A promising upcoming gacha RPG in need of more polish | Demo Review - ASTRA: Knights of Veda
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✨Overview
ASTRA: Knights of Veda is an upcoming 2.5D gacha RPG for PC and Mobile, offering a visually striking world filled with intriguing storytelling. The game is currently slated for release on PC, with an available demo for players to explore. Additionally, a mobile version of the game is in development and will be launched soon.
📖Story and Premise
Set in the bleak world of Planis, ravaged by the oppressive reign of grotesque King Magnus, ASTRA presents a dark and gripping narrative. The story takes a truly sinister turn reminiscent of the depths of despair that reminded me of Berserk.
The emergence of a malevolent tree, leading to horrifying undead consequences for its victims, sets the stage for a desperate struggle. The goddess Veda intervenes, choosing a champion, one of the Knights of Veda, to combat the looming curse and bring hope back to the world. This premise sets the tone for a narrative that promises to be both haunting and captivating.
The central theme of ASTRA revolves around the quest to find and collect all 12 pieces of Veda, along with her lost and corrupted books, adding layers of depth to the storyline.
🎨Art and Graphics
ASTRA: Knights of Veda features 2.5D graphics with a decent art style and Adobe Flash style of animations. While the game's details might appear low-res, it isn’t exactly pixel art. The animations themselves have a somewhat peculiar and clunky appearance, giving them an amateurish feel, but they also possess a certain charm. However, this charm may not appeal to everyone.
Nevertheless, the art is undeniably impressive. It closely resembles the style of games like Dragon’s Crown and Dragon Blaze, making it a distinctive visually pleasing experience despite its simplicity. Additionally, the English voice acting holds up well. It feels like this game has high production values, particularly evident in some of the animated cutscenes.
🎮Gameplay
The gameplay in ASTRA is reminiscent of titles like Dragon’s Crown, Dragon Blaze, and, more recently, the sleeper hit Astlibra Revision. However, unlike Astlibra Revision, which leans towards a pure 2D platformer, ASTRA presents itself in a 2.5D beat-'em-up and hack-and-slash style.
The game begins at a slow pace, taking over an hour to complete the tutorial level and enter the gacha mechanics and adventure mode. While the storyline is captivating, the cutscenes are overly drawn out and there is an excessive amount of dialogue, leading to pacing issues. Fortunately, the cutscenes can be autoplayed and even sped to 2X, in which the implementation works pretty well and improves the pacing a little bit. Still, you can opt to completely skip the cutscenes if you only care about the actual gameplay
The player character can also roam around the village to talk with characters and progress the story, although you can also opt to skip these “free roam” segments and portal straight to the next objective, which is neat for those who’d want to skip these segments. You can also partake in other side missions or activities such as cooking.
⚔️Combat
ASTRA allows players to control multiple characters, one at a time with seamless switching between them, reminiscent of titles like Genshin Impact or Aether Gazer. Each Knight possesses unique skills and abilities, classified into melee, ranged, and magic categories. The gacha element comes into play when collecting these diverse Knights.
However, the combat experience leaves much to be desired. ASTRA's combat feels unresponsive, inaccurate, and janky, lacking the fluidity of titles like the aforementioned Dragon's Crown. It's clear that the game draws inspiration from the latter but falls short in terms of smoothness.
Action is introduced at a sluggish pace, with long sequences of story in between short combat segments, leading to a somewhat disjointed experience. The camera's unnaturally close zoom significantly limits visibility, potentially affecting the player's ability to react to enemies promptly.
As a gacha game, ASTRA incorporates familiar features such as autoplay, an adventure mode for the main story, an idle game mode called "Nightmare", premium currency, and a stamina/energy system called “Shoes” to limit adventure mode play, although I was overflowing with “shoes” for my first few hours of play. Elements of Genshin Impact are evident and the game clearly takes pages from Genshin, particularly in gacha mechanics and UI design, though ASTRA lacks transparency in pull rates.
📊Technical Performance
An unfortunate thing, but my experience with ASTRA was severely hampered by it subpar performance. Despite displaying 60fps, the game often feels closer to 30fps or even lower due to its sluggish animations and combat, which is surprising considering its 2.5D nature. The game supports both keyboard and mouse controls, as well as partial controller support where some segments still requires the mouse/touch for navigation. Handling and responsiveness issues, especially during combat, hinder the overall experience for both keyboard and gamepad schemes.
⚖️Conclusion
ASTRA: Knights of Veda offers an intriguing dark narrative, visually captivating art, and a gameplay style akin to acclaimed titles like Dragon's Crown and Astlibra: Revision, all within a gacha-style gaming format. The game shows promise, but for now, it remains just that — a promise. It requires substantial improvements in terms of combat and pacing to be truly enjoyable. However, with dedicated development and attention to player feedback, and the fusion of Genshin Impact and Dragon's Crown's formulas into one game, ASTRA has the potential to become a standout gacha RPG in the future.
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