izigame.me

After finishing and 100%'ing the game, I can only say that this one is tough. To put it simply, Eternal Strands is not bad. Conceptually, it's actually decent. But when looking at the execution, it lacks polish. A LOT of it. And that has left me deeply frustrated for most of the game, which made me give it a negative review for now.
The art style is good, writing and world-building are interesting (but suffer a lot from bad exposition), characters are not exactly deeply original, but they're fun and somewhat interesting — and I don't mean the “what triple A studio executives think teenagers talk like” fun; they're actually nice to interact with, and the voice acting does a decent job.
In concept, it is an enjoyable game that ends up in-between Shadow of the Colossus, Zelda, and Monster Hunter. It also brings some nice fresh air and reminds me a lot of Kena: Bridge of Spirits in “vibe”, a game that I love, but with a more cozy and more “amateur” feel to it (it's not a bad thing by itself, it's just different).
The gameplay loop is simple but enjoyable. Some concepts are creative. The way crafting gear works, even if somewhat simple, is innovative, mainly considering you're never actually losing any of the materials and it rewards experimentation. Mixing the game's “strands” (powers) during combat is also interesting and can lead to some fun combinations. Upgrading your equipment and your base is also a nice touch and something I particularly enjoy in games.
Bosses are also really cool. They're creative, entertaining to fight, and have some fun mechanics. But bosses are also where the game's biggest flaws show up.
Let's discuss the bad stuff, starting with the minor issues first.
Characters will often spam walls of text that are simply not that appealing. From mid to end-game, I just started skipping most of the dialogues because they were just not engaging. The game has a LOT of lore, but it's not presented in a way that makes you want to read it. It's insane to get five dialogues in a row back to back from the same character, with a ton of useless exposition that could've been condensed into one or two lines. This would be great in a light novel or dating sim, but hell does it feel misplaced right here. Characters are talking about lighthearted, happy stuff when you're on the blink of calamity near the end of the game. There's a lot — and I mean A LOT — of useless dialogue. Like, zero content, non-important dialogue.
The plot also gets from “fun” to “eh” near the last acts of the game. The villain is the cliché bad guy (woman? thing?) that reveals their whole plan to the MC in the last act. I thought the game was building up to a more interesting political plot twist given all the lore cues, but it just didn't happen. The evil thing is just evil because it's evil, and that's it.
The camera is not great either, mainly considering the size of the bosses and how the game is built around climbing them. Good luck trying to track a giant bird that went flying when the camera is stuck and zoomed in on your butt because it's too close to the ground.
Another problem is how the game has an artificially overstretched duration (check my playtime) due to the ridiculous amount of dialogue and the number of “fetch quests” there are. You'll frequently be revisiting repeated areas and interacting with stuff for lore drops, which sometimes happens even for main quests. This is backed by somewhat decent storylines, but it gets flat and boring pretty quickly. In the late game, I was more than often storming through dialogues and just rushing the quests so I could finally get the game done with. It gets ridiculous to the point that a character will straight up tell you to “know that objective you just did? Repeat it, just because we need more data”.
Now the big issues, and the main reason I'm giving this game a negative review, as it almost made me give up on finishing it.
Movement and combat.
And that's a massive deal, considering you will be doing it most of the time.
The combat is not responsive at all. Attacks will sometimes not connect, enemies barely flinch or react to being hit, dodging feels useless sometimes with how heavy the character feels even with the lightest of armors, and there's barely any visual feedback to what's happening on screen. There's almost no visual cues on elemental damage or any indication of what's happening in the fight. There is SOME feedback, to an extent, but it just gets lost in the noise.
Once you start to fight the same mobs over and over again and the game keeps throwing enemies that are more cumbersome to kill, you'll soon find yourself just ignoring or literally grabbing and throwing the enemies away with your powers so you can keep up progressing in the game. To sum it up, combat gets boring pretty quickly.
The transition between different actions and animations is not smooth — your attack animation ended a second ago? Well, you can't use your flask yet, you have to wait until the game detects that you're not attacking anymore, which for some reason can take a few frames longer than your actual attack animation. This is totally unpredictable and feels more like a bug than a feature. It's not a huge deal, but it's annoying and gets mixed up in the grand scheme of trouble.
Now movement. Oh boy, the movement.
Controlling the main character is a mess and by far the worst aspect of the game. Movement is clunky and frustrating. The MC has a weird permanent walking-on-ice feel to her and drifts around all the time. The physics are really, REALLY off, which can be seen when you are moving at high speeds and the character starts to bounce around on stuff like a pinball until she decides to climb something for no reason. There's a certain traversal power later on that really shines a light on how bad the collision and physics can be in this game.
And the climbing. Oh lord, the climbing is a real topic here. It is worse than the likes of Genshin Impact or Conan Exiles, which is saying something. It is just not good at all. It's not fluid. It's not natural. It's not fun. It's just a chore. Honestly, I think the game would've been leagues better if it wasn't built around climbing.
In a game where you'll be going full Shadow of the Colossus on some big fellas, it becomes really annoying when you start to flicker around the boss because the game can't decide which hitbox to climb on, or when the MC starts climbing the smallest obstacles at random at the most inconvenient of times, or simply dive head-first for no reason into oblivion making you lose collected items in that run.
I wasn't expecting triple-A levels of finesse, but movement is trash. Plain and simple.
In the end, Eternal Strands ends up being a frustrating experience if you care about responsiveness and polished combat and movement. It's an okay side-game to play for the sake of it, but it's not a game that I would recommend to someone looking for a good action-adventure game, mainly at full price. (If you're Brazilian like me, you know this game ain't cheap and you can get a lot more content for the same price, so yeah there's that.)
The art style and narrative are what gave me strength to get through it (and also the fact that I'm a masochist that needs to 100% games), but I'd first recommend mainly Kena or even Monster Hunter if you're looking for this kind of itch. It's a shame because ES has potential, but it's just not there yet.