On paper, Towers of Aghasba sounds like a dream game. It’s an open-world sandbox game that lets you explore and shape your island to your liking, all while fighting off threatening monsters and restoring balance to nature with magical powers. However, in practice there are so many issues, both major and minor, that you’re in for a rude awakening soon after you start.
Towers of Aghasba follows the Shimu people, who find themselves shipwrecked on the shores of Aghasba, which once served as their home. However, the vibrant ecosystems of Aghasba are no more due to the Withered. It turned the continent into a dead wasteland. Though the player character is only an apprentice, she’s capable of using and collecting Amity. Amity is basically life energy, and you can use it in various ways throughout the game to restore Aghasba. With the help of the gods, native lifeforms, and the other members of the Shimu tribe, you have to work together to thrive 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. It’s pretty unpolished in the state that it’s currently in, but Dreamlit has a really strong foundation right now. I’m fairly excited to see how development will continue down the line. But for now, I have to say that for every one thing that Towers of Aghasba does well, there are about two other things that make the experience far more difficult than it needs to be.
To start with, I actually quite like the plot of the game and how story-driven it is. It’s not as open a sandbox as you might think, since you’re locked behind quest lines and Withered Haze areas. Withered Haze areas are places that are full of the Withered, and staying in them for too long will rapidly drain your HP. While the Withered Haze area is in effect, you can’t do things like ride your mount or create a new ecosystem. There are ways to clear it, of course, but it can be a hassle to do so thanks to the crafting system, which I will get into later.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. I sometimes fall into the rabbit hole of open world exploration where I get so interested in unlocking and seeing everything on the map that by the time I want to start the story again, I’m way too overleveled or I’ve already lost interest. With Towers of Aghasba actively preventing me from doing that and forcing me to take it slow, it’s a lot easier to control my progress and I never end up at a loss of what to do. Though some of the designs for the creatures can start to look like they’re Spore creations, I quite like how the animals and Withered look as well.
Now, again, I’d like to reiterate that Towers of Aghasba isn’t bad. There are just a lot of little QoL issues in the game that can really start to build up. For one thing, there’s practically no music in the game, which means you might need to play your own. This can serve as a handicap though, as you won’t be able to hear the combat music when you suddenly and unexpectedly aggro something. Climbing in the game isn’t very fun, and the mount is a lot less easy to handle than you’d imagine due to the difficult terrain. While trailers for the game show off luxuriant greenery and beautiful landscapes, most of the time, you’re going to be looking at a washed out wasteland.
On the far end of the scale, ecosystems have so much going on, it’s impossible to see anything on the ground. Feeding animals is a task that you need to do to level up the King Tree and such as well, but the AI for the animals is pretty bad. I’ve thrown food directly in the path of some, to no avail, only for one on the other side of the mountain to slowly amble towards it. Since so much of the game focuses on restoring nature and all, I would like to see something done with the animals in the future. Even being able to see how different species interact with each other would be nice.
In the grand scheme of things, all of those above complains are pretty minor. The biggest issue for me is how annoying the map is to use. If you play with a mouse and keyboard, you can simply press M to open up the map. However, if you’re playing on controller (like I was), you have to hit select and then tab open the map. You can’t set custom markers, and some of the map marks are missing their text. The landscape also looks more or less the same. This means I have to rely on the world map rather than the miniature one. So having to manually open up the menu and select it all the time just to make sure I’m heading in the right direction got aggravating very fast. I highly recommend just playing with a mouse and controller to avoid this.
Something else that bothered me just a little bit is how annoying it could be to collect materials for crafting. For a mechanic that’s basically 80% of the game, collecting materials was pretty exhausting. First off, Aghasba is so large even with portals and a mount that traversing it to collect the large amounts you need got old, especially since the game is so silent unless you play your own music. Secondly, some items felt impossible to find. Fish, for example, took me a while because the water reflection made them impossible to see at first, especially in the tutorial area.
At least I know that fish are in the water. I sometimes had no clue where to even start looking. I needed a guide to figure out how to get items like Cob and Hardwood. The map isn’t very helpful, since it only shows the most basic landmarks, and you can’t look up item descriptions for a clue. I found it odd that I got annoyed, since I played Don’t Starve without issue, but I think it’s because of a fundamental difference between the two. Back when I first started Don’t Starve, there were items that I didn’t know how to get since I hadn’t encountered them yet. But because there are so many things to do on a daily basis in Don’t Starve, there were enough tasks to occupy my attention when I wasn’t looking for the necessary materials.
In the case of Towers of Aghasba, the aforementioned story-driven nature of the game means that there actually aren’t that many things to do outside of simply collecting materials, crafting items, and fighting. So if you’re not sure where to get an item and you’re running all around the map searching for it (while needing to manually open up the map instead of simply hitting a shortcut), it can really eat away at your patience. Thankfully, I started playing the early access a little later than others, which means that I was able to consult other players’ posts or guides.
As a note, if you wanted to play this with your friends or other players, I recommend you wait until a bit later. In order to start multiplayer, you need to first unlock the Multiplayer Gate on Midhaven. Then, you need to input a code. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I don’t have friends who play, meaning I had no one to exchange codes with. But according to very 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 rocks. However, I once encountered an absolutely game-breaking bug. At first, the game stopped letting me aim things, which meant I could no longer throw objects or shoot arrows. Since I was close to completing a quest, I pushed on. Like someone slowly succumbing to poison, my game continued to break down. The color became even more washed out. My health and stamina bars disappeared into the aether. For the cherry on top, my on-screen mini-map vanished as well. So far I haven’t been able to recreate this to see what could’ve triggered it.
While this preview ended up fairly negative, I do think that Towers of Aghasba is fun. I already mentioned in my Tokyo Jungle retrospective that I’m the type of person who enjoys completing lots of minor tasks for a greater reward at the end, and that’s exactly the type of game this is. It’s just difficult to recommend this game in the current state it’s in. Dreamlit is cooking up something really interesting though, and I look forward to the day they can fully realize their vision.
Towers of Aghasba is available on Windows PC via Steam, and it’s still in early access.
Published: Nov 30, 2024 09:00 am