Astor: Blade of the Monolith

I kept waiting for Astor: Blade of the Monolith to stop apologising for itself and just commit. The first hour or two leans on a narrator who tells you things you can see with your own eyes, and the desert biome that opens the adventure offers little but long walks between objectives and recycled enemy squads. C2 Game Studio is a small team making their first non-mobile title, and those growing pains are visible. But here is the thing: if you give it until the second or third biome, something quietly shifts. The world of Gliese is home to the Diokek, sentient puppet-androids built from wood and stone by a now-vanished human civilisation. That premise carries a gentle, melancholic weight that the cutscenes never quite verbalise well enough, yet the environments pick up the slack. Swirling desert ruins give way to a snow-capped tundra, then a vibrantly purple forest, and eventually the interior of the Monolith itself, where each ascending floor swaps its backdrop entirely. The chunky cartoon aesthetic is genuinely lovely, and each biome is crafted with enough care that pausing to look around never feels like wasted time. Combat is the game's most polarising quality, and the reviews you will find elsewhere split on it for good reason. Astor carries a sword, a pair of gauntlets, a spear, and a hammer, each with distinct rhythms: the sword is fast and forgiving, the gauntlets slow and punishing, the spear keeps enemies at distance, and the hammer scatters crowds. Light attacks, heavy attacks, and unlockable runic finishers like the Wall Crush and Runic Cannon can be chained together, and you can swap weapons mid-combo for extra damage. The parry and block system is legitimately buggy on normal difficulty, inputs occasionally failing to register, which is frustrating enough that most players will default to dodge-heavy play. Enemy variety is acceptable but thins out fast, and the side quests are mostly fetch work padded across the open hub areas. A mount arrives partway through that should make traversal feel expansive; in practice it mostly highlights how little is hidden in the wider spaces. Where the game finds its footing is in the late-game payoff: the runic abilities eventually let Astor summon constructs, decoys, and shields that turn combat into something closer to the spectacle it is clearly reaching for. The lore, too, finally assembles in the final act into something worth caring about, even if getting there requires patience. The OpenCritic average lands around 69, which feels accurate: not a hidden gem, but not a cynical one either. This is a studio working hard on limited resources, and the result is an earnest, sometimes messy adventure that does enough right to justify the time if your expectations are calibrated. Kai, Scout Team