Achilles is a legendary Greek hero of the Trojan War whose weakness was so popular that we named a body part after it. Achilles: Legends Untold aims to retell his story, this time with a twist. After falling in battle, Achilles wakes up having escaped death. A mysterious voice in his head urges him forward and he finds himself in a familiar place at an unfamiliar time. Over the course of a dozen or more hours, Achilles will slaughter his way through enemies, both real and mythical, on his quest for revenge. While Achilles: Legends Untold can be a fun game to tear through, it’s often crippled by conflicting design decisions that can make the game more frustrating than it should be.
Let’s begin with the narrative. The premise of Achilles: Legends Untold is interesting enough at the start but it’s often hampered by its writing and presentation. After the opening hour, I found it hard to be engaged with the plot. The third act has some cool reveals but by and large, it’s relatively uninvolved. This is due in large part to a lot of the main missions being a series of favors. (A point that Achilles even makes himself in passing.) Apart from being a boring way to push the narrative forward, it does little to build Achilles up to be the mighty hero that he is. To exacerbate this issue, the ending of the game sees you fighting previous bosses you’ve already beaten in the lead-up to the final boss. This felt like a cheap way to extend the runtime rather than a conscious decision made to progress the narrative.
Achilles: Legends Untold is built on the Unreal Engine and the result is a game that can look good during gameplay. I played the game on the Xbox Series X and found the environments (especially areas with ornate carpets and complex tile work) to have nice detail with the lighting system being a notable highlight. However, the same cannot be said for the cutscenes, which are often lackluster. Animations are stiff and details that appear in gameplay are notably absent. This especially goes for the quick cutscenes that play after most boss fights where Achilles will either kill or spare an enemy based on your choice. These feel like PS2-era sequences that feel ripped out of the original God of War games.
The game is also impressive in the audio department with good sound design from the smashing of wooden barrels as you roll into them to the changing of footsteps based on the terrain you walk over. This, paired with the score, really helps give the game a good sense of atmosphere as you roam the map or delve into dungeons. But, at the same time, the voice acting is very mixed. I understand that it’s hard to get great performances as a small indie studio but for a game called Achilles, it really hurts when the voice of Achilles isn’t very good. It lacks the gravitas of a legendary war hero. Other performances are hit or miss with some great line delivery in between, but they come and go. Achilles is with you the whole time and it gets hard to ignore when he starts emotionlessly reciting poetry as you play with little to no inflection.
Now let’s get to the actual gameplay, where the game seems to be conceptually conflicted. On one hand, Achilles: Legends Untold is an isometric open-world Souls-like, with dodge rolls and Bonfire-esque Shrines to boot. On the other, the game is also a Diablo-like loot-based RPG. While the game describes itself as Souls-like, it’s more simply a hack-and-slash. There is a fair amount of weapon variety from axes and swords to spears and greatswords. These feel distinct in gameplay and accommodate different playstyles based on your interests.
You also get a special ability, which you can change in the equipment menu. It’s defaulted to a satisfying kick that is reminiscent of the “This is Sparta” moment from 300. While I did experiment with the others, the kick was what I primarily used. Achilles also has the ability to throw an equipped shield and call it back like Mjölnir. Unfortunately, there is some slight delay in combat that I couldn’t quite come to grips with. Don’t get me wrong, Achilles can look pretty badass in fights, especially when combining a good kick and shield toss in with the attacks. However, the floatiness of the controls meant I didn’t always feel like a badass. On a few occasions, I found the game would not respond to inputs at all when I pressed them. The combat’s not awful when you look at it as a straightforward hack-and-slash. I just find it odd that the game specifically classifies itself as a genre where combat feel has the utmost importance.
The feeling of confusion permeates the first few hours of Achilles: Legends Untold. Take the skill tree, for example. It is sprawling and looks cool but it’s also a bit overwhelming and it takes a while to get acquainted with. Thankfully a handy reset option is always available but that doesn’t really change the fact that it’s confusing. To use the skill points, you need to go to Shrines that are dotted across the open world. You can use these landmarks to fast travel to other Shrines and rest. Much like other Souls-likes, resting also revives enemies in the area. One really great thing in Achilles: Legends Untold are the load times. Whether you’re fast traveling from Shrine to Shrine or just going into a new area, the loading is nearly instantaneous. It’s so fast in fact, that I wonder if a loading screen was even necessary for the latest generation of consoles.
