Towers of Aghasba Early Access review-in-progress: The good ending of a God-sim
All survival-craft games that come with building mechanics allow you to change its world to a degree. The freedom of this allowance ranges from moving its very mountains to just leaving a temporary mark on the server with a unique-looking base on a conspicuous spot. Towards the former end of that spectrum, you can reshape and terraform the world to the point of Theseus'ing it — think Minecraft.
Towers of Aghasba takes that idea, and fuses it with an ecological simulation. Instead of terraforming the map, you hold the rein of its ecological fate. You get the choice to nourish or stifle its biodiversity. At least in theory. In practice, you don't play an evil God, since the world is already fallen. The only way we go from here is up.
This theoretical anatomy of a God-sim, in the end, is a pretty cool game about watching entire ecosystems grow — or a meditation on eco-terrorism, depending on how you look at it.
Towers of Aghasba vs. industry-standard survival games: The 4X Rhomboid of Life
Towers of Aghasba has some of the expected nuts and bolts of a survival-craft game: there's a lot of resource collection, building huts, hunting, fishing, farming, and fighting. The main draw, however, is its ecological simulation. Rather than implementing the circle of life like a realistic simulation, it's a gamified system to add another layer to the rhomboid of explore, expand, exfoliate, and exterminate.
Towers of Aghasba comes with a number of biomes that can foster its own flora and fauna. The game nudges you to cultivate and learn about all of its living-breathing beings, as this is at the core of the gameplay progression.
Other survival-craft games will reward you with gear progression and character levels, but Towers of Aghasba provides a successful alternative. To watch a biome of your own making proliferate over time is a joy in itself, but to see a humble sapling you planted grow over time to live up to the name of a colossal tree seed is something else altogether.
From a narrative standpoint, one of your main goals is to bring the barren, hostile lands of the Midrath islands to their glory days of biodiversity, which it is implied your ancestors ruined—as humans tend to.
From a gameplay standpoint, creating and messing with biomes and their animals is your primary sandbox. Towers of Aghasba presents a blank canvas terra firma, where you plant Collossal Trees that can create and expand biomes around an otherwise barren soil. These are entire ecosystems that also bring along new creatures that would be otherwise unavailable.
You also, of course, need to create livable housing for your people to hunker down in. There's very little scope for granular base-bulding here. You don't build a house brick by brick. Instead, you build entire towns and place individual buildings.
As you parallelly build up the towns and the wilderness biomes, you spend the most time on the latter. There's a full-on pokedex that updates as you observe and interact with the creatures by giving sustenance or taking their life away. This ties into Amity, a currency that corresponds to your karmic score of creating or destroying life on these lands.
It's quite intuitive: feeding animal good, killing animal bad. Planting seeds good, chopping trees... not bad, because that would make it too tedious.
There's also exceptions to that "killing animal bad" rule. Spiders, one of the self-identifying bad guys of video games, can be killed without consequence (other than the consequence of blunting your weapon durability). I was surprised about learning that there's no Amity tax to pay for spider-slaying endeavors. Other than adding a whole new layer to the word Arachnophobia, this takes away some of the nuances of ecological preservation the game seemed to pose initially.
The explanation, of course, is that's no ordinary spider. That's the withered Raziliths, the spawn of corruption (and therefore the certified enemy of the people in nature). The Withered is the bogeyman miasma in Towers of Aghasba. The bad influence of Withered areas will drain your health, and in denser quantities, insta-kill you if you go into the super-Withered areas.
Towers of Aghasba's combat: Primitive but functional tools
Now that the natural-born enemy has been introduced, it's time to talk about Towers of Aghasba's combat. You can use your tools of geological inspection (Shovel, Picaxe, Hatchet) to poke and prod enemies, but that doesn't feel good at all. The real weapons are far better: sporting two-hit or three-hit combo movesets.
You also have a stamina bar, so you also have a dodge-roll. It's a meaningful dodge-roll here. Enemies have attack commitment, and while it's not always telegraphed, they have predictable enough patterns that you can make pretty good use of the dodge to do the usual poke-and-evade routine. Ranged combat is ranged combat — there's not much to talk about bringing guns to a knife-fight.
