Sent by the Crown as part of a secret trip to the distant island of part of the Kingdom, you are ready to live adventure. But in RPG from a third person ash and steel, you are not one of the highly trained, well -armed holy knights trying to enforce the will of the king … You are a clever orphaned caratory for a ride, because the maps of the island, Grays Haft, are quite bad. Perhaps they are bad, because the island suffers periodic volcanic eruptions so destructive that it is covered with deadly ash, which cakes in the lungs and kills you, eruptions so terrible that ships avoid the islands all year round when it seems inevitable.
That is why the brave cartographer Tristan agreed to go there. And like many fantasy heroes, Tristan will soon be in his head – all because he wanted some adventure – when all the holy knights are dead and the only one who was to provide an urgent mission. At least this told me a practical preview with the tutorial of beta and the first hours of Ash and Steel.
Ash and Steel looks like a fairly customary RPG, reminiscent of classics from 2000. It is not that it does not give you job markers or anything but directions in the world, but at the same time emphasizes the loot on earth or chests with which you can interact when you are close to them. It is somewhere between Gothic and the first game Witcher, in his own way, with a nod to games oriented to survive the last decade. Although it is not fully survival and load, Ash and Steel still have something from RPG 2019 in this.
First of all, Ash and Steel resembles the game in the heritage of dear RPG Piranha Bajtes, the creators of the Gothic series, Risen and Elex. This includes characteristic camp acting mixed with a decent drama, as well as a lot of strange and unexpected humor. (One early task makes you find grubby pants of a man who, after drunk, just narrows and leaves pants to spotless later).
Perhaps its most venerable school feature is that there is no level scaling in his world-conventions are a constant level in a indefinite place, forever. You were warned early that the descent from the path could be threatening, and every recent enemy meeting is often a matter of approaching enough to see if it is massively ahead of you before you decide if you decide if I do not hope for good loot when you do it. In combination with this deadly, but reward exploration is the basics of the survival system, in which persistence and watering is a need to survive, and setting up a store on previously defined campsites allows Tristan to rest and cook to recover the hit points and collect buffs. Time will also pass, which is useful in a world where NPC and monsters follow their own schedule, when and where they appear, and even when they nap and do not talk to you about your very urgent mission.
Tristan has three skill trees, and perhaps the most pressing is fight. Investing in combat skills allows you to choose up to three different battle positions, each of which looks like different effects based on the type of weapon you hoped – there were axles, swords, clubs, daggers and crossbow. Unfortunately, the feeble Tristan starter was not mighty enough or competent enough to rule most of them.
What is a huge part of what I think, tells about the creator of the story of Fire Frost from Ash and Steel. This is not a fantasy hero game in which your character begins as competent with all useful skills relevant to his current situation. It will be a zero-hero story, and other characters in the world react to Tristan when it becomes stronger. “If you were treated like Ragamuffin at the beginning of the game,” said Fire Frost, “At the end of the game, the characters will literally bow to your feet.”
During the preview game it was a hint, because the characters that Tristan saw only in Thortbare clothing before, later had complementary things about the armor I bought. Where they earlier they asked: “You really wear This?” Later they said: “Ah, I had such a solid suit when I was younger.”
And a solid armor suit is very much needed because the fights can be quite brutal. The armor will lend a hand you survive a few hits, but the fight -based fight was really based on perfectly avoidance and plots. Tristan’s attacks, at least at the beginning of the game, are sluggish and clumsy – he has never fought before. When he gained combat skills, he moved more confidently and raised his ability to evaporate in a way that opened enemies to counterattacks. It mixed well with a rapid knife, which allowed him to get to these hits before he quickly returned. Despite this, there are some corrections at the early stages of the fight-non-diaries, people certainly reflect from how clumsy Tristan was, or they will simply not know the sanctified strategy “to train a difficult enemy to the nearby powerful NPC”.
Speaking of an attempt to survive, this is the subject of the other two Tristan’s skill trees: survival and craftsmanship. They are much more mundane, practical skills simply because of their nature. Survival allows you to stay from feeding and alive, and creation allows you to improve and maintain your equipment. Creation also performs one very crucial job: he earns money. Tasks and other strange works are an excellent source of experience and cash, but paying people for training Tristan in all these recent skills is not budget-friendly.
What’s frigid is that investments of money and skill points in craft and survival trees actually paid off in battle. A good craftsman can better sharpen his weapon for bonus injuries or strengthen armor for additional defense. Meanwhile, survival could pick up nasty tricks, such as thrown daggers and the operate of poisons on their weapons-although the penniless preview Tristan was a bit too dull intellectually and low level to try these skills.
However, even with all the advantages of the level and time of ash and steel, it will definitely be a game in which you kick your ass. Very. I expect QuickSave to be Tristan’s greatest friend in the world. The enemies hit firm, and the enemies, who are a higher level than those, very hard-even so quickly that penniless Tristan at a low level simply did not have a chance to react in time, let alone get one attack. As a result, he was torn out by many things. He was convicted by a gigantic rat. Depth for a huge mistake. Consumed by a lizard. Disgusted by all bandits, both living and seemingly undead.
And the only reason why Tristan has not been distributed by this giant troll is that when everything can intertwine you, well, you become quite good on the run and climbing in danger.
While some people can recognize this kind of frustrating, Ash and Steel were quite nice in terms of this count. The Action-RPG struggle was somehow more clumsy than playing from the software, but after some time it settled in its own rhythm and I hope that more and more smoothly with more skills and skills in the full game.
Do not expect miracles with Ash and Steel, but the preview was proof of the promising Medium level RPG, which will probably delight the purists of the venerable genre, and at the same time will be available and sufficiently fascinating to attract lovers of a more up-to-date action based on characters.
