Beneath The Mask Is A Good Game, Maybe?

GOOD Beautiful, well-crafted environments.

BAD Incessant narration every five seconds.

WTF Leaving the best feature until the end of the campaign.

I love a great lore-rich experience. It’s one of the main reasons why I love videogames like Elden Ring and Assassin’s Creed. But to support the weight of that storytelling, it needs a solid foundation based on interesting gameplay, mechanics and pacing. Astor: Blade of the Monolith is what happens when that foundation isn’t as strong as it should be.

Astor is a cartoony hack-and-slash title that tells a lore-rich, interesting story about the implications of humans creating artificial life, and how that life interacts with the natural world. Unfortunately, the message is often lost behind waves of mundane combat, mind-numbing narration, and boring traversal mechanics.

Things open with the titular character and his friend Zan exploring an ancient temple to find artifacts of the past. Astor and Zan are masked puppet-esque androids who live in a sprawling fantasy world that’s been long-abandoned by humans. Astor then falls through the temple floor, collects a mysterious artifact, gets a magic sword, and finds out that he is “The Chosen” — a special member of their species that was meant to overcome an insurmountable evil.

After a lengthy tutorial, I soon learned Astor is a Diokek — puppet androids created by the humans who are no longer in this world. The Diokek are locked in a constant battle with the Hiltsik, which are similar masked androids, but evil. Both of these factions derive from the Monolith, a tall structure of black stone that towers over the land in Astor and emanates with dark energy. Later, a town elder gives a typical cut-and-paste quest structure where Astor has to go through three trials and come out the other side somehow.

My next few hours of gameplay were spent looking at Astor‘s environments while learning the basic mechanics, and the art direction in Blade of the Monolith is a shining light in a sea of mediocrity. Every environment is crafted with the intent of being a wonder to behold, featuring sweeping vistas and beautiful colors.

Yet while there are countless wonderful environments to explore, there’s not a lot to do once Astor is in them. He’s either fighting the same band of enemies for the fifth time in a row, collecting haphazardly-scattered resources to upgrade his combat abilities, or walking to the next mission. This is compounded by the incredibly annoying narrator, who quite literally spells out every single thing that happens to Astor, not leaving an ounce of space for original thought from the player to interpret their surroundings.

This monotony is extremely evident in the first world, the desert, as I had no other means to get to a distant objective other than to walk. Eventually, Astor unlocks the ability to traverse the environment more easily, but I didn’t get this until two-thirds of the way through — one of many small tweaks that could be made to the pacing of Blade of the Monolith that would make it far more enjoyable.

Additional tweaks are needed in Astor’s combat. The game tries its best to emulate Devil May Cry-esque flurries of light, heavy, and special attacks, stringing them together in elaborate combos, but the execution is lacking. For example, I’d smack a normal enemy with the starting sword, and then it would fly back, yet I’d still be in the combo so Astor would do a weird glitch-jump to continue it. None of the attacks have synergy with any other, and combos feel janky.

Furthermore, this janky combat would often distract me from crucial story moments. I’d spend entire gameplay sections not remembering what happened in the plot because I was too focused on how jarring the combat was, all while the narrator was spewing words at me.

Eventually, the combat does begin to click, but it soon becomes more of a chore than anything else, and a lack of enemy level scaling makes the entire last third of the campaign a cakewalk — but there’s a hidden beauty in that. The story that I wasn’t paying attention to in the first two thirds was now my only focus, and when I wasn’t toiling through boring encounters or walking to my next mission, I began to appreciate the slightly deeper meaning of the story in Astor, which is passable, save for the narration.

There’s a good experience buried beneath all the issues in Astor: Blade of the Monolith, I think. There’s no reason why some reworking of the combat, reordering certain elements to speed up the pacing, and putting some duct tape over the narrator’s mouth wouldn’t do wonders, but in its current state these flaws are simply too glaring.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: The game was developed by C2 Game Studio and published by Versus Evil and tinyBuild. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBX/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 9 hours was devoted to the game, and it was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game has an ESRB rating of E for Fantasy Violence and Animated Blood. This is an action-adventure game in which players play as Astor, an android who goes on a quest to save his species from war with an evil faction of androids. Astor will get into sword combat with these evil androids, but these smaller fights have no blood and end in the enemies disappearing off the screen. A few of the boss fights have some animated blood in them, but it’s extremely few and far between. Outside of the combat, there is no violence in the game and it’s very tame in its themes.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind options.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game offers subtitles. Subtitles cannot be resized. There are no audio cues needed for successful gameplay. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game features 4 preset controller settings, but no remappable controls.