You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard about the game The Awakener Forgotten Oath before you read this because I certainly hadn’t until very recently. I imagine this isn’t helped by the terribly generic name of the game, which certainly won’t help it stand out in the horde of games added to Steam every day, which is a shame because this game is actually pretty good.
I won’t lie and tell you that I paid attention to the story of the game because I didn’t! This was mainly because the first bit of story you get when you start the game is largely two blocks of text about some… stuff I really can’t remember. Thankfully the story doesn’t seem all that important and from what I have played, it is the gameplay that’s the focus as it is an action roguelike, which also tells you most of what you need to know.
Dialogue in this game is pretty terrible, but that’s something that can easily be fixed by the developer, and as you can tell from the screenshots here, a bit of proofreading and some minor improvements would go a long way.
I thought I should point this one out as it was driving me insane with the lack of space and “its” should be It’s, and little issues like this can take away from the otherwise enjoyable gameplay.
Without a doubt, the best part of the game was the gameplay itself, and the plethora of different abilities and playstyles it has to offer. It comes with the ability to get different characters, which gives the game the fun it needs. At the start, my favourite thing to do was to launch my enemies in the air at shoot shadow daggers in several different directions. At least, it was my favourite until I went through and learned the Thunderhammer was a thing, and that’s really fun!
From my own experience, the core of the gameplay loop is easy enough. You go through a portal to fight enemies and then you go to the next room but you get to choose which room is next out of three options, and these will each have different rewards, difficulties and enemies to keep things feeling fresh. The further you get through the game, the better the rewards you have, but the higher the risk of keeping going.
The design of the rooms and world is nice, they look good but you can tell that the creators were spoiled for choice with the assets in front of them. Everything is just awkwardly placed with the lamps all being placed perfectly while cups, chairs, pots and everything else are damaged and knocked over while the lamps are in the perfect place. It looks good, but it’s a largely generic level of decoration.
The training dummy just stands out like a sore thumb in its stock assets position and it makes me feel like I’m walking around some person’s house in the Elder Scrolls online. That’s a perfect way of describing the feeling of being in a player’s house in an MMO, just placing whatever furniture they have and where it would look sort-of good.
I am not saying that using asset packs like this is necessarily bad but the overuse of them looks like they were just spamming copy and paste because there were pots everywhere.
The game’s menus were suffering from too much bloat as there was just loads of rubbish on the screen. I had no idea what half of that stuff did just lots of minor symbols and useless words that meant nothing. This could have easily been refined and less complicated.
The Steam page recommended hardware requirements are as shown below
Minimum
Recommended
The game’s visuals and graphics looked stunning which they should be considering the game was made on Unreal Engine. The game ran perfectly for me at max graphics, which isn’t a total shock considering I’m running an RTX 4090 and a Ryzen 5800X, so I had a consistent FPS of around 120, which appears to be the max cap of this game, and I don’t think the game can go far past that, not that I felt it needed to.
Honestly after rereading what I said of the negative parts of the game’s story, assets and dialogue are all just minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and they are all outshined by the core gameplay loop which is fun and I will go back to it for a few more playthroughs. I should also mention that the game has not been released yet at the time of writing this review, so many of the issues noted so far may have been fixed by the time the game comes out, and are something I’ll keep an eye on.
It also seems like many of the reviews on Steam agree with me about the core gameplay loop being the best part. So if action roguelike gaming your thing, you’ll find plenty of fun here.
The game is on Steam for pre-order on steam for just under £13 which is an absolute steal for what you get. I suspect Steam Sales will make this a future bargain too, so be sure to add it to your list of games to play.
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