To balance out the highly exploitable enemy AI, they also sometimes come with dirty tricks like spitting out poison globs, and their basic attacks also hurt a lot if they land. Regaining health is also quite tough in the early-game. Together, these factors mean you have to think twice before taking a fight. More often than not, running away is just the better option.
That is not to say that combat is optional in Towers of Aghasba. The Withered threat is something you'll eventually have to fight, and the enemy ranges from various manners of critters and grunt mobs to towering bosses. Even outside of that, you'll have to necessarily hunt predators and prey as part of the game's crafting progression.
The janky basics
Speaking of running away, there's that stamina bar again. The glider you get at the beginning of the game paints the correct picture, there's a handful of Breath of The Wild inspirations here. The stamina system forms the basis of movement: sprinting, swimming, and climbing.
The first two are self-explanatory, but what about the climbing? It's quite janky. You crawl like a spider on cliff-faces and structures, but the collision boxes are just volatile enough that you sometimes clip through the surface and end up on the other side, at which point you have to spend even more time frantically trying to get back to the overworld.
In general, the basic movement system of Towers of Aghasba has good potential between freeform climbing and readily available gliding. Yet at its current state, I found it clunky and buggy. Riding my first mount also felt equally clunky, making traversal less fun than it should have been.
This speaks to the game's currently underbaked technical state. Performance on my RTX 4070 was far less stable than one would hope, and I can only hope that console players do not share the same issues. It's a good time to remember that Towers of Aghasba is ultimately in Early Access, so this is an understandable if unsavory impediment to an otherwise quite fun game.
Visuals and world-building: Man was here, too
The gameplay in Towers of Aghasba is not its greatest asset - at least in this (very) Early Access build I got to play. Notwithstanding the technical state, the game's graphics are impressive. With its pastel visuals, Towers of Aghasba is often reminiscent of a more vibrant Shadow of The Colossus.
At times, it can be too vibrant to the detriment of visibility. Small creatures can occasionally become hard to spot in the moody golden-hours of its GI tech, and harvestibles get lost in the thick underbrush of the temperate biomes. Yet, on the whole, the game's implementation of atmospheric fogs, far-stretching shadow cascades, and good-old ray-tracing can create downright breathtaking scenes.
While the graphics can be a hit-or-miss depending on how much the aesthetics appeal to you, the writing and characters absolutely blow it out of the water (a pun that will pay off when you start playing).
Often enough, the premise to survival games are paper-thin punctilio excuses for a jungle-island escapade. The characters are piecemeal vessels to drive gameplay, the plot gets left in the back-burner. Towers of Aghasba is a welcome departure from these expectations.
It's a very unique world with remarkably charming characters and its own history: deep enough for immersion, but not so deep that you get lost in the details. You're a masked child of the Shimu tribe, who have ventured far from their homeland to return to their ancestral islands. Here you are at that promised land, and now it's your task to build civilization back the right way (i.e. appeasing the four biome-Gods and dispelling the curse that plagues the lands).
The game's crafting and town-building take great care to stick to the tribal theme, while still providing a good sense of progression through more advanced buildings. There's no granular hut-building to make way for your creation, so you have to take this theme park at its face value. The indigenous Shimu architecture is well-realized, so this tradeoff works out in making the game more interesting and memorable.
In fact, it's the idiosyncratic artistic direction that carries the game the most, and the reason why I'm hopeful for the future of Towers of Aghasba. This game's brilliant music, art direction, and writing click into place perfectly, and elevate it to a misty zen wonderland I see myself coming back to often. For the first outing of an indie studio, this is no small feat by any means.
Despite the limited choice of base-building, the biome-building itself presents enough incentive as a progression system. It manages to create the foundation of something that could survive long-term in the open-world survival-craft sandbox genre.
Due to its nature as an Early Access, and the fact we didn't fully experience all of Towers of Aghasba yet, it would be unfair to make this a scored review. For now, what we can say is that it's a fresh take on open-world sandbox in the broader survival-craft genre. Its biome ecosystem gimmicks are well-developed enough to try right now — if you can overlook the Early-Access jank and optimization problems.
This is a review-in-progress, so we'll update it as we explore it more thoroughly and gain more perspective on its nuances.
Previewed on: PC
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Publishers/Developers: Dreamlit Inc.