Towers of Aghasba, the new Early Access endeavor from Dreamlit Inc, caught my imagination and attention when the first trailer appeared a year ago. This debut indie game claims to be a meeting of monster hunting, 3D city building, and survival crafting. In reality, it is a meeting of frustration, boredom, and more bugs than even Timon and Pumba could scarf down. I am embarrassed on behalf of the developers that they felt this was fit for human interaction in any way, even in Early Access.
In Towers of Aghasba, you play as a young boy who is tasked with revitalizing the land a dark magic has left desolate. Starting with the powers imbued by a strange crystal, you are intended to rebuild civilization one bit at a time, bringing trees and life back to the crags and crevices of this once beautiful kingdom. That’s what you’re supposed to do, at least, if the game even runs long enough to get you through the tutorial without a crash to desktop.
Before describing all the technical problems I’ve had with Towers of Aghasba, I feel it prudent to share that I have a pretty high end PC rig. Even with my RTX 3080 and Ryzen 7 3800x, I experienced near constant crashes to desktop, frame drops, broken land geometry, and even Steam crashes. The developers put out a day one update, and while that fixed the problem that wouldn’t let me navigate the menus (yeah), it did little to help stabilize the game. Even lowering the settings to medium, Towers of Aghasba constantly froze. Characters were constantly clipping through full structures, and my own character seemed unable to move more than 30 feet without getting trapped in a rock, a boat, or just nothing at all, requiring a restart.
Towers of Aghasba has a strange DRM requirement that I think is the source of some of the issues. It is outlined clearly on the Steam page, so I can’t fault them too much that I didn’t realize, but despite being a Steam game it requires the Epic Games Store (EGS) to launch. Just to make it clear, when you click play on Steam, it forces you to open and log in to the EGS, despite this not being an Epic Game. Epic then verifies your ownership of the game, closes again, and then Steam launches the game. This alone isn’t a full dealbreaker for me, though it is unarguably annoying. The dealbreaker is that half the time, the verification launcher doesn’t work, and crashes the EGS, preventing you from playing the game.
Last night, I sat down to try to continue past the first 10 minutes of Towers of Aghasba after the day one update, hoping I could finally make progress. No such luck. After continuing to be unable to climb anything as my character glitched and fell into the land geometry, grabbing and releasing the rocks at an uncontrollable rate, I closed the game and went to bed. Today I sat down to find that Steam thinks I’ve been playing Towers of Aghasba for 20 hours because for the past 18 hours the game has been attempting to launch the EGS to verify the DRM, crashing EGS, and then attempting to relaunch the program only to crash it to desktop and repeat again. I am stunned.
Moving beyond the technical issues, nothing in this game is even remotely ready for prime time, even in Early Access. It’s covered with this low-saturation high-warmth filter that I cannot adjust that makes the whole thing look like a washed out Polaroid from the 60s, devoid of color and personality. It is gross to look at. The very first thing the player is asked to do, jump over some boats and retrieve an item, is damn near impossible because of how difficult it is to actually get your character to grab on to a surface, jump properly, or land without falling through an object. More than a handful of times I fell through a boat, got stuck on the underside of it due to nothing, and drowned.
The game only has an option for PlayStation button prompts, even when I have my Xbox controller plugged in, leading to great frustration as I kept mixing up where the X button was. It did show Xbox prompts for a few seconds sometimes for no discernible reason, making this all the more aggravating. There’s a journal to track your quests, but it doesn’t tell you what you need to do for the quests. None of the animations are finished. Moreover, this is a game that is almost entirely about picking up crafting materials off the ground every few seconds, and every time you do a full three second unfinished animation plays. If you recall, this was such an aggravating feature in Horizon Forbidden West that Guerilla Games actually had to patch it out to convince players to pick up the game again. It’s so much worse in Towers of Aghasba because you’re doing it at least 10 times every minute while exploring.
It probably is no surprise that the building mechanics don’t really work either, and the combat is pretty much impossible when enemies are teleporting around because they are glitching into and out of existence. Never mind the fact that the frame rate is cycling anywhere between 1 and 60 for seemingly no reason at all times. On top of all of this, everything about the story and characters that has been presented so far is some of the most boring material I’ve ever had the misfortune of being exposed to.
The roughly one hour of actual gameplay I managed to wrangle out of this Sarlacc mouth of a game into which all technical functionality goes was awful on every design, visual, and mechanical level. My last feeble attempt to play Towers of Aghasba today after the second patch somehow not only crashed the game, but crashed Steam, and then uninstalled only this game from my computer, a thing which I have never had happen nor witnessed in my 10 years on the platform. So be it; I will accept this last gesture of goodwill from Towers of Aghasba, one feeble attempt to rescue me from itself. It is the only good thing it has done for me. Do not purchase this game in Early Access. This game clearly needs two more years of hardcore development to even be ready for Early Access, and I’m certain it will not be worth the wait.
Nirav reviewed Towers of Aghasba on PC in Early Access with a review copy.
