Astral Throne is a roguelike strategy RPG I’m absolutely hooked on
In previous reviews and editorials I’ve made clear my love for Fire Emblem and the larger strategy RPG genre in series like Disgaea and indie titles like Dream Tactics. These games tend to have fun albeit largely formulaic stories, with the gameplay being the driving factor that keeps me coming back. I’ve replayed my favourite Fire Emblem titles with any number of constraints and toyed with the various randomiser tools over the years to change which units I get when and how strong they are, but I’ve always wondered what a truly replayable game of the genre would look like. A game that offers fresh challenges and constant variation playthrough after playthrough. I’ve always wanted a roguelike strategy RPG. I've always wanted a game like Astral Throne.
For those who have followed the genre in the past, a lot is going to be very familiar right out of the gate, but for those less so let’s cover the basics. The core gameplay takes place on a series of grid-based maps, where your army and the enemy takes turns to move, attack, and use a decent variety of skills. Each character has different stats dictating how far they can move, how much damage they do, how much damage they’ll take, all that good stuff. For each combat encounter, and each skill used, your characters will gain experience to level up, and it’s about here we should start talking about some of the things that actually make Astral Throne a little unique.
Coming from a background of mostly Fire Emblem I felt right at home in these battles. Units move in a familiar way, you can attack and largely control the game in a familiar way. The developers have clearly put a lot of thought into making the game accessible to the audience that are likely to pick it up, and that bleeds into the changes that stray from that sense of familiarity. In terms of battle there are really two big things worthy of note, and that’s how characters level up, and what happens on level up. You see in a game like Fire Emblem it’s incredibly straightforward. You smack an enemy, you gain experience. You get 100 experience, you level up, randomly allocating you stat points based on set percentages that vary from character to character called growths. If a unit has a 50% attack growth, every level they have a 50% chance to gain one point. In this game we still see growths, but they’re used to distribute experience for stats to level up individually. This gives a sense of consistency to the stats when levelling up, and allows the game to mix things up elsewhere. After you’ve had seven individual stats level up, your character as a whole levels up, increasing their HP and allowing you to pick from three skills to take on. These skills are the other big difference to me when compared to your more traditional SRPG, and I’m all for them.
Going back to Fire Emblem, skills aren’t exactly a new thing. Each class has set skills, and typically reaching a certain level as a certain class will grant you that skill permanently. You can then swap classes, get more skills, and mix and match to get potent combinations. It’s a good system, but notably takes time to really build up. Time we don’t have in a game that’s made up of three acts and a limited number of battles per act. What we see here is a pretty good middle ground, and one that feels right at home in a roguelike setting. What you’re offered on level up will vary, with skills taken from a common pool, as well as more specialised pools for your class and larger party makeup, and amongst these you’ll find offerings of varying rarity. There’s some really great synergy to encounter, and the randomness of it really does make for some unique builds, often changing what would otherwise be a familiar class or archetype. My favourite one so far has been applying stealth onto an archer if they manage to secure a kill that turn, with stealth being a status that means an enemy can’t interact with them for their turn. Suddenly this frail class that hides in the backlines is out in front hoping his 90% kill shot doesn’t miss and leave him vulnerable. It’s brilliant.
There is more to the game than just the battles though. Each new run will give you a randomly generated map, and after one initial battle, you’re free to choose your path through the world. There are special events, shops, camps, all manner of things to think about when it comes to your pathing. As mentioned before, each act gives you a limited number of battles, but you’re free to weave in any non-combat activity for no cost at all. Once your battles are up though, your only option is to go fight the challenging act finale. It’s all something of a balancing act. Health doesn’t automatically heal between fights mid-act, so you’re left debating whether you want to chain multiple combat encounters together, whether you should try to find a camp mid-act to guarantee some healing, maybe stop at a shop and see if there's something useful. They’ve done a really good job in weaving that roguelike decision making into the SRPG genre, and it’s handled in a way that doesn’t feel overtly punishing or prohibitively challenging out of the gate. To their credit too, the maps used for battles still manage to feel very intentional. The map design itself isn't random, with enemy placement, recruitable units, and lootable items being the things that swap from run to run.
Unlocking achievements and completing full runs will net you new hero characters to start your next playthrough with, as well as higher difficulties as you work through the four available to you out of the gate. I’ve stuck to the base difficulty as of the time of writing, but I can at least appreciate the transparency of telling you exactly what changes as you preview the ones that follow it. Having only picked the game up yesterday this post naturally isn’t a comprehensive review, and given my schedule I’m not sure I’d have time for one anyway. Astral Throne isn’t perfect by any stretch, and I’d go so far as to say you you might be better off waiting a week or two to play due to a nasty save corruption bug that can just kill a run if you don’t fancy tackling all three acts at once. There are other small things I’d like to see like being able to zoom in and out on the map and being able to perhaps make the enemy attack range indicators a little more visible.
Having said all of that though, I keep coming back. This game really feels like something good to me, and I hope it both gets those last touches soon and continues to receive attention from the developer going forwards. It’s one SRPG fans should not be sleeping on.
