Preview: The Towers of Aghasba could use a lot of polish

On paper, Towers of Aghasba sounds like a dream game. It’s an open-world sandbox game that lets you explore and customize your island to your liking while fighting menacing monsters and using magical powers to restore balance to nature. However, in practice there are so many problems, both major and minor, that you’ll be in for a rude awakening soon after you get started.

Towers of Aghasba follows the Shimu people as they find themselves shipwrecked on the coast of Aghasba, which once served as their homeland. However, Aghasba’s vibrant ecosystems are no longer thanks to the withered ones. It turned the continent into a dead wasteland. Although the player character is only an apprentice, he is able to use and collect friendships. Friendship is essentially life energy and you can use it in various ways throughout the game to restore Aghasba. With the help of the gods, native life forms, and the other members of the Shimu tribe, you must work together to succeed on Aghasba and transform it back into the paradise it once was.

This is a pretty ambitious game and it’s still in Early Access. In the state it’s currently in, it’s pretty unpolished, but Dreamlit currently has a really strong foundation. I’m pretty excited to see how developments will continue. But right now I have to say this about everything Towers of Aghasba well, there are two other things that make the experience far more difficult than it needs to be.

First of all, I really like the plot of the game and how layered it is. It’s not as open a sandbox as you might think, as you’re locked behind questlines and Withered Haze areas. Withered Hazes are places full of Withers, and staying there for too long will quickly drain HP. For example, while the Withered Haze area is active, you cannot ride your mount or create a new ecosystem. There are ways to sort it out, of course, but it can be a pain to do thanks to the crafting system, which I’ll talk more about later.

Anyway, back to what I said. Sometimes I fall down the rabbit hole of open world exploration where I’m so interested in unlocking everything on the map only to see that by the time I want to start the story again I’m way too overleveled or have already lost interest. With Towers of Aghasba If I’m actively prevented and forced to take it slowly, it’s much easier to monitor my progress and I never know what to do. However, some of the designs for the creatures can start to look like they are spore Creations I also really like how the animals and Withered look.

I would like to emphasize this again Towers of Aghasba is not bad. There are just a lot of small quality of life issues in the game that can really compound. For one thing, there is virtually no music in the game, meaning you may have to play your own. However, this can be a disadvantage as you won’t be able to hear the battle music if you suddenly and unexpectedly attack something. Climbing in the game isn’t much fun and the mount is much less easy to handle than one might imagine due to the difficult terrain. While trailers for the game show lush greenery and beautiful landscapes, most of the time you’ll be looking at a washed-out wasteland.

At the other end of the scale, there is so much going on in the ecosystems that you can’t see anything on the ground. Feeding animals is a task you have to do to improve the king tree etc, but the AI ​​for the animals is pretty bad. I threw food right in a few’s path to no avail, only one on the other side of the mountain slowly strolled towards it. Since a lot of the game focuses on nature restoration and everything else, I’d like to see something done with the animals in the future. It would even be nice to see how different species interact with each other.

By and large, all of the above complaints are pretty minor. The biggest problem for me is how annoying the card is to use. If you play with mouse and keyboard, you can just press M to open the map. However, if you’re playing on a controller (like me), you’ll need to click Select and then tab to open the map. You can’t set custom markers, and some map markers are missing text. The landscape also looks more or less the same. This means I have to rely on the world map and not the miniature map. So it was annoying to constantly have to manually open the menu and select just to make sure I was going in the right direction very fast. I highly recommend just playing with a mouse and controller to avoid this.

Something else that bothered me a little is how annoying it can be to collect materials for crafting. For a mechanic that basically makes up 80% of the game, collecting materials was quite a pain. First of all, even with portals and a mount, Aghasba is so big that traversing it to collect the large amounts you need becomes tedious, especially because the game is so quiet unless you’re playing his own music. Secondly, it felt like some items were impossible to find. For fish, for example, it took a while because they couldn’t be seen at first because of the reflection in the water, especially in the tutorial area.

At least I know there are fish in the water. Sometimes I had no idea where to even start looking. I needed a guide to figure out how to get items like corn cobs and hardwood. The map isn’t very helpful as it only shows the most basic landmarks and you can’t look up the description of items to get a clue. I found it strange that I was annoyed since I played Don’t starve not a problem, but I think it’s due to a fundamental difference between the two. Back when I started Don’t starvethere were items that I didn’t know how to get since I hadn’t seen them yet. But because there are so many things to do there every day Don’t starveThere were enough tasks to hold my attention when I wasn’t looking for the necessary materials.

In the case of Towers of AghasbaThe aforementioned story-based nature of the game means that there isn’t actually much to do other than simply collecting materials, crafting items, and fighting. So if you’re not sure where to get an item and are running around the map looking for it (and having to manually open the map instead of just pressing a shortcut), that can really drain your patience. Luckily, I started playing Early Access a little later than others, meaning I was able to consult other players’ posts or guides.

As a note, if you want to play the game with your friends or other players, I recommend you wait a little later. To start multiplayer, you must first unlock the multiplayer gate on Midhaven. You then have to enter a code. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, I don’t have any friends who play, which means I didn’t have anyone to exchange codes with. But according to recent Steam reviews, you can’t play in multiplayer anyway.

Multiplayer isn’t the only thing broken in the game. There are some minor visual bugs and glitches, such as floating stones. However, I once encountered an absolutely game-breaking bug. The game initially stopped allowing me to aim at things, which meant I could no longer throw objects or shoot arrows. Since I was close to completing a quest, I continued. Like someone slowly succumbing to poison, my game continued to collapse. The color became even more washed out. My health and stamina bars disappeared into the ether. As icing on the cake, my minimap also disappeared from the screen. So far I haven’t been able to recreate this to see what might have triggered it.

Even though this preview was pretty negative, I still think so Towers of Aghasba That’s fun. I already mentioned it in mine Tokyo jungle Looking back, I’ve realized that I’m the type of person who enjoys completing lots of smaller tasks to get a bigger reward at the end, and that’s exactly the type of game we have here. It’s just difficult to recommend this game in its current state. However, Dreamlit is cooking up something really interesting and I look forward to the day when they can fully realize their vision.

Towers of Aghasba is available via Steam on Windows PCs and is still in Early Access.