Achilles: Legends Untold puts the “early” in Early Access. Across the board, this action RPG is full of ideas that feel like they are still an epic journey away from being ready. Combat, which has Soulslike ambitions, is competent but a bit flat; the first stage of this world looks good and is full of monsters to kill but devoid of things worth exploring; and the story – beyond its interesting reframing of the death of Achilles by a well-placed arrow from Paris of Troy – is trivial and its characters are rote. And, while it should go without saying that early access games are buggy, at launch Achilles has more than its fair share, even by this standard. In its current state, there’s nothing legendary to talk about.
The imaginative addition to the myth is that after being slain, our titular demigod goes to Tartarus and meets Hades, where they agree that it would be in their mutual interest to let Achilles return to the surface so that he can take his revenge; in return, Hades gets a superhuman tool to do his bidding. Familiar characters, like King Agamemnon, meet the freshly undead Achilles and aren’t always happy to see him. It’s a good start, but the other characters and story elements introduced thus far are largely forgettable, and much of the dialogue is utterly underwhelming.
Once reborn, Achilles is thrown into a colorful, verdant Greece, with the first bits of his new lease on life spent finding Hades’ missing nephew, Hephestus, the god of fire. Once they’re reunited the three of them hatch a plan: they’ll restore the connection between Greece and the underworld so that the shambling undead can go back to their homes. Sounds good to me, what could go wrong?
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From there, I did a bunch of running from dungeon to dungeon, gathering doodads for so-and-sos, all in pursuit of Hades’ big plan – that takes about five hours to hit the current finish line. Doing so was more inconvenient than it needed to be because without a minimap, in conjunction with the great distance between these locations, it’s incredibly easy to get lost on the way. You can eventually fast-travel between shrines, but because there isn’t a proper world map either it’s impossible to know where they are in relation to each other. As an example of the trouble this causes: when you first begin your adventure, you unlock a forge that’s supposed to be your early go-to location for upgrading and buying equipment… but you can’t teleport to it. So until I memorized exactly where it is among a lot of samey-looking ruins and rocks, I spent more time searching for it than I did engaging with any of the crafting.
This confusion can go double for dungeons. The second one, the Temple of Cronus, changed its layout every time I died in it – but only slightly, with some sections being exactly how I left them, sandwiched between new sections that I’d never seen before. This was a maddening and cruel penalty that made what should have been a simple restart take so much longer, and one that could be easily made palatable by a map or wayfinding system of any sort. Contemporary games with randomized dungeons are almost always a linear path from one room to the next, or at least have tools for finding your way through them – and I didn’t know how much I missed those until now.
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All of that aimlessness is a side effect of the fact that the countryside between dungeons is surprisingly large, full of pretty scenery and diverse locations like rugged mountains, dark temples, and rolling hills… but it’s also devoid of anything worth walking off the beaten path to discover. Maybe it’s expecting too much of a modest game like Achilles, but this many years after games like The Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild stoked our urge to explore by filling their massive open worlds with points of interest with elaborate side quests or puzzle dungeons, I was disappointed by what I found. Rarely did any of my sidetracking bear any fruit, and when it did, it was just to add a new unremarkable weapon to my arsenal of swords, bigger swords, spears, and shields. That might be one thing if you have an exciting loot system, but right now Achilles does not. Other than that, many items you find are various sorts of health potions or status cures, most of which I never even engaged with because (thus far) things like being poisoned are never presented as a viable threat to you.