Achilles Legends Untold – Action RPG Adventure in Ancient Greece – Beta Preview

In the action RPG Achilles: Legends Untold, you can relive history from Ancient Greece with Achilles.

In Achilles Legends Untold, we play Achilles, the hero from Homer’s Illiad saga, and fight for ancient Troy. In this action RPG adventure, there is Ancient Greece mixed with ARPG gaming like in Titan Quest, but it also resembles RPGs like Diablo or even Dark Souls.

The release date of the game is planned in Q2 2022 for PC on Steam and I will show you gameplay and explain how it is played. If you like games set in Ancient Greece, with mythology and heroes, then this game by Dark Point Studios from Poland might be right for you.

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This post is available here as text, but also as YouTube Video (German Voice-Over, English Subtitles). So you can choose how you like to enjoy it most.

Achilles Legends Untold – Beta Preview Video

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

Achilles: Legends Untold – Beta Preview – Pre-test – Introduction

Hi there, this is the Zap. In this “Achilles Legends Untold” Beta Preview, you’ll get a sneak peek at the new action-adventure game with a bit of RPG and hack’n’slash set in ancient Greece.

The game is developed and published by Dark Point Games from Poland. This is the first title from this studio, but it already looks very promising. Please note that this video is based on an early beta version. So the game is still in development and a lot can still change.

Background – History of Achilles

In “Achilles: Legends Untold” we play the eponymous hero from Greek mythology or history. That gets a little blurred when it comes to the Greeks. He was a hero in Homer’s Illiad who is said to have been nearly invulnerable.

According to Homer’s tale, he was dipped into the underworld river Styx by the sea nymph Thetis, and this made him invincible. Only she held him by the foot during the immersion, so it didn’t get any magical juice, and therefore the heel was his vulnerable spot, the proverbially known Achilles heel.

Of course, this hero has had many an adventure, and in Achilles Legends Untold we reenact some of his heroic adventures, and perhaps experience a few that are not recorded this way in the history books.

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Game Type – Action-Adventure

We see our hero Achilles mostly isometrically from diagonally above and control him via WASD. With the mouse buttons, we hit light or heavy attacks, we can specifically target enemies, block, dodge, and even sneak up behind them from time to time. The controls are actually also well suited for the gamepad, but this is not yet included, at least not in this beta. I assume, however, that this will definitely be available later. (Meanwhile, it was implemented)

Every attack, dodge, and successful block costs stamina, and of course, this must be replenished after a series of attacks. It is important how we position ourselves to the opponent because a block is not always automatically a protection. If an opponent hits us from the side, we often get hit hard even if we have our shield up. And at the latest with several opponents, we have to act more strategically, so that our stamina is sufficient for all parries and our attacks. Without stamina, we are quite helpless against these opponents.

In the conquest of Troy, in which we participate, the normal opponents have all sorts of variants. For example, there are “sword and shield” fighters who attack mostly out of the block, or several types of fighters with larger swords who then strike harder, but are also easier to hit in turn. Some have special attacks like jumping blows or they take us down with a kick against the shield. Together with the archers, this results in special tactical combinations that aren’t always easy to crack.

Besides the normal soldiers, there are also all sorts of other enemies, so you can find undead skeletons in a cellar or sometimes a giant scorpion on the beach. And every few sections you get to deal with a special boss, which often also represents a well-known figure from Greek mythology, such as Hector or Paris.

Speaking of sections, the map is divided into stages with shrines. At a shrine, we can regenerate, save and refill our potions. Also, there, we can distribute the soul points that each enemy spends into a medium skill tree to improve our hero. Here we can learn a few special skills, like throwing with our shield, or simply improve basic stats, like strength, stamina, or life energy.

On defeated enemies, but equally, in boxes and in hidden corners, we can find new potions, but also sometimes throwing projectiles or even better equipment. Our hero can fight not only with the sword, at least one combat spear I have already found and surely there is more to discover.

Achilles Legends Untold – Gameplay Screenshots

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Achilles Legends Untold – Beta-Test – Preview – Tech, Graphics, Sound

Achilles is developed in the Unreal Engine, which gives the whole game a fancy underpinning. Although we mostly only see our hero from an angle above, there are sometimes passages where the camera suddenly changes perspective or even allows tracking shots right through the action. Dark Point has done a solid job here, and the first Troy level playable in the beta looks really appealing.

Everything ran with decent performance so far on a mid-range computer and there were no crashes, major bugs, nor did anything get stuck. The controls were usable to good. A couple of times I had the feeling that I would have actually hit, but the opponent didn’t get any damage. And once I managed to get an enemy into a temporary invulnerability state. But in a beta, little problems like that are acceptable.

The soundscape is upper class. The punches, footsteps, and other battle sounds are of high quality throughout, and the music available so far sounds quite nice as well. There are a few scraps of English voice acting, but not a whole lot.

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Achilles: Legends Untold – Opinion and Conclusion

My first impression is quite positive. The fights feel mostly challenging, but with a little practice everything is manageable. And if you really fall down, you can just restart at the last shrine. You only lose the soul power that you had collected up to this point and had not yet spent. But you can collect them again when you reach the point where you died again.

The three bosses I’ve been able to discover so far are slightly stronger enemies that have special abilities and their own arena. But again, the difficulty was more in the medium range. So far the game has no features to adjust the challenge up or down, but that may yet come. The nature of the game literally screams for a New Game Plus or Hardcore Mode and features like that (and meanwhile there is an NG+ implemented).

So far, the story is almost non-existent. Whether this is just due to the beta, or whether the game will also do without cutscenes, conversations, and some form of quests, later on, remain to be seen. But it would probably even work without them. Right now you just hack your way through the level, discovering hidden treasures or little secrets here and there, but aside from that, the gameplay is pretty linear and unsurprising.

I’ve definitely had fun running through Troy with Achilles already. And I can well imagine playing the game then later when it will finally be available for purchase on Steam. An Early Access phase is planned, which should probably start in Q2 2022. Looking forward to it.

Outro

Do you like Ancient Greek history and hack’n’slay adventures? Or are tactical action battles not for you? Feel free to write me your opinion in the video comments or in the Community Discord.

More gaming news, game reviews, and guides can be found on the ZapZockt YouTube channel or here at https://zapzockt.de – thumbs click, subscribe and share with friends certainly can’t hurt and then I wish you a great day, ciao, ciao, your Zap

Links and Sources

Achilles Legends Untold Steam page

Dark Point Studios Twitter