When visiting the local store, the merchant’s dialogue crowbars unrequired details from the past three years of your protagonist’s unseen life into a single, painfully unnatural exchange: “It’s been three years, my dear Thorn. Aiming for dark melancholy, the script mostly lands on fumbled sentiment and excruciating exposition. The quality of writing bounces between generic and cringeworthy, and fails to craft a tale – at least in its opening – that feels worth hanging on to. It is almost a facsimile of The Banner Saga’s own dual system of armour and health, but works well enough to make battle a /slightly/ different spin on an already successful design.Ĭombat may be enjoyable, but outside of tactical moments, Ash of Gods comes across as a pale imitation of its inspiration.
It also features a neat dual hit point system, in which you opt to either damage an enemy’s stamina to prevent them from performing strong attacks, or target vitality for straight-up wounds. The combat, devoid of cover mechanics or other complexities, hones in on the importance of positioning and lining up character turns in the correct order. This is a stunning imitation and so it, too, is beautiful throughout, be that in its detailed static scenes or the nostalgia-inducing animation that pays homage to the likes of Fire and Ice, Wizards, and the animated The Lord of the Rings film. In its best moments Ash of Gods is great simply because The Banner Saga is great.