Legends of Aethereus

My first instinct when I loaded up Legends of Aethereus was genuine curiosity. The setting sells itself fast: a world of majestic forests, misty swamps, and ancient ruins reshaped by three cataclysmic Skyfalls, with a tone that blends tribal-orc fantasy against steampunk gadgetry. Firing rockets at orcs while waiting for an airship to land is the kind of moment the game promises more of. The problem is that the promise mostly stays a promise. The structure is hub-based, closer to an instanced MMORPG than a traditional action RPG. You kit out in the Nexus City-State, hit the dock, pick a quest, and head out. There are hand-crafted expedition levels alongside procedurally generated ones, multiple difficulty tiers, and an ambitious spread of modes including solo questing, four-player co-op expeditions, PvE arena runs, PvP arena bouts, and even a permadeath hardcore mode. On paper that is a lot of content for an indie release. In practice, the expeditions quickly blur together because the level design recycles the same enemy types, the same hollow corridors, and the same small set of quest objectives. Critics who reviewed the game at launch pointed out that the entire range of what the game has to offer becomes visible within the first few missions. The class roster gives you the Inventor (a gadget-heavy DPS archetype), the Officer (a tanky melee role), and the Astrographer, each with their own skill trees. The Inventor's toolkit is the most interesting thing in the game: sticky bombs, landmines, deployable turrets you can control from first person, and a mix of crossbows, pistols, and rifles alongside conventional swords, axes, and maces. That variety should generate build diversity. Unfortunately the combat engine undercuts it. Blocking feels sluggish, hit detection is inconsistent, and what could be a kinetic, physics-driven brawl instead plays out with the loose, floaty feedback of a budget MMO from a decade prior. Reviewers across multiple outlets flagged the combat as the game's single biggest liability, and it is hard to argue otherwise because combat is what you are doing the overwhelming majority of the time. The genuine bright spot is crafting. Loot drops are sparse by design, so you build your gear from materials gathered on expeditions. The system lets you choose individual components for weapons, including handle, blade, and guard for swords, each from different material grades, and a similar depth applies to armor and ranged weapons. The crafting UI is clean and lets you save blueprints for items you cannot yet afford to build. For a certain type of player who enjoys gear progression through assembly rather than random drops, this loop has real appeal. It is just not strong enough to carry the rest of the experience on its own. The co-op modes are where the rougher edges become slightly more tolerable. Running expeditions or arena waves with three friends adds chaos that the solo game badly lacks. The Nexus City-State also offers light social customization through a statue maker, banner creator, and arena personalization, which gives a faint sense of a shared space. But with a Steam positive review rate sitting at roughly 26 percent and a Metascore of 41, the player base that would populate those co-op lobbies has long since moved on. If you cannot bring your own friends, that layer evaporates entirely. Legends of Aethereus is a game with identifiable ideas that never received the execution they needed. The steampunk-fantasy fusion is genuinely appealing, the crafting depth is real, and the multiplayer mode variety shows ambition for a small studio. But spongy combat, repetitive level design, a near-absent narrative, and a community that has essentially gone dark make this a hard sell at full price in 2025. It is the kind of game worth grabbing at a deep discount if you have two or three patient friends willing to run co-op expeditions together, and a complete skip for solo players expecting a satisfying action RPG loop.

Alex · Scout Team

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