There’s quite an extra🥀ordinary boss fight in the early hours of Asgard’s Wrath 2. Towards the end of Abraxas’ journey - a revenge tale about confronting the Egyptian god Bast for the death of his father - you come face to face with a Serpopard; a mythical half-leopard/half-serpent with a razor sharp tail and a taste for mortals. The battle is long and demanding, requiring you to learn the monster’s attack pattern, capitalize on split-second opportunities to counter, and leverage Arbrax꧅as’ unique combat tools - like his magical sword that transforms into a whip - to progress the multi-stage fight. Sometimes you’re required to grapple to the creature’s tail to soar over an otherwise unavoidable attack, while other times you’ll use the whip to trip the beast and pile on some weak spot damage as it struggles to get back up. The battle ends in a climatic QTE-like where you use the monster’s own tail to slice off its head. Perfection.
The first time I fought the Serpopard I was blown away. It takes all the best things about a God of War boss fight - the scale, the﷽ brutality, the inventive combat mechanics - and ܫuses them to create the kind of gameplay experience you can only have in VR. The second time I fought the Serpopard, at the end of the very next dungeon, I was slightly less impressed. It had some minor variations in color and attack patterns, but the battle plays out, and ends, the exact same way. The third time - which, granted, comes many hours later - made me roll my eyes. Since finishing the campaign and getting into the endless battle tower mode, I’ve fought this same boss six times, becoming less impressed with each new encounter.
Asgard’s Wrath 2 is a remarkable game in many ways. That Sanzaru Games was able to fit such a mammoth project, which includes four different storylines spread across more than 100 hours of content, on the Quest 3’s mobile hardware still astonishes me. It set out to make a triple-A action-adventure epic for VR and succeeded, but throughout that experience I felt constantly reminded of the sacrifices that had to be made to make that dream come true. This is no doubt one of VR’s finest titles, but its incredible ambition is ultimately to its own detriment. A smaller, more focuඣsed game would have been so much more satisfying, and likely more polished, than what Asgard’s Wrath 2’s scale offers.
Asgard's Wrath 2's Cutscenes Are Breathtaking
Cutscenes aren't used often in virtual reality games, but Asgard's Wrath finds a way to make them both organꦇic and perfectly fitti🍰ng for VR.
The repetition sets in pretty early. Abraxas is the protagonist through the game’s first two (of seven) Sagas that take you on a journey through a series of dungeons and temples across the sandy deserts of ancient Egypt. There’s not much to distinguish one dungeon 🐈from another. They’re linear levels that involve puzzle-solving, platforming, and combat arenas that are all filled with the same enemies and similar mechanics. Only a handful of dungeons throughout the game stand out in my memory: a scorpion cave that requires some stealth, the stomach of a giant♕ turtle, and a send-up to Ocarina of Time’s Water Temple. The rest all blend together into one long series of interconnected, tan chambers filled with sarcophaguses, pressure switches, and swinging axes.
The quality severely declines as the game goes on. Each character’s story is shorter than the one before it, with Abraxas’ making up nearly half of the game, and less and less effort was put into the design and execution of each Saga as the game goes on. From the character introduction cinematics, which start out as thrilling action sequences before📖 eventually dwindling to a dull, uneventful tracking shot by the elast one, to the design of the dungeons and puzzl꧃es, this is a game that consistently gets worse as it goes.
The art direction is top-notch.
It’s a shame, because each character has just as much potential to carry