When I got a chance to see Towers of Aghasba in a hands-off preview, I was almost immediately sold on the idea based almost solely on the game’s inspiration. A world as big and open as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but with the go-at-your-own-pace vibe and city-building elements of Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Sign me up!
While it’s certainly worth considering that Towers of Aghasba is currently in “Early Access,” those were definitely some big shoes to fill and if Dreamlit Inc. was going to aim that high they absolutely needed to nail it. However, after the hours upon hours I spent playing the game, something about it just wasn’t sitting right with me, and upon reflection, I think I’ve come across what it is.
Conceptually, Towers of Aghasba has a lot of really amazing ideas. A free-form open-world game that slowly blossoms to life as you attempt to build and develop is pretty ambitious. However, the game has a persistent problem of getting its own way. Some of this I attribute to its Early Access state, and some seem to derive from a lack of evolution from the games that inspired it.
I want to say up front that I really do love what Towers of Aghasba is trying to do. There were so many times while I was playing it that I caught little glimpses of a game that could be truly amazing. Unfortunately, those moments were almost constantly offset by design choices and a genuine lack of polish that really just makes the game feel like another bog-standard open-world exploration game with crafting elements.
Credit where is due though, Towers of Aghasba really has an absolutely stunning world. Le talked a lot about crafting a world that felt really unique, particularly inspired by the works of Hayao Miyazaki and it really shows. From the stunning landscapes to the truly fantastical creatures, the world of Aghasba really pulls you in and makes you want to explore it—it’s only a shame the game design doesn’t really complement it.
It really doesn’t come down to one big thing in particular, but a lot of little, bizarre choices that continuously pulled me out of the experience. For starters, a bit shocking to experience were the limitations in how the world could be formed. During the initial preview, Le made it seem as though Colossal Seeds could be planted anywhere and change how a biome world would look and feel.
“Not that death matters at all since, no matter how you die you end up respawning at camp without having lost any items or progress…”
So imagine my frustration when the very first Colossal Seed I received needed to be planted a very specific distance away from the first Town Square I was required to build—before getting the seed, mind you—and then every area that was far enough away from the town apparently wasn’t the correct ecosystem. Once I did find the arbitrary spot where the seed could be planted, it was in a location that didn’t really gel with the initial vision I had for creating my first town.
This is compounded by a lot of little inconveniences that make Towers of Aghasba feel a bit behind the times. For example, certain materials need to be harvested with certain tools—which is pretty standard for these kinds of games—but when you come upon one, even when you have the tool, you get a prompt that says you need the tool. I couldn’t help but feel like, for a game like this, having the game just automatically switch to the appropriate tool in order to gather the resources would’ve been a convenient way to improve the game’s flow.
Furthermore, the Towers of Aghasba decided to borrow the worst element from Breath of the Wild—its needlessly restrictive stamina and weapon/tool durability system. I get tool durability is kind of a staple of this genre, but Towers of Aghasba is trying to have a Cozy vibe where you restore life to a desolate land. Imposing all these arbitrary restrictions like forcing you to make a new shovel every 10 minutes just makes it feel annoying—just let me have one shovel and make rarer materials require me to build a better shovel.
And the stamina system was particularly egregious with swimming, since—much like Breath of the Wild—if you run out of stamina while swimming, you end up drowning. It was just a bummer because they made water biomes so beautiful and begging to be explored, but not only can you run out of air while trying to, you can run out of stamina and just die in the water.
Not that death matters at all since, no matter how you die you end up respawning at camp without having lost any items or progress—save for your precious time. Sure you’re health is reduced to half but a few berries can remedy that. Again, it just felt like an unnecessary restriction that doesn’t mesh with the game’s attempt to be both an epic adventure and a cozy building sim.
Furthermore, the combat in Towers of Aghasba isn’t really anything to write home about. It’s a pretty mindless affair of attacking and dodging. But whether it wasn’t expanded because of the Early Access launch, or because this is just how it’s meant to be designed, neither weapons nor enemies feel like they have any weight, and most Withered opponents aren’t really staggered by attacks. And these things can kill you in two or three hits, so the only effective strategy I found was to just hit and roll and since dying isn’t really a penalty there’s a really wide margin for error.
“It wants to have the scope of Breath of the Wild, the gameplay of Minecraft but the pace of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the two things don’t really gel.”
I started to wonder why so many of the choices that seem standard for games like Minecraft or No Man’s Sky felt so off in Towers of Aghasba, and I think it had a lot to do with how the game wants to be played. It’s not really a survival game, nor is it truly a mining/crafting game, so a lot of the systems that facilitate the gameplay of those games feel kind of odd here. It wants to have the scope of Breath of the Wild, the gameplay of Minecraft but the pace of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the two things don’t really gel.
Another example is how planting things like bushes or trees requires the player to wait in real-time, but the game doesn’t play on a real-time clock. So you’ll plant a tree that won’t grow for thirty real-life minutes and if you need the wood or resin to complete building projects, you have to wander around for that length of time until it grows. If you turn the game off, the clock stops so you’re expected to wander around picking up sticks until you can get the material you need, and it crosses that line from cozy to boring.
Again, why implement this kind of restriction if the rest of the game isn’t really built around it? The game already has an “Affinity” system which rewards you with a form of currency when you contribute to the land and subtracts from it when you take from it, so it’s not like waiting is a mechanic to help keep the balance of nature in check. Trees could have just grown instantly—or maybe an in-game day—and the flow of planting, building and exploring would’ve been significantly improved.
The thing about both Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, despite their flaws, they still utilize a lot of mechanical shortcuts to make their respective experiences more convenient. But Towers of Aghasba just feels archaic by comparison, and I think this disappoints me because the game’s Early Access Roadmap, includes things like “Quality of Life updates, Polish and Bug Fixes,” which implies to me that Dreamlit was aware their game needed a lot more work, but chose to release it anyway. And the game is in desperate need of polish.
The controls feel wonky and are often unresponsive, there were multiple times when turning the camera caused ecosystem details to disappear—which can sometimes come in handy with how the insane amount of grass and flora can often obscure harvestable resources—and the way certain creatures behave is sporadic and eclectic.
None of this is to say Towers of Aghasba is bad, but in its current state it’s just so average that it borders on forgettable, and it genuinely upsets me that a lot of players may just move on before this game can be something special. Dreamlit built an absolutely stunning world, but it needed to have a much clearer focus and modernized design, and I can only hope it finds it for the official launch.
