Today we are going to take a look at Asura. This top-down hardcore indie hack’n’slash game that draws heavily from Indian mythology puts you into the shoes of demon incarnate and it is your mission to reclaim your kingdom from the mortals, obliterating hordes of enemies, upgrading your equipment and picking up skills from procedurally generated talent tree. It is available on Steam for 8 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

Gameplay

I had my eyes on this game for a pretty long time, more specifically since I played the beta and had a very good time doing that. So when it finally came out I picked it up and after playing it a decent amount of time I’m ready to do the review now.
And let’s start talking about the gameplay. So in its very core, this is your run of the mill hack’n’slash isometric game. But it provides a very nice mainly skill based combat with a large focus on dodging attacks.
The attacks themselves are divided into two basic categories – attacks with your weapons and skill based abilities. The attacks with your weapons can either be melee, ranged or they can be magic based and you are always carrying around both melee and ranged or magic types of weapons and you can easily swap between these weapons with a single keystroke. Attacking is then done with a right-click, while your movement is done through the left-click a control scheme many people will be very much used to.
The strength of these attacks depends on the weapon you are currently using and sometimes on some of the skills you have gathered by leveling up or even with some of the items you can buy in the shops that can be found in each level.
Secondly, some of your attacks can come in form of skill abilities, those are usually much more powerful but also come with a drawback – a cooldown. But instead of the cooldown being based on time, here it is based on kills. I suspect this is done so you can’t just kite the bosses forever and kill them using purely with the skills and while I didn’t like it at fist, as I played the game more I found myself understanding this design choice more and more.

Other then attacking the main thing you will be doing is dodging. This is done by pressing space and it is a very important thing to do, because getting hit often means a very large punishment for you. Either just lose some health, but there are also special attacks against you, more specifically you can get burned, which if it goes fully through will destroy one of your items and you can get poisoned and not be able to heal for the duration or you can get stunned and trust me, that will hurt you a lot.
Dodging and attacking is also fundamentally connected, because they both run of the same energy pool – stamina. Stamina is a the main energy pool of asura and it recharges at a pretty decent rate, but if you have weapons that use a lot of it, you will find yourself being often very limited both in terms of being able to attack and being able to dodge.

Other then the direct combat, there are a few mechanics that enhance the gaming experience in Asura. First we will talk about the skill tree, which is done in a very unique way in Asura. Well, to a certain degree. You still have have skills and you need to level up to get them. And they still provide either an active ability or some sort of passive bonus for you as in most other games.
The difference comes in the fact, that with each run, you never know what exactly the talents will be and in what order they will be placed in. So you can’t really find that one cookie-cutter build that works for you, you need to adapt in each run giving the game an insane amount of replayability on top of the procedurally generated levels, enemies, drops and everything else.
The skills themselves are divided into four skill trees, one that focuses primarily on melee combat, another one for ranged physical combat (archery), one for magic and the last one is there for those who like their characters to be really tanky.
Each of these trees then has 4 levels and in each you can find a skill and an upgrade for that skill. On top of that the ability on the skill, each skill also provides a small passive bonus based on which tree you are investing in. It’s either more melee damage, more stamina, stronger elemental damage or just more health.

The second way you can improve your character is through gear. Again, divided into two basic categories. The first and the one you will be most happy to encounter in the beginning of each level, are weapons, there is pretty large amount of them and they come in common, epic and legendary rarities, where the epic and legendary ones also provide some sort of extra effect, like a chance to stun, burn or life steal.
As you progress further down the levels and you will most likely already have weapons you are happy to use, you will be much more happy to find pieces of armor. At any given time, you are capable of wearing three different pieces of armor – more specifically shoulder, hand and leg armor. Each of these again provides you with extra stats and if you get really lucky and find a epic or legendary piece of armor, even an additional effect.

