Astral Throne

I find it kind of disrespectful to not fix the game that still has many bugs and instead of fixing any of them you announce a sequel....

An early access game with bugs galore that they dropped support for before it was finished to start making a sequel. If there's a fire emblem game you haven't played before, play that instead. If you've played all of them, play mods of them, if you've played all of those, play Dark Deity 1/2, if you've played those, keep looking for a different game, this one is entirely worse than its inspirations in every way with no real meaningful or well implemented alterations to regular fe gameplay. The only unique thing it has going for it is the artstyle (WHICH THEY DECIDED TO DUMP IN FAVOUR FOR A WORSE VERSION OF RPGMAKER 2.5D IN THE SEQUEL LMAO). Speaking of the sequel, the "award winning fantasy author" is an ai slop writer, the "awards" they win are the same handouts every book that no one has ever heard of gets, and after reading some excerpts of their softcore corn, I dont know how the devs thought it was a good idea to blow any amount of budget on this. Honestly you have to see the sequels trailer to understand how bad it looks. Regardless, they stopped support before the skeleton of the game was finished, don't waste your money. If you *really* wanna try it yourself, do it the cheaper way.

This game is so close to being something special, but held back by decisions that limit play too much imo. You get approximately 4 fights before you're forced into the final segment. Less if you don't clear the stages fast enough. This means your characters will probably be around lvl 10 going into the endgame due to exp scaling. And after a certain level, your units feel like they just stop getting exp altogether until you move on to the next chapter...which also mean their fights waste exp... Though with the SHEER ENEMY DENSITY, maybe that doesn't matter too much. The limited number of fights also means you have a limited amount of gold/exp to farm before progressing. This is made worse by the fact that the few items you DO get will only sell at 10% of their cost. You may as well just destroy items you don't want or just gamble them in the transmute pools. Speaking of which, I'm not sure if blue items are the highest rarity, but I didn't encounter anything higher. Even then if it's one you can't use, you can MAYBE afford a potion by selling it or pray you get a unit/book that makes use of it, lol. Finally, despite the punishing limitations, the game was actually enjoyable as units' builds and skills slowly add up and everything starts to click...until around the final 3 fights of the run. As soon as you see teleportation panels, the game just becomes incredibly unfun. Not only are they not intuitive on which ones connect to where (despite color matching, they don't all connect with all spots of the same color), but the enemies somehow SPIKE in difficulty beyond what you can bring at this stage. I said you hit around lvl 10-ish with your units by endgame...and the enemies feel like lvl 15 or lvl 20...and they VASTLY outnumber you. Don't even get me STARTED on the final boss. Giant crystal with 300 HP and 40 Defense and Resistance, 5 max-rarity weapons only it can use (of all ranges), and constant self-buffing and a self-heal for 30 damage. You'll be LUCKY to get 3-8 damage in at the cost of an entire unit's HP (because it also hits like a truck), only for it to heal it all back and smack 3 of your units at once. This, in addition to the swarm of enemies constantly pouring in behind you and I don't see how the final boss is actually winnable on any difficulty. MAYBE if you invest all your units into party/proximity buffs into a single stat (all-physical or all-magic) and pray you can buff hard enough, but...idk. Anyway, super-long rant over. tl;dr Would I recommend this game? Tbh, only for Fire Emblem masochists that want to add a roguelike element to what's the closest thing to a randomizer kaizo you can get. I rate it a 30-strength "All Attacks have +5 Range" Axe-Knight on a fort out of 10.

Game is fun but would have been better if it was a full campaign rather than the weird roguelike that it is. There are quite a few bugs with menuing that aren't hard to work around but makes the interface feel a bit cheap or fragile. Things like soft-locking because menus closed or opened at the same time or tooltips getting locked in place and unable to close. A save and return to the menu then a reload fixes these issues but it can be annoying and make the game feel sloppy or clunky. The game also starts to lag hard when there are many units on the map making for a poor experience as you get further in a campaign. The offerings on level up and skills also feel shallow and like more tiers should have been added. There's a bit of gacha aspect to the skills you get on level up but the pool is so small you'll probably see most everything pretty quickly. The campaign is also quite short amounting to 11 or fewer combats meaning your progress and units will fade as quickly as you get attached to any of them. The game offers controller support but it felt impossible to do the out of combat menus without switching to the keyboard and mouse. Unless you really enjoy the replay value the game will last about 6-8 hours which is a little too few for the price of the game. Had the campaign been more fleshed out and longer I think I would have been able to recommend this game despite its flaws. I think there's a good start to a game here but overall doesn't feel like a full game that would be worth the time to pick up. If you can get it on sale for 3-5 dollars sure go for it that's about the price range where I'd say the game becomes worth your while. On sale about 10 dollars, if you're really into the genre but can't feel attached to the units you're building and enjoy the feeling of starting a new campaign you'll probably feel satisfied. For full price I cannot recommend this game there just doesn't feel like it's enough game at that price point.

While I enjoyed what I played, I got unfortunately swamped by bugs the further into the campaign I got. From minor visual glitches to the game getting completely locked and only a restart would fix it. While I have every confidence the developer can iron out the bugs that are currently plagueing my playthrough, at the moment I just can't recommend it.

