumstances. It’s far more sensible to play conservative and just grimly march forward using the default attack or even spamming defensive buffs and bait the enemies into attacking. Sometimes there’s almost a puzzle element to the encounter, where your guy squares off against 8 enemies and you have to figure out which ability they want you to use to get past it.
Multiplayer is included in the game, but right now only Arena combat against other players is available. It’s fairly simple: build out a party from the characters in the game, build a deck, and throw them into the arena. There’s also clan support. Upcoming features include a tower of trials and a, er, Cave. That’s all it says, “Cave.” Multiplayer combat is the same turn-based combat as single-player, but is excruciatingly slow. Rather than moving and positioning your characters all at once, the game swaps off one at a time. So, for example, I move my archer, then you move your fighter, then I move my magician, and so on. Each of these turns can take up to 45 seconds or so, which means an entire “turn” in a full six-on-six matchup can take up to 9 minutes at a time. It’s especially boring when you’re in the early turns, waiting for everyone to slowly march forward. I’ve played over-the-top nerdy wargames that were less excruciating.
As points of excellence, the soundtrack is fantastic and the voice acting is surprisingly solid for a very indie production. It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a story mode if you want to chill out and enjoy the story rather than fiddle with the combat. Story mode puts the combat in “auto” mode, beefs up the characters, and provides more resources.
The Final Word
Overall, Ash of Gods is not a bad game. Several issues were fixed in a recent patch–like skills not actually telling you what they do–and the developers seem pretty responsive. If you like the overly grimdark flavor of fantasy, you’ll probably enjoy the game. The world itself seems pretty interesting and I’d like to know more about it. I just don’t want to sit through a bunch of people being dicks.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
