Achilles: Legends Untold Review Mini – Review Mini

Achilles: Legends Untold is a top down, action RPG, with strong ties to the souls-like genre. Its presentation also brings to mind classic isometric western RPGs like Diablo. The end result is a moderately compelling adventure that struggles to deliver on its goals on Nintendo Switch.

You play as Achilles during and following the battle of Troy, building off of events described in Homer’s Iliad. The story plays out through cutscenes that all feature some pretty rough voice acting. Within the first hour I had started just reading the subtitles and quickly skipping through the voice acting. It is overall very poor.

Action takes place from a top-down, isometric perspective. Achilles has all the moves you would expect from a souls-like. His quick and strong attack are mapped to R and ZR respectively. He can also block using a shield and dodge-roll out of the way of attacks. All of these consume a stamina meter while another meter is consumed by special attacks which are mapped to a face button. Combat and movement both feel good, and I was surprised how well these mechanics were adapted to this top-down perspective while still feeling very much like their inspiration. The downside is that it never really goes beyond that. It is content to ape without bringing anything original to the table.

The world is reasonably large and predominantly open, though I rarely found myself compelled to leave the primary questline. The map is dotted with shrines that serve as checkpoints where you can rest, level up, and fast travel to other discovered shrines. As you’d expect, resting at these shrines also respawns nearby enemies. The world is fairly diverse in terms of environments and manages to stay pretty fresh. Unfortunately, the Switch version doesn’t really deliver on the visual ambition of the game. Extremely low-resolution textures are stretched over massive pieces of geometry and there are no dynamic shadows at play. The Switch port shows the classic signs of features being turned down and culled until it works, with no alternative put in place to replace them. As a result, Achilles: Legends Untold is a pretty ugly game on Switch. It does, if nothing else, generally run well enough. It isn’t perfect but the majority of my play was at or near thirty frames-per-second.

Achilles: Legends Untold is a functional isometric souls-like that plays well enough and has plenty of territory to explore but falls short in its Switch port. It isn’t completely unenjoyable by any means and mechanically it is quite solid. But ultimately through the combination of a rough Switch port, poor voice acting, and a general struggle to do anything that stands out, it winds up being a forgettable journey.