I really didn't want to give this game a downvote, but here we are. I love the concept and the overall direction. Truly. But, and it's a BIG but, this game is riddled with bugs still, this long after launch. I encountered a rather serious bug where if you have a character with a particular status effect at the start of battle, then you are unable to select any units or even go into the menu after they move. I tried several times and still wasn't able to break past it. Combine that with absolutely atrocious UI and controls (I played on Steam Deck, if that matters) and it starts to get very frustrating. Some of the issues are just bizarre. Why can't I navigate to the character status screen during battle with a normal directional pad input? Why do I have to use the mouse pointer? Which has AWFUL aim btw. I have never been more annoyed fighting with a pointer just to hover over an icon to see what the description says. Trash controls. The actual concept of a Fire Emblem-esque roguelike is fantastic and should be replicated more. And there really isn't much wrong with the gameplay cycle of this game, besides perhaps more meta-progression. The world map is incredibly basic, even for the polygonal pixel vibe, but it works. Navigating with a directional pad is, of course, a literal nightmare and I had to use the pointer to find my next destination. Which is also a nightmare. I REALLY wish the bugs would be fixed but the developers have already announced a sequel so I'm doubting (but also hoping) these are all worked out before it's abandoned. Would 100% return to this if so, but as the game is right now, I can't recommend it unless you want to be seriously let down by a run-ending bug or lose your literal mind just trying to find what an icon is for. Thanks for coming to my rant.

I wanted to like this game because I love the concept but after 3 runs, including one ended by a save corruption bug, I can't recommend this game. * I found the UI consistently frustrating and buggy. For a game with so much menuing, the menuing not being smooth and bug-free breaks the game. * The maps seem to be the exact same every run? * The pixelation filter on everything is distractingly ugly. * The music was a very pleasant surprise and is the highlight of the game. I'm also kind of disappointed that rather than iterating on and fixing this game, they're announcing a sequel.

I'm really mixed on Astral Throne. I really wanted to like this more. I don't think I'd outright recommend it, but I wouldn't warn others to stay away either. The scope of Astral Throne is impressive and ambitious. I really dig the art style and animations. The gameplay is heavily inspired by Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. The game pulls off those elements really well here, though I wish the upgrades were more impactful. The main element holding this game back for me is actually the roguelike mechanics. Because each run takes so long (at least 3 to 4 hours), I don't feel compelled to start another run. I wonder if this game would have benefitted more from a longer campaign and dropping the roguelike parts. Unfortunately, the game is also pretty buggy, particularly the UI.

After finishing my first full run, I am tentatively putting my review at a thumbs up because I feel the game has a solid base but still has a lot of room to improve. Even though its another roguelike in a *very* saturated market of other roguelikes, I think you'll enjoy it if you're a fan of them along with Fire Emblem like strategy games. The core gameplay loop is fun, and while I don't think it's a game I'll get endless hours out of like some others, I could definitely see myself going through a decent handful of full runs. The story is fairly slim but not bad, which is fine. It makes sense that your non-main units have basically no dialogue/lore relevance outside of a small blurb in their details, but I do wish they at least looked a little less same-y art wise. Would've gone a long way for having some favorites for reasons outside of their base stats/skills. That being said, I do have a few major criticisms that I think will have me put the game down until it's got a little more time under the hood. I ran into a handful of bugs in my first run alone, and I'm sure there are more that I didn't encounter. The runs are also VERY long(partially because some maps feel a bit too large and bloated with enemies in my opinion) for a roguelike that has basically no safety nets or undo's for a misplaced leader or unlucky crit that ends a run. For a game that has runs in the 5-10 hour range, I could see this being real frustrating on higher difficulties, which frankly has me hesitant to even try anything too hard. I personally found the UI very unintuitive to tangle with, and a lot of controls/menu navigation just felt very clunky on controller, which was a bummer considering it's my preferred control scheme. I do wish the game had some more music though. It feels fairly repetitive, and not terribly great to listen to for long stretches of time. Not terrible, but nothing to write home about. All in all though, I love the idea of the game, and most of my gripes I think are things that could be improved in patches. I look forward to what the devs have in their future updates and hope the game does well enough to continue supporting it.

ran into several bugs, including being unable to deploy units unless i restarted. on top of that, the ui is terribly grating to use, whether it's with a controller or m+kb. extremely amateur on that front and made the game unpleasant to -play-. fundamentally, part of what makes SRPGs interesting is how attached you get to your units. some games will have ways for you to get "random" units that aren't part of the story, but you can get attached to them. they can even carry some runs for you! and that's cool! unfortunately units kind of vanish and you have no real reliable way to get them again, even if units are drawn from a pool. so uh sorry if you liked someone, might take a while till you get them again. and this isn't even accounting for the randomness of a playthrough in a SRPG, which is part of the appeal and seeing which unit will pop off this playthrough. mix of unreliable units + skills being picked from a roguelike format is not super fun to me and goes against the fundamentals of the genre, to me at least. if you have more patience than me then i'm sure this game could be for you. unfortunately, the tragic part is that there's a lot of strong SRPGs that deserve their accolades, ranging from mythic titles like FFT or Tactics Ogre to good ole Fire Emblem, that are widely available to play and easy to access. try the demo to see if it floats your boat, i guess?