‘Asterigos: Curse of the Stars’ is an action-adventure RPG, developed by Acme Gamestudio and published by tinyBuild. Taking inspiration from both Greek and Roman mythologies, from buildings, and creatures, to clothing and armor; instantly you can see these themes in everything. Now, I don’t know if this is what they were going for but the main character Hilda, to me seemed very Spartan, while the NPCs were more Greek/Roman in appearance.

The premise of the game is you play Hilda a young legionnaire from the Northwind Legion sent to locate a group of warriors from your kingdom and sent on a mission to the cursed city, Aphes. You are to locate them and assess the status and details of their mission and help however you can, with even more incentive as your father is commanding the squad. Traversing the streets and outskirts of the cursed city, meeting its inhabitants both good and bad, and making choices will affect how you are looked at. Using all of your warrior training, and mastering an array of weapons and skills, you will take on mythical creatures and devious enemies. You will need to learn and uncover the truth of the cursed city, find your father, and become a true warrior.

Using a keyboard and mouse, I found it tough to manoeuver Hilda while moving the camera but switching to a controller made it much easier as I am more used to console gaming. Luckily, Asterigos can be played using any controller, as you cannot re-keybind at the moment which may annoy some, but with controller access, it is not a massive issue.

Even though there are some issues, the combat is still quite fun especially once you figure out the flow of your weapons, how they work and the best combos to use in most fights become quite easy. Dodging and defending was probably the worst part of the combat, so I just adopted the old saying the best defense is a good offense, and defeated enemies before they could attack.

When leveling up you have three stats you can choose to upgrade, your raw power (attack damage), max health, and Astral ability recovery speed/special attack damage percentage. You will also upgrade abilities specific to weapons and unlock weapon-specific special attacks, these are the best ways to quickly take out enemies but it drains your Astral energy bar, so you need to manage and plan out your fights.

I have to say my favorite thing about this game is the look. Now, graphically, it’s not next-gen and this is not a dig at the game or developers, I think if it was more realistic it would look worse. The more cartoonish character designs fit well with the game’s art style, fitting better with the surroundings and architecture.

Also, with the more mythological creatures and general vibe the gameplay gives off, the look is perfect in my opinion, makes me think of the old Hercules cartoons by Disney. Talking about the surroundings, it is quite detailed and looks amazing, you can get lost just manoeuvring around the gorgeous labyrinth, but that also could be because there is no mini-map to help guide you around making side quests and main quest objectives hard to locate.

The music and soundtrack were good, the classic fantasy game epic music fits but is not particularly memorable. The sound effects were great. The sounds of the weapons while doing a combo or the abilities, and the clashing of weapons when defending were beautiful.

The voice acting was also really good the dialogue sometimes was a bit cringe but for the most part, was perfect. Speaking of perfect, my favorite character Lucaine, livened this game up for me. I specifically did the quests and side quests that involved her, so I got to speak with her more often, her voice actor, and her unique character model; I wish more characters were more unique like her.

I recommend this game for RPG lovers and people who like the Souls games, Elden Ring, or less difficult like Genshin Impact. There are problems and hopefully, these will be fixed with patches, such as the binding of keys. I would maybe wait for patches in this case before getting it on PC if you are committed to only using a keyboard.

Though I had a lot of fun with this, it was challenging without seeming unfair or bugged, and when you were able to locate your quest, the story had some really good elements and made you think about the consequences of the decisions you make.

Written by: Adam Brasher