Game Review - Eternal Strands

Game Review: Eternal Strands by Yellow Brick Games

Score: +3/-13

The core of the game is good but pretty much every system falls short of satisfying and instead leans toward tedious or nearly broken. Even the storytelling with its shortcut to hand-drawn concept panels.

+1 The graphics look good and have a distinctive style somewhere between realism and the more exaggerated, cartoony look of something like World of Warcraft.

• The environments and giant bosses can look quite impressive.
• However, optimization feels weaker than I would expect considering the stylized graphics and relatively small open-world zones.

+1 The material and crafting system is genuinely interesting.

• Different materials contribute different types of stats, and different pieces of equipment require different mixes of materials.
• This gives gathering some purpose because the material you use actually matters instead of everything simply becoming generic crafting currency.
• Lossless recycling helps enormously because experimenting with equipment does not permanently consume valuable materials.
• Nightingale tried something similar with materials and gear components, but its version became overly complicated while also encouraging fairly obvious damage metas.
• In Eternal Strands there is more reason to trade raw damage for environmental protection because heat and cold hazards can be extremely irritating if you are not prepared for them.

-1 Combat looks like modern responsive action combat, but often does not actually feel responsive enough for the mechanics it asks you to use.

• Combat is generally fine against a single enemy.
• Once there are two or more enemies, their very high mobility makes encounters much harder to control.
• Melee enemies can have very fast and sometimes extremely long-distance gap closers, so trying to disengage to find a more favorable location to control the approach of multiple enemies can be surprisingly difficult even if you simply run.
• Ranged enemies tend to move extremely quickly as well. They try to get line of sight to attack you while also being scripted to run away when you approach.
• A single ranged enemy can often be lured closer by hiding behind terrain. With multiple enemies, you are trying to corner one while the others flank and shoot you.
• This makes terrain extremely important, but the open-world areas are often wide open, especially from the perspective of ranged enemies.
• What begins as exciting action combat can very quickly turn into tedious pursuit and crowd management.

-1 Regular fights are not fun. The Spitfire is a good example of an encounter that can become extremely irritating when there are several enemies.

• These flying insect enemies often appear in pairs or groups.
• Their firebombs have long range, high accuracy, and leave lingering patches of fire on the ground.
• They attack quickly, are highly mobile, and can fly faster than you can run.
• A single Spitfire is manageable. You can break line of sight and wait for it to come closer, then use Ice Wall to exploit its vulnerability to frost and either let the ice kill it or attack it while it is frozen.
• With several Spitfires, however, they can bombard you from different directions while you are trying to deal with one of them.
• The tutorial recommends using a bow, but Spitfires do not take much arrow damage on Normal difficulty.
• The time to charge a bow shot for more damage leaves you exposed to their firebombs, and any hit throws you out of charging. Rapidly firing arrows at a moving target is unreliable and consumes stamina quickly. Once your stamina is depleted, you have to stop and recover while the Spitfires continue attacking.
• Your arrows realistically have medium range because they arc aggressively and there is no aim correction so despite the round reticle, shots must be absolutely precise. Meanwhile enemies have complete accuracy at long range, able to calculate the proper trajectory every time. And if you move closer they run (very fast) away.
• The result is another encounter where the counter exists, but becomes much more difficult to use when the game simply adds even one more highly mobile enemy.

-1 Blocking also feels questionable.

• It is not always clear whether attacks can be cancelled into a block, which makes blocking much harder to use reactively.
• Perfect blocks require reading an attack and timing the block properly, but that becomes much less practical when several enemies are circling you or shooting from outside your view.
• Holding block can work but feels pointless against multiple enemies because it is directional and enemies move very quickly to flank.
• The usefulness of perfect blocking against the giant bosses is also dubious.
• As a result, trying to engage with the more skill-based defensive mechanic can feel like a disadvantage rather than something the game rewards.

-1 Skills can be fun in theory but become clumsy and irritating once enemies get close.

• Enemies moving sideways even at a moderate pace can simply avoid many targeted skills.
• Tab targeting helps you land skills and spells better against a single target, but becomes a liability once several enemies start circling you and you are simultaneously trying to reposition or change targets or see what is happening.
• The game encourages Ice Wall as crowd control, but actually aiming it at a moving enemy at mid or close range can be surprisingly difficult unless that enemy is already running directly toward you.
• Once Ice Wall is placed, it becomes a hazard to you as well.
• If auto-climb is enabled, approaching an enemy trapped in the ice can cause you to climb onto your own wall and start taking freezing damage.

Another example: Drake's Breath.

