One of the great pitfalls in this industry is running into a game which isn’t as originally advertised. Sometimes, that can be a deliberate move on the part of the developer, pulling the rug out from under players with radical changes. Other times, it’s a marketing thing; somebody using the wrong description or an incorrect term which obfuscates the title. So, it was with my initial appreciation of Astor: Blade Of The Monolith. It was passing itself off as an action RPG, which I took to mean either a Diablo-style dungeon crawl with all manner of randomized loot or something in the vein of Elden Ring with its different classes, deep lore, and expansive environments. Astor fits in neither of those buckets, being far closer to classic action-adventure games like Ratchet & Klank than anything. And, with that in mind, it’s not bad, but not quite up to the level of the games it’s trying to imitate.
Astor puts you in the robes of the titular character, an artificial lifeform known as a Diokek. An exploration of ruins with a friend leads to your stumbling over ancient relics which imbue you with unique abilities, setting up the conditions for you to fulfill a prophecy which could theoretically bring back “The Makers,” human beings who long ago created the Diokek and then disappeared. You’ll go through a number of different zones, fighting off the forces of the Hiltsik, as well as the defense mechanisms left behind by the Makers in their long-abandoned facilities.
Visually, Astor makes excellent use of the Unreal Engine to establish the world, giving players a brightly colored and lightly cel-shaded environment to explore and enemies to defeat. If one had to give a high-level overview of the aesthetic, my initial description might be “Journey meets Horizon Zero Dawn.” Structures are either highly primitive or appropriately cyclopean. Creature and character designs look like they fit within the larger world, though there seems to be a dearth of variety in creatures out in the wild. There’s a little more variety among the enemy types, but it’s not quite as diverse as it feels like it should be in some respects. It’s somewhat more whimsical than Horizon Zero Dawn‘s post-apocalypse-recovery vibe, which is perfectly fine. The use of special effects and some of Unreal’s more catchy bits of eye candy is nicely done. Not eye-popping and jaw-dropping, but it works quite well.
My big complaint comes from the map function, or rather the lack of map function. The only purpose it seems to serve is to show you how many collectibles and challenges you’ve found. It shows the stylized representation of the area, but doesn’t give any detail, which makes it utterly useless as a map. Beyond that, the UI is pretty minimal but basically useful. You’ll see your health and energy bars at the bottom, along with representations of your currently equipped weapons. There’s a rough compass of sorts which helps point you in the general direction of your next objective. The UI’s not particularly stylish, but it does work.
The audio elements of Astor are something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the music is quite good, alternating between evocative environmental themes and short battle anthems. The sound effects are modest, cleanly recorded and implemented but not quite hitting the point where they’re viscerally satisfying. On the other hand, the narration as Astor enters new areas is deeply bothersome. Not quite as bad as the one found in Biomutant, but still a serious detriment to the sense of enjoyment one expects. Compounding this is the Simlish every character except the title character engages in. I’m trying to figure out what exactly the developers were hoping to accomplish by having the main character effectively be mute when everybody else is talking (even if it’s not recognizable). This, probably more than anything else, broke my sense of immersion.
When it comes to gameplay, Astor gets some of the basics right, but screws up others pretty thoroughly. The combat is pretty simple, mostly chained button presses with a finisher prompt coming up. Defeating enemies refills a bit of your “runic” power (used to execute finishers) and sometimes drops health to help refill your bar or recharge the health gem restorative items. Traversing the environments is also quite simple, either going on foot or unlocking a mount fairly early on. I did run into some spots where getting on to climbing surfaces wasn’t quite as smooth as it probably should have been.
Puzzles aren’t particularly taxing and fairly quickly solved, moving you along to the next room with minimal fuss. I already mentioned the problems with lack of map functionality. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the game was more linear in its map and mission designs. But no, it’s trying to be quasi-open world, letting you run around and do side quests, notionally exploring even as it restricts your movements. Compounding this is a ludonarrative urgency which pushes the player to go to the next main story mission without giving them the chance to take a breather and poke around, find all those collectibles that the map screen mentions. It’s a pacing problem which doesn’t get any better the longer you play.
To make the pacing problem and the map design issues even worse, there are a couple of sections where you’re blocked from progress until you obtain a new weapon. That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s a trope which other titles have used to great effect. The problem here is that those “keyed” barriers only really appear in just those two mission areas and nowhere else. It’s a tremendously wasted opportunity to get players out and about, looking for new secret areas beyond what you can access through the one dedicated “Spirit Sight” power.The extra twist of the knife is that one of those two weapons needed to break those barriers is wildly overpowered and the other is barely worth using except to break the appropriate barriers. Seriously, once I unlocked the second weapon (a set of stone gauntlets), I barely used anything else. They were too good. While I like having a reliable favorite, I also like having genuine options about how best to lay the smack down on opponents. There should be times where one has to bring out the right tool for the job, but the only job I seemed to be fulfilling was some variant of punching bag.
Some of the additional powers granted by completing challenges suffered the same problem. Some felt like they were worth using, and others were definitely a case of “I went through that challenge for this?!” Not that the challenge was particularly difficult. I purchased a “Resurrection Crystal” item as an insurance policy and never once had to use the thing. Though this was another problem: one badly telegraphed “run away from this” sequence led to an instant “game over” because it wasn’t immediately clear where I needed to go. Beyond that, never once found myself in a position to need a rez. It makes one question why a “New Game+” mode was added if the fundamental difficulty was so laughably low.
As a final insult on the pacing, unlocking enhancements to the weapons (extended attack chains, “launcher” attacks, etc.) was completely trivial. The final weapon, for example, went from bog standard to maxed out in a few seconds because I’d managed to save up more than enough resources to unlock all possible enhancements in a run. Mix this in with the balancing issues, and one can’t help but feel that they wasted a lot of time for very little return.
Narratively, Astor is just an absolute mess. It veers wildly from neo-pagan mysticism to preachy nihilistic technophobia without any sort of buildup or transition, much less any sort of rhyme or reason. Seriously, when the background lore of Destiny is more internally consistent and well laid out, you know you’ve got a problem. There’s little in the way of stakes to motivate players, the major story beats feel trite and flat, and since the title character is a complete mute, we’ve got nothing to invest in beyond the fact we can punch things into oblivion. There are no great shocks, no surprises, no dramatic tension to draw the player along. We’re told the main character is important and that’s all the writers apparently felt was necessary to explore. We’ve seen this premise explored far better in other games which touch (however tangentally) on the same subjects such as Horizon Zero Dawn and NiER: Automata.
I wanted to like Astor: Blade Of The Monolith. I kept waiting for it to grab me with something novel, a fresh approach to a classic trope, an engaging mechanic, even just an overworld map I could get lost in for a few hours trying to ferret out goodies, anything that would justify the time spent. And when I reached the end, I felt badly cheated. It’s not a bad game, but it’s so incredibly mediocre that it should probably be approached with a sense that it’s not going to be the sort of game you’re going to spend more than the absolute minimum playing to reach the end. There’s not a good reason to try and go full completionist on Astor. Life’s too short to engage in such an exercise in tedium.
Axel reviewed Astor: Blade of The Monolith on PlayStation 5 with a review code.