One thing that I found helpful (that admittedly also made me complacent) is the mini-map. It comes with a handy dotted line that leads you right to your current objective. Part way into the adventure, I found myself over-relying on the mini-map so much that I sometimes didn’t really understand why I was doing what I was doing. You can turn off the mini-map if you feel the same way and while the game doesn’t have many “next-gen” options like performance modes, it does let you tweak the experience by turning off damage markers, enemy health bars, and more.
Let’s get back to the gameplay conflict at hand. The Diablo side of it all. As you play, you will come across numerous chests to break and glowing bags to pick up. To the game’s credit, I do think that it rewards exploration pretty well. Going off the beaten path will often net you loot of some sort, be it in a cellar full of skeletons or around a group of soldiers. Unfortunately, the loot mechanics aren’t very rewarding, and engaging with those mechanics isn’t necessary. I made it seven hours into the game without really giving what I picked up a second thought and I made it by without any real consequence. I did eventually start trying things out for the sake of thoroughness, but part of what makes loot-based games so addicting is the hunt for a better weapon or cooler shield, and I didn’t really feel that here.
I believe the best version of Achilles: Legends Untold is at the end of one of these two diverging gameplay loops and I personally think it’s down the Diablo path. A lot of elements feel thrown in for the sake of being more “Souls-like” without it feeling necessary. For example, the Shrines. I understand that a Souls-like needs a bonfire equivalent but the leveling up feature could easily be slotted into the menu. And instead of respawning at those Shrines, the game could have just as easily respawned me at pre-determined checkpoints. Something that the game actually does at some points as I didn’t always return to a Shrine after death. And, in my opinion, I could have done without the respawning enemies after resting too.
If the game instead wanted to be more like a Souls-like, there are a lot of elements that need to be reworked here, Mainly the level design. As significant as the gameplay is, level design is also a cornerstone of the genre. Open worlds in great Souls-likes are large (which Achilles: Legends Untold is) but they are also winding with side paths leading back to familiar locations to minimize backtracking. And the Bonfires (or a given game’s version of them) are often placed strategically and sparingly as a way to encourage exploration. Achilles: Legends Untold instead chooses to fill its flat map full of Shrines, giving players the alternative choice of fast traveling everywhere.
Achilles: Legends Untold uses a proprietary GAIA (Group AI Action) system that allows several enemies to work together to mob you. This is often the case as you play, with Achilles frequently being run up on by soldiers, skeletons, wolves, and more. In practice, this not only dictates how the enemies approach you but also how they attack. On a few occasions, I would see one soldier kneel with a shield to give another soldier a boost up for a jump attack. All this works as intended for the most part and being mindful of not being cornered is key to survival. (Though with the ground pound skill, you don’t really need to worry about that.) I noticed some minor AI bugs but they were mostly harmless like a deer doing 360s like it was trying for an Optic sponsorship. On the Wanderer difficulty, the game is not too hard and players who want more of a challenge can kick it up to Hero in the main menu.
Before I wrap it up, I want to mention saving. I played Achilles: Legends Untold over the course of a week, stopping after a few missions by selecting the “Save & Exit” option in the pause menu, loading back to the main menu, and then closing the game. The saves are pretty forgiving, putting me close to where I left off. So I did the same thing last night (as of when this review is going live). This morning, I booted up the game to find that I wasn’t where I should have been. To my dismay, the game put me back by not one, not two, but two and a half missions. I spent the next hour and a half replaying what I had already played and beating one big boss and three mini-bosses. Fighting through all the enemies I had already killed and having to reignite all the Shrines I already visited really made the open world feel like a chore and, I have to be honest, this setback really dampened my experience with the game.
I know I spent a long time talking about the flaws in Achilles: Legends Untold but I still don’t fully hate the game. The gameplay is decent enough to keep you going for the game’s 15-hour run time and by the third act, the story does manage to recapture your attention. (Assuming a save doesn’t set you back by an hour and a half.) While I understand the motive of small developers trying to imitate big AAA games, Achilles: Legends Untold fails to commit to one vision and the result is a game that can’t decide if it wants to be a challenging action-adventure game or a loot-focused RPG. I might not care much for a continuation of this particular story or world, but I am interested in what Dark Point Games do next. The groundwork for a good game is here and I want to see them build upon it with better writing and performances, as well as a more streamlined gameplay experience. Achilles: Legends Untold is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
