Achilles: Legends Untold

The second title in my humbling soulslike backlog block was Achilles: Legends Untold -- more Greek mythology. Like Sands of Aura, this one is an attempt at a top-down perspective take on the genre. I'd say the execution in this one is better: the fixed-direction camera, lack of platforming, and a mini-map -- and an actual map -- prevent you from getting confused, and being able to lock to a target keeps aiming and facing clear.

Once more into Greek myths

The protagonist of the game is the titular Greek hero Achilles from Homer's Iliad. The game begins with the assault on Troy. You first kill Hector easy-peasy but the fight is soon followed by the fateful encounter with Paris. It is possible to beat Paris, too, for an achievement, although it might be quite the challenge depending on your set difficulty. Afterwards Achilles dies regardless -- only to be resurrected many years later.

Achilles discovers that Greece has become quite a dangerous place thanks to dastardly leaders, monsters, and what seems to be the dead pouring back from the underworld. It's a bit of a mystery who is helping Achilles and who even is the main villain of the story. But it will all come clear later on. Neither the story nor writing are not particularly noteworthy, nor is the voice acting. I was also wondering if they were going keep swearing with 'fucks' but the 'malakas' did come out eventually.

Achilles: Legends Untold is not visually particularly impressive. I had the game on maxed settings yet it looked kind of blurry -- or maybe grainy? It makes the game appear older than the 3 years it is. You'd think a top-down game could push for clearer visuals.

I'm also not a fan of the typefaces used in the game. I'm not familiar with Unreal Engine to know which typefaces it comes out of the box but the ones used sure look like default ones. With many of the menu screens being so basic, you get an amateurish impression from the game.

Ready-paved road

The 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy has been heavily influential for games set in Ancient Greece or adjacent universes. The movie's action choreographies are so apparent in titles like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars, and this one. You can see Brad Pitt in every spear and xiphos lunge.

The 2006 Zack Snyder comic-book film adaptation 300 has been another obvious source of inspiration. The movie's iconic Spartan kick is referenced in more than one way in Legends Untold as well. I reckon it was taken from 300, too, how enemies can execute a pretty cool teamwork combo in this by having one crouch while holding his shield over him and another use it as a boost to leap at you.

Fighting skeleton warriors in this, and in Titan Quest back in the day, also reminded me of the ancient 1967 Don Chaffey film Jason and the Argonauts. I don't think I've ever watched it fully but I've seen the stop-motion animated fighting scenes.

Lacks that final layer of craftmanship

Combat in Legends Untold is mostly enjoyable, especially after you've picked up some perks to enhance it. But there is some serious friction in the experience as well. A minor bother are the hitboxes on giant scorpions' claws. Being in front of the scorpions without having a shield up -- and I do recommend using a shield -- has you getting hit constantly. Quickly enough you'll learn to keep circling behind them to not be near the claws.

You can unlock a perfect block and a follow-up riposte on the game's perk tree. I hated how it was impossible to use the riposte when fighting more than one enemy in melee because the attack would get interrupted every time by an enemy who hadn't just been blocked. The perfect block would need either an area-of-effect stagger or a slow down effect, or the riposte would need i-frames or just be uninterruptible.

Gotta get up to get down

The biggest issue with the combat is getting knocked down on your ass all the fucking time. Wolves with their 2-pounce spam cause it and so do enemies using the Spartan kick. I started getting triggered whenever I saw a heavy enemy sprinting because the purpose for it was always the kick. And they won't stop the sprint until they get close enough to actually do the damn kick.

If a game features this frequent knockdown, there really needs to be a roll action to get back up quickly. That alone negates the frustration. But this one doesn't have such, so every time you're just: "Oh, great. Let's watch Achilles slowly get up again."

I played on the second-to-highest difficulty (of four in total, I think) for achievement purposes. I didn't find anything particularly challenging until one of the game's combat rifts repeatedly defeated me. I think the problem was using an axe at the time. It's just not a great weapon type. I switched to a spear later and returned to the rift to be more successful. Spears aren't a super fast weapon type either but they have more reach so you can intercept the enemy attempts to land a boot on your face.

Scorpion King boss also dropped a spears-exclusive Thorns special attack, which turned out to be extremely effective. It summons multiple spears to stab up from the ground and I think it can hit large enemies more than once because I one-shot them many times with the ability. After settling on spears, I never went back to the other weapons so I don't know how good their exclusive abilities are.

A tad padded

The game's perk tree is laid out in the form of interconnected constellations. There are special perks and moves -- like the perfect block and riposte -- but most of the stars are simple +1s to an attribute. Some constellations grant a completion bonus while some constellations are just the singular bonuses to attributes, which makes the thing feel a bit half-assed, especially when compared to the devotion constellations of Grim Dawn, which I recently revisited.

There are perks that increase experience gain and I beelined to those because you need to get such as early as possible. I also picked a whole lot of +1 Luck stars while at it to increase upgrade material drops. It wasn't very helpful for the early game but I suppose in the long run it was worth it.

My first, thorough run took 20 hours and it felt quite stretched out. There are not enough enemy types for that many hours. There's also one egregious re-use of a large dungeon level. The changed lighting and added fog weren't enough to fool me. On my New Game+ run (for achievement purposes) I did only the main quests, strictly following the dotted line on the mini-map, and it took me only 9 hours to beat the game.