So… how do you acquire gear in Asura? That is a good question, because it nicely ties into another not so common mechanic Asura uses. But let me first tell you about the way that is much more common in other games. First of all, you can find gear in chests that are around the levels.
But secondly, you can also loot your enemies. Well, that isn’t unusual you might be saying right now. But the fact that you have to decide between either getting experience points or getting loot from them definitely is! Finding the right balance between leveling up and getting gear to help you with slaying your enemies is something you will certainly need to do in Asura and getting it right is a different experience every-time. Sometimes you will want to scavenge them, specially whenever you are desperately looking for that healing item, so you can regain a bit of your health. But if you are sitting on a good gear and on full health, you will mostly go for the experience.

Now we should talk about the enemies you will be obliterating and as in most other hack’n’slash games, they came in a few basic varieties. The basic difference between them is that some of them use melee, some use ranged and some utilize magic to try to kill you.
On top of this, you will encounter enemies with the ability to poison, burn or even stun you and specially the ones with a stun can prove incredibly dangerous, because they expose you to attacks from the rest of the enemies, so making sure you don’t get hit by these enemies is essential towards victory.
And lastly, we have the bosses. These are always found near the very end of the level and not only is their health-pool much higher then of the regular enemies, they also posses some quite powerful abilities. The bosses are quite varied, each and every one of them requires a different tactic to defeat, yet they always have a few things in common.
The first thing they have in common is the fact that their attacks are heavily telegraphed, so if you are fighting them, keeping a good eye on their stance can allow you to defeat them much more easily. The second thing that have in common is the fact that all of them do summon in minions, more precisely, the opposite type then they are. So a boss that uses ranged or magic attacks will summon melee minions on melee bosses will summon archers and mages.

The combat and all the mechanics feel really good, but specially the combat. Impactful and fast at the same time and on top of that, it feels really skill based. And in my opinion, in not only feels skill based, it actually is skill based and that it is such an awesome feeling whenever you manage to deal with a hard situation, because you played the game well. And the amount of ways you can build your character is amazing, you can play as either a melee, archer or spell wielding character and enhance the build in significant ways with the skill tree and you will always have fun.

Story

Okay, so we are done with the mechanics and it’s time to look at the atmosphere building tools of Asura and we will start with the story.
First I should probably tell you, that the story isn’t emphasized in Asura very much. You get a nice cut scene when you start-up the game and then one right before you go into the dungeon. But here it is anyway.
In the ancient Deeva kingdom a might ruler has been visited by a yogi, who prophesied dire times for the kingdom, unless a sacrifice is made to the gods. The king decides to listen to the yogi and sends out his armies to find a suitable candidate for the sacrifice and one day, they find a small innocent child hiding and they pick him as the sacrifice.
During the sacrifice, energies build up, until they cause a large explosion, blinding everyone temporarily and once they regain their sight, the child is gone, so they think the sacrifice was successful. But instead, the child has been taken to the demon realm, where the most powerful demons infuse him with their power, creating an even more powerful demon. You – Asura. And now you are on the journey to get revenge.

Graphics

So… yeah… that’s the story. Now onto the graphics. Asura uses this sort of cartoony looking graphical style, that honestly fits the indian theme the game has. A lot of the game is colored towards gold and even the rest of the colors are pretty bright and stand out a lot, making everything easy to see, which is really good for this kind of game, because if was hard to see the enemies telegraphing their attacks, the game would not be fair.
But because of its style and isometric camera, it is hard to talk about the quality of the graphics, it’s more about whether you just like them or not. I personally like them very much, but you might not as much as I do.

Performance

Now to the performance of the game. And I have only good things to say about it. It ran with a high framerate and was even playable while I was rendering a different video and that is something you don’t see often. Plus no bugs or crashes either.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion. Asura is a very good contender in the heavily saturated hack’n’slash market. But it also provides a very unique theme and a few unique mechanics that make it stand out from the average crowd. If you like hack’n’slash games, go and pick up Asura now, as for its price, it provides hours of fun.

Well, that’s it for today guys. Hope you liked the video and if you did, please consider liking it, follow my blog and comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later, with more gaming content.

images have been used directly from the steam page