Ashen

I don't think you could make a clunkier game even if you tried.

Ashen is yet another Dark Souls clone and that fact alone should have kept me from purchasing this game. However, here we are. Be warned that you cannot manually save and every enemy does a ton of damage. There are lots of extremely accurate archers in this game too. When you are killed, you are sent way back to a respawn point to do it all over again and face the same respawned enemies over and over. You also die almost immediately when entering water for some reason. Also, some keys on the keyboard cannot be remapped such as the arrow keys for WSAD and using autohotkey sometimes causes the player to run and turn on its own without input. There are also lots of bugs such as being sent back to a respawn point when you didn't actually die and using consumables (which are scarce by the way) not actually healing you. There is also no way to pause the game and you are attacked by enemies even when entering menus. Everywhere in this game also looks the same with low-res graphics and bland washed out gray and brown colors. Everything also takes place in boring outdoor forests and fields. This game is also TERRIBLY optimized with constant huge frame rate drops when loading areas no matter what graphical setting. In addition, pressing the dodge key does nothing when sprinting and using a shield is useless. There is also a very limited diversity of weapons and gear and they all wear down and break constantly. You also cannot loot enemies for gear and weapons because they instantly disappear after you kill them. So there really is not much to managing the inventory system in this game. I also found the story and dialogue to be boring and completely uninteresting. I cannot recommend this game at all as there are much better rpg games out there to be played.

Love the look and as a big souls fan I was looking forward to this. It starts out pretty good. Has a decent story and a great look. But, the combat is just not quite there for a souls game. It wants to be. But, just doesn't cut it. It's fairly easy throught the first 3 areas or so. Then the difficult all of a sudden ramps. The problem is, the combat just isn't up to par with where it should be. And, in order to increase the difficulty they just throw in lots of enemies in tight spaces in lieu of quality encounters with better enemies. I'm about half way through and ultimately my initial impressions have been brought to the reality that this game just isn't that good. With a bunch of tweaking to the combat and a better implementation of the encounters if could be good.

I like soulslikes in general, but this one is so utterly bland and mediocre in every possible way that I couldn't even get through half of it. It's like DS with less gear, less skills, less customization options, less charm and less fun. It's not bad, it's 'fine'. If you like the genre then go get Nioh, or The Surge or Bloodborne, something with its own identity that tries to build upon the DS formula, because Ashen just takes away from that formula and adds nothing to it.

I played this game at a friend's and I couldn't stand it after merely a good hour or two of gameplay, the gameplay is bland, controls are horrid and you'll find yourself mostly fighting against controls rather than the very simple AI. The graphics are mostly grey and washed out, which I usually love (and to be completely honest the aesthetic looked promising initially) but it really becomes just bland and boring after a moment. The game is also extremely badly optimized and was making my GTX 760 run at max for graphics that really aren't that impressive in any way (and also changing the settings seemed to have little to not effects)