• It is basically a magical flamethrower, which sounds like it should be extremely useful both in combat and while exploring frozen areas.
• Unfortunately, magically frozen ground can neutralize the fire so quickly that it does not create a useful warm area.
• If you keep using it long enough, you can briefly set the ground on fire instead and start burning yourself before the ice returns.
• In combat it can set enemies on fire, but it can also leave the ground burning afterward so you take damage trying to collect their loot.
• You can use Ice Wall to extinguish the fire, but then you have frozen the ground and can take cold damage while trying to collect the same loot.
• So when you get your new skills, they can feel clumsy and terrible in the early game.
• Ensnaring Blast is your first new skill and it's generally so clumsy to use that it's good only for one thing: hitting the weak point on the staff of the Arc of the Living Flame. This location is really annoying to reach or target but the Snare can easily be placed on it from a distance. Detonate it and the weak point is cracked.

-1 Some of the game's stated elemental counters are actually worse than ignoring the advice and using cheese tactics.

• The tutorial entry for the common Acala enemy says: "Their thick fur makes them resistant to frost, but ignites easily to flame."
• That strongly suggests that fire should be the preferred solution.
• In practice, Ice Wall can be much safer. Freeze the Acala, accept a little damage from your own ice, and kill it while it cannot retaliate.
• Drake's Breath requires getting much closer, takes a while to actually ignite the fur, and leaves you vulnerable to being hit several times while trying to apply the supposedly correct elemental counter.
• Those enemy hits can cost multiples more health than standing near your own Ice Wall.

The Glacial Slider enemy is an even clearer example.

• Its tutorial entry says: "Coated in a thick shell of frost magic, they are nigh-invulnerable until it is removed. Flame magic to the rescue."
• Except Drake's Breath seems to take forever to remove the protection, if at all.
• The Glacial Slider can simply walk sideways out of the relatively short-range fire attack.
• It has no useful hit reaction while you are channeling, so it can attack you and interrupt Drake's Breath.
• That same attack it makes creates a ground AOE which breaks your spell channel, slows you, and inflicts cold damage, making it even harder to maintain the supposedly intended attack.
• It can be easier to find high ground and repeatedly use your very first magic ability, Weaver's Grasp, to fling the enemy around until it dies. Or try rushing them with your two-handed sword.

-1 Weaver's Grasp can become a cheese tactic in many 1v1 encounters.

• Enemies are briefly stunned after landing, so you can sometimes grab them again before they recover and repeat the process.
• Grab, fling, stun, grab again.
• Having your first magic ability remain one of the easiest ways to defeat troublesome enemies undermines the fun of discovering new magic powers.
• The game keeps giving you interesting new toys while its combat balance can encourage you to keep using the first one.

-1 Boss fights are not fun and more about fighting controls.

• Trying to reposition while clinging to a boss can be surprisingly tedious.
• It is difficult to stop climbing and simply change which direction your character is facing.
• While climbing, trying to reverse direction can result in moving backward rather than actually turning around.
• Climbing can stick you to the wrong body part if you are close.

The very first Ark of the Stricken Earth also demonstrates the repositioning problem.

• Its wide headpiece is almost always very close to the location on the shoulder you need to be to hit the weak spot.
• You can easily stick to the wrong nearby body part and then spend too much time fighting the climbing controls just to get back into position.
• The challenge becomes less about defeating the boss and more about persuading your character to stand where you want.

-1 Targeting or damaging individual boss body parts can also be unreliable. This breaks the entire boss fight encounter and definitely makes boss fights not fun.

• When trying to burn the mane off a Brennig Glasstail with Drake's Breath, you can stand directly in front of the mane and use the fire conal attack only to damage the boss itself but not even set the mane ablaze briefly. Even using the Flame Bow and seeing a flicker of flame on the mane can result in nothing happening even after multiple shots.
• You can end up killing the boss without even singeing the mane for reasons that are not visually obvious.
• When you watch footage carefully, the mane appears burnt off when you "break" the head (blue-light cracks appear).
• You cannot actually target the mane. Shots go right through as if it is an object with no clipping.
• You can break the head with another type of attack (e.g., your sword) but using Drake's Breath on the mane afterwards does not burn it. So it's still unclear what the mechanic is.
• This is also contrary to breaking other giant boss parts where a piece cleanly falls away and you don't do much damage to the boss's health (which prevents the boss from dying before you can complete the sequence to harvest the Strand item).
• The obvious solution of using a purely fire attack (Drake's Breath skill) instead of a smaller fire attack (fire arrows) doesn't seem to work as well or not at all, adding to confusion for the player when the in-game documentation clearly states the mane needs to be burnt off.
• Instead of an intuitive mechanic that corresponds to in-game instructions, the player has to reverse-engineer the developer's workaround to approximate the mechanic they want.
• This is particularly frustrating because targeting and dismantling specific body parts is supposed to be one of the game's signature systems and the only way to get skill upgrades.
• If a game wants you to climb around giant monsters and surgically attack particular pieces of anatomy, the climbing controls and hit detection need to be unusually good. Here they often are not.

-1 Harder difficulty can feel like it is throttling progression rather than rewarding skill.

• The monsters (in theory) drop materials you actually want to keep, so defeating them is an important part of gathering and progression.
• However, most monsters drop low-grade materials you might never use, and then every encounter becomes a waste of time but they are a lot of them sprinkled on the maps.
• When the mechanics themselves are already tedious, making enemies harder does not necessarily create a more satisfying skill challenge. It can simply make collecting those materials slower and more expensive in healing resources.
• This is especially noticeable when encounters involve several highly mobile enemies because the player has relatively poor tools for preventing themselves from being surrounded.

After a difficult encounter, the next part of exploration can become searching for replacement Vitality Tonics.

• You can only carry four healing potions.
• They are not desperately uncommon, but you may have to trek back through the environment trying to remember where you previously left one behind.
• So an irritating fight (that was unavoidable but also pointless because they didn't drop anything you wanted to keep) can be followed by an equally uninteresting recovery phase where you retrace your route just to restore the resources consumed by the encounter.
• An easy fix would have been to allow the player to collect the potions but only replenish their belt quick-use slots outside of combat.

-1 The presentation sometimes looks like development shortcuts rather than deliberate stylistic choices.

• Despite having attractive 3D environments and character models, some story sequences switch to almost hand-drawn illustrated panels.
• These may be intentionally stylized, but they can look like concept-art panels or storyboards that were used in place of fully produced cutscenes.
• Regular dialogue also uses 2D visual-novel-style character portraits rather than the existing 3D character models.
• The contrast is jarring because the game has already established a fairly attractive 3D visual style, so switching to static illustrated panels can make those scenes feel unfinished or budget-driven.

+1 Some world systems genuinely change the way you approach the map.

• For example, the weather can affect what preparation you might need, how your skills can affect the world, and what creatures you can encounter. This means the same map has to be handled differently.
• -0 Sometimes the changes are less than what you would expect. For example, creatures are almost never affected by the weather conditions like Flash Freeze or Miasma (dangerous zones of fog) even though they can be very dangerous to you. They might swap in some appropriate creature (e.g., cold-resistant Glacial Sliders during a lash Freeze weather event) but even fire-based creatures like Spitfires that would normally be affected by your ice powers are immune to cold weather that does more damage than your ice powers.

Exploration is either lacklustre or irritating.

• -1 Initially there are an excess of breakable crates but mostly they give junk and your inventory is limited anyway. But later on there are an excess of higher-tier materials from fighting enemies and your inventory starts to limit exploration because you might be forced to drop some of those resources to make room.
• -1 However, most resources end up unused because there are better ones. Trying to remember which ones especially newer ones are better however can be a chore and you don't see stats until you are at the blacksmith composing gear.
• Chests are sprinkled about but often it feels like they are more reliable at giving you slightly better junk with mostly green-grade material. Some chests are better but don't respawn regularly or never.
• A way to mark locations in-game would help a lot with finding them again.
• Some of the materials you really want are hard to farm except from a giant boss and even that is somewhat random with not all bosses available in the world and some zones having an irritating weather condition you have to deal with.
• There may be several materials but you will as "best in slot" but want to use only a handful. And when you find out what they are, you discover farming them is tedious. Which obviously extends the game with grind but it would at least be enjoyable grind if combat were more enjoyable to repeat.
• Meanwhile moving around the map means unrewarding but time and potentially resource-consuming encounters around every corner.
• Because most of the items end up being junk, the player really doesn't need to be saddled with inventory management in the style of an extraction game where you have to choose what to bring home with you. The camp upgrades are about converting junk into upgrade currency, and that could simply be increased to allow the player to periodically clean up their hoarded stuff (or better yet, be made more meaningful).
• -1 Climbing is terrible. Mostly it works but sometimes it is unpredictable such as suddenly letting go. Or starting a climb at a ledge to begin climbing down only for it to not work or cause you to let go. Jumping onto a wall either starts you climbing or sometimes bounces you off.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in Eternal Strands. The elemental interactions, material system, physics magic, climbing, destructible giant bosses, and environmental hazards sound like the ingredients for a very systemic action RPG.

The problem is that many of those systems are more entertaining when you imagine how they should work than when you actually use them. Elemental weaknesses can have inferior practical results compared to the "incorrect" element, crowd-control spells create hazards for the player, enemies can simply walk out of channeled attacks, new magic competes poorly with cheese using your first ability, and boss battles can become fights with climbing and targeting controls.

Combat is generally fine when fighting one enemy, but the game frequently scales difficulty by adding more highly mobile enemies without giving the player equally good tools for controlling the battlefield. That turns exciting encounters into tedious ones, followed by trekking around to replace the healing potions they consumed.

Eternal Strands has some genuinely interesting systems underneath all of this. Unfortunately, too often the practical lesson is not "use the clever elemental interaction the game taught you," but "find whatever awkward workaround the mechanics happen to reward."