This causes an inherent problem due to the open-ended questlines that you can tackle in any order. The player you get matched with is entirely anonymous, and the game doesn’t even notify you that the switch has been made. Throughout the game you always have an AI companion following you, and sometimes the game will silently replace your companion with another human player.

The passive drop-in/drop-out multiplayer also seems to be a bust. Since combat calls for so much patience, the frantic chaos of being surrounded will quickly add up to being too frustrating to bother, and it wasn’t long before I was sprinting past enemies avoiding them entirely. Opponents will often sneak up behind you after spotting you from seemingly hundreds of yards away, and it’s unfortunately common to be swarmed by as many as ten or twelve foes at once. Ashen’s enemy placement is not nearly as methodical. Souls-like games tend to be very careful about enemy placement, making it so that learning the locations of various enemies so that you can prepare for them across multiple forays is as important as learning your way around the controls. The open-world design does a lot for exploration, but it also negatively impacts the combat loop. The world is laid out quite well overall, with multiple paths through each area that allow experimentation and reward players who choose to take a more roundabout route from Point A to Point B. Ashen is also a lot more vertical than Dark Souls the environment allows for numerous chances to explore via climbing and dropping down from high ledges.Īctually running around and exploring feels pretty great. Rather than confining the player to more or less linear paths that branch out here and there, the world of Ashen is filled with open fields reminiscent of more traditional action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda and The Witcher. How Ashen sets itself apart is with its open world nature.

If you’ve played Dark Souls, you already know your way around Ashen’s combat because it really doesn’t do anything different.

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