Eternal Strands

[Scraper]

This just came out on PC, Series S/X and PS5. If you have Gamepass it's on the higher tiers for free. I've put about 3 hours into it now and I am enjoying it. It's an open world third person action game. The best way to describe it is a mix of Breath of the Wild and Shadow of the Colossus with the combat from Dragon's Dogma 1. But it's not an exact clone of any of those games, it just takes good elements from all of them.

It was made by a new Dev studio that is on the smaller side. I think less than 100 people worked on the game, so I'm willing to cut some of the rougher edges some slack. But so far I don't have a lot of complaints. It seems like a fun action adventure game with a likable heroin and supporting cast. The combat isn't anything to write home about but it's good enough. Also, the game has a cell shaded style of graphics and it looks really good. It was made with the Unreal 5 engine and the performance on the Series X seems really solid.

No idea how long the game is, but so far I'm enjoying what I see.

[Skinypupy]

Looks kinda cool. It’s on my “someday when it’s on sale and I have nothing else to play” list.

[Scraper]

I'm about 12 hours into this one now and I'm still enjoying it. The combat seems shallow at first, but once you figure out the mechanics of it and unlock additional weapons and magic attacks it becomes much better. I don't think it's a long game but that's ok with me. The Devs seemed to have gone with polish over length, as everything works really well and I haven't experienced any bugs . Given that this is the first game made by this developer I like what I see and I can't wait to see what they can do with their next game.

[Scraper]

I finished this up at 22 hours game time. I did about 90% of the side quests, but I was ready to move on. Any longer and the game would have run out of steam. It was a good first effort by a new studio but by no means is it a AAA game. Probably what drug it down the most for me is that most of the quests really just amount to fetch quests, as in go to this zone, grab these items and come back. At 22 hours it was just short enough not to get stale.

I did enjoy the storyline and characters (even if there was a lot of exposition). The graphics were good, the sense of exploration was decent even though the zones were broken up into individual areas that really weren't all that big. The combat was varied enough that it was serviceable and didn't get old in the 22 hours I spent with the game.

At the end of the day Eternal Strands is a decent game from a new developer who did what they could with a small budget. Usually that means the game is a buggy unplayable mess, but Eternal Strands is the opposite. It's a solid 3rd person action game that does several things right, nothing really wrong, but still isn't a game of the year candidate.