Action RPGs have been popular for decades and have experienced many ups and downs in their evolution. Nowadays, it’s a genre mostly dominated by a few popular live service titles, making it harder for new and smaller games to break out among the competition.
Empyreal, developed by Silent Games and published by Secret Mode, is a sci-fi-themed action RPG with fast and challenging combat and tons of customizations and progression systems. The game describes itself as complex and feature-rich, keywords that are commonplace in the modern ARPG scene, but are incredibly hard to implement and design in a satisfying and approachable way.
Empyreal has a decent character creation for a game of its scale. There are dozens of good-looking customization options, and you can see them wearing the armor and wielding the weapons that each background starts with. There aren’t many mechanical decisions that you have to make while making your character, which I believe is a good approach for new players to the game. The main gameplay choice we make is choosing a background that gives us our weapon and starting abilities, and we can easily change these up and experience with other options after a short time.
Empyreal‘s story is at an uncomfortable place. At times, it feels like it is pushed to the background to make us focus on the action and gameplay, but again, it makes us go through a lot of interactions and lore expositions with the various characters in the game. We are a mercenary sent to a forward operating base to explore and uncover a mysterious landmark created by a lost civilization. There are a handful of characters in an unnecessarily large and hard-to-navigate hub, and they have a lot to say between each mission. I tried to engage with the story at first, but after a couple of hours, I lost interest and would skip most of the dialogues, which is additionally inconvenient as the quests don’t have any markers, and if I skipped the wrong information, I often would not realize for a while.
The first hour in Empyreal showcased a lack of accessibility in the game. As we begin, we watch two cutscenes about the NPCs and the world, and then we are in the main hub with a quest that says “Find someone in charge”. There’s an immediate disconnect between our avatar and the story, as we have no idea who we are and what we are doing. There are no quest markers, and the main hub is a huge, multi-leveled area with mostly empty spaces. If you take the wrong turn in the beginning, you can easily roam around aimlessly for five minutes before finding the NPC you need to speak with. After talking to the person in charge, we can enter a map and actually experience the tutorial and gameplay.
The combat in the game can be pretty fun. We have a few abilities, we can dodge and parry, jump around the enemies, and when we get into the tempo of it, the gameplay can be very engaging. We find new gear and can upgrade and change our fighting style and abilities over time to find the playstyle that fits us best. Where the combat starts to fall behind is where progression becomes a key part of Empyreal.
The first layer is the gear level itself. There is no character level, so our power comes directly from how powerful our gear is. After that is the abilities, and unlocking higher-level skills and abilities would require a lot of currency and special items. A key component of the game is the consumables, including heals, buffs, and grenades, and you need to prepare with the consumables that you need before going on a mission. And finally, we can modify our weapons and armor with a variety of buffs and effects. At the surface, this doesn’t seem like a lot of different systems, but their implementation and introduction make them feel hard to engage with. There are a lot of numbers and stats on each piece of gear or modification without any clear explanation of what they do. Even with the ability to compare different pieces of gear, I could barely say if one was necessarily an upgrade to my current loadout. And even when I did get an upgrade, it was really hard to tell the difference with how the difficulty of the missions was handled.
We find these orbs called cartograms that unlock new missions. We can identify the orbs to see the difficulty, the level, the item drops, and other information about a specific mission. But even after about 10 hours into the game, I still had no idea if the mission I was hopping into was trivially easy or completely impossible. I could fly through a mission that the game would say is hard, and I could not kill a single enemy in an easy mission, and I could never tell why.
Empyreal overloads the player with information, lore, and systems in an unintuitive way to the point that makes it hard to get into. I’m sure if I got the hang of these systems, I could enjoy the game for the fast-paced combat and decent visual design, but for me, trying to figure out what upgrades are better, what missions are appropriate for my level, and understanding all the different numbers and stats without any clarification from the game itself became too much.
ARPG games are famous for their complex progression systems. Path of Exile‘s gargantuan talent tree is an infamous one that can intimidate a lot of players, but what it does differently is a clear explanation of every mechanic and showcasing them in action, and a gradual and enjoyable difficulty curve that makes the leveling and endgame grind a challenging but satisfying experience. Complexity for complexity’s sake is a trap not unique to the genre, but the nature of these games makes them more susceptible to this design flaw, and Empyreal has a hard time balancing the complexity with fun.
Nima reviewed Empyreal on PC with a provided review copy.
