Eternal Strands Review
ETERNAL STRANDS REVIEW
BRYNN OF ALL TRADES
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Shadow of The Colussus, Dragons Dogma and Monster Hunter are just a few of the sources of inspiration for Eternal Strands that Yellow Brick Games have been very transparent about. As the saying goes “Jack of all trades, master of none”, which is usually accurate. However, Eternal Strands defies conventional wisdom with gameplay as proof that you can offer a little bit of everything and still have a very good experience.
GENRE BUFFETT
Eternal Strands is a buffet, serving a little bit from RPG’s and adventure games from the past few decades. There are telekinetic powers, elemental spells, looting, crafting, light levelling, base management, diverse magical lands and of course, epic colossal encounters.
You play as Brynn, a young, courageous, and inexperienced Mage, which in Eternal Strands is called a Weaver. With the help of her fellow Weaver outcasts, Brynn is at the forefront of recovering the Enclave from the evil tangles that have infected the lands.
The story is told to you through a variety of mediums. There is the occasional CGI cutscene, and great looking almost anime style animations, but for the most part, it was told through static 2D art. It would have been great if more of the cutscenes were animated, however the voice acting was incredible that it gave an authenticity to each character and removed the focus from the lack of animations.
The adventure in Eternal Strands also aided by a fantastic score from Austin Wintory, who made a name for himself from games like Journey and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.
YELLOW BRICK ROAD
The gameplay loop of Eternal Strands is traditional, but still satisfying. Get a quest, head out into the Enclave, fight some enemies, collect loot, complete the quest, return to camp to upgrade and process the story. What made the loop unique and addicting was the amount of elements in the sandbox and a gameplay that constantly surprised you with the unexpected.
Each biome has an epic encounter or colussus that you will need to defeat if you want to learn a new magic spell. The first time that you defeat each behemoth requires a brutish approach. All it requires is that you figure out what works and survive, even if sometimes you figure out how to exploit each Goliath.
You don’t have to take on most of these colossal enemies, but each one drops a a crafting material that you will need to learn a new spell, which you could go without most spells, but playing Eternal Strands without taking full advantage of all the spells, would be wasteful of the experience that Yellow Brick have crafted.
Taking things a step further, to upgrade each strand, you will need to gather research, learn their weaknesses and then similar to Horizon Zero Dawn, surgically defeat these colossal beasts. Returning to these fights was also completely optional, but it allowed you to upgrade your strands and it was more fun on repeat encounters when you knew what their weaknesses were, and had to approach the battle from a tactical perspective.
When it comes to bringing down these gargantuans, combat is truly your oyster. If you want to be focused on magic you can focus on finding and levelling up magic spells, but if you would rather take a more traditional approach to this fantasy game, you could focus on upgrading your bow, sword and shield or two handed weapon.
Whenever you are having a difficult time, the key is to remember that Eternal Strands wants you to experiment. I kept having a difficult time with an enemy later in the game. Fire wasn’t working, ice wasn’t working, and weapons weren’t really working either. Then I remembered one of the first skills Eternal Strands gives you, which was the Kinectic Grasp and then I just picked them up and flung them off the cliff and deep into the abyss below.
The universe in Eternal Strands is lore rich, which is nice, but it also is not always in your face. If you want to just play around in the sandbox, that is your choice, but if you care to learn more about this world, finding clues around the world will expand your codex and provide lengthy entries to read back at camp.
CRITICISM
If the highlight of Eternal Strands was the emergent gameplay, then the underlying issue is that too many things deviated the player from it. The plot had too many “strands” and became overly complex with unnecessary romances, one too many side plots and a few too many quests that felt like nothing more than busy work. There is too much loading and this is exacerbated when there are plot points and quests that require you speak to adversaries back to back, but they are located in different areas.
There was also a weather system with flash freezes and droughts in Eternal Strands that I can appreciate for the variety for return visits, and how if there was a drought the world would be more susceptible to fire, but it mostly became frustrating and inconvenient. What I usually ended up doing was just sleeping until the weather was right to avoid the inconvenience altogether.
The other issues were related to combat. To begin with, there was a lock on ability, which kept you in the enemies orbit when you tried to dodge roll and this would often roll you into danger instead of away as you would want. Next, by the end of the game, you have a lot of spells and often needed to use a combination of them. This meant you needed to constantly open the slow motion radial menu . It would have been nice to have a hot-key to program your more frequent spells, just as you had the ability to switch potions with a quick push of the D-Pad. This would have provided a more fluid combat experience.
Moreover, the climbing system in Eternal Strands is effortless, but worked as a double edged sword as during battle, you could easily begin climbing as you were trying to evade danger and this left you exposed to danger often, especially if you were fighting one of the Enclaves behemoths.
CONCLUSION
Eternal Strands biggest strength is its sandbox gameplay full of experimentation. The game constantly rewards you for attempting something new. Eternal Strands features an impressive physics sandbox, and although it lacks the polish and refinement of its inspirations, it harmoniously blends elements of Zelda, Monster Hunter, Dragons Dogma and Shadow of The Colossus.
Even though each element of inspiration is better in the source material, Eternal Strands ability to combine everything into one massive sandbox created a wonderful adventure full of emergent experiences.