Of Ash and Steel Review — My Medieval Crashout

Of Ash and Steel, without exaggeration, has proven to be the most difficult review of my career so far.

I mean that in a few ways. It was a difficult title to review in the sense that it was something of a nightmare to actually sit down and play the game. Countless bugs and performance issues plague this indie title, doing very little to help the increasingly bad reputation of the Unreal Engine in the indie sphere. This review is only now being written, an entire week after the game’s embargo date, because it simply took me that much time just to get the game to a playable state that I could actually review.

But it is a game that was difficult to judge as well. Despite my best efforts to be objective about my experience with Of Ash and Steel, there is a certain lingering hesitation to score the title. As I write this review, I find myself skeptical about the inevitable low rating I know I am going to give the game at the end, and I find myself wishing, strangely enough, that I could give the game a higher score than it deserves.

That is because, despite everything I encountered that made playing Of Ash and Steel a miserable experience, the game also captured something of a sense of wonder that I have not felt in a long time while playing games. There was an attraction to the game’s open world, a desire to explore, and the want to level up my character and get him geared in high-level arms and armor, a feeling that does not grab me in every RPG I play as an older, more jaded player.

Of Ash and Steel, in a word, is janky.

The amount of bugs and performance issues I faced could probably create a one thousand two hundred word review on their own. I know I am not the only one experiencing these problems either, because it would seem that the developers have been hard at work addressing the many issues reported in the game’s commentary section.

To give you a brief tour of what I experienced, Of Ash and Steel opens to cutscenes with delightfully amateurish English voice acting that is not well lip-synced to the game’s characters, presumably because the game was created in a different language. This on its own would not be very distracting if not paired with rapidly timed cuts back and forth between speaking characters, in such a way that it feels like you do not even get time to process what someone just said before someone else is speaking.

If you are like me and make the mistake of alt-tabbing while playing Of Ash and Steel, you might find that the game will outright crash during loading screens and cutscenes. During one of these cutscenes, I had to force close the game and reload it as the camera froze on some background characters, as if a real time cutscene failed to actually load past that still frame. Coming back in, I was greeted with a camp of allegedly slaughtered allies, though you would not be able to tell this immediately because characters were still doing their mundane tasks from the scene before. I listened to an injured ally tell me about how everyone was dead, as soldiers chopped firewood and made small talk not far away, and the ally himself continued to stand up and sit down like he had forgotten what pose he was supposed to be in for this interaction.

Little but impactful issues continue from here throughout the rest of the game. Props in the environment float, random areas will drop the frame rate, and enemies will continue to attack you during a loading screen if you transition to a new area in combat. I could go on. Suffice to say Of Ash and Steel feels like it utterly skipped the playtesting phase and released in a completely broken state. Even the game’s autosave system did not seem to work, as, despite constant game freezing, popups letting me know things were saving, all of my autosaves took me back thirty minutes to an hour before my death.

The final straw for me was when saving the game caused it to lock up and crash to desktop.

When the game was working, I found its intentional systems to be lacking. The combat, which is supposed to be slow and methodical, kind of just feels slow, not really picking up in variety until you have spent a lot of time and gold learning combat techniques. Magic starts to make combat feel more interesting, but you won’t get it for a while.

Even then, it is just a game of stamina bar manipulation that tries to feel like realistic, deadly combat. It is at its worst when you are fighting multiple enemies. This is, of course, dangerous in real life too, but in Of Ash and Steel, it just leads to you being stun locked and shoved into terrain until you die.

The game not having a map early on or quest waypoints is a bold choice that I think some players will enjoy. However, the inability to talk to locals to find locations is one of many flaws that lead to the overall unfinished feeling of the game.

And yet, despite all of this, I still found myself wanting to explore the world. The narrative did not really catch my interest, nor did the characters, but the setting felt vivid, alive, and full of interesting locations and creatures. There was a desire to explore and level up that kept me playing the game past the point of frustration, but unfortunately, said frustration eventually caught up to me and I didn’t get very far.

Overall, I think the problem with Of Ash and Steel is that it is clearly an Early Access title that was rushed to release, perhaps by developers who were overzealous with a project they were clearly passionate about. If the game were in Early Access, I would say that I am optimistic about its future. However, in its allegedly full launch state, I do not have a lot of hope that it can be fixed, as simple performance problems are not all that plague this title.

Regardless, I will be keeping my eye on Of Ash and Steel. If you really want to check it out, go ahead, but I suggest waiting until the more severe performance issues are fixed at least.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Of Ash and Steel. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Of Ash and Steel is available on Steam and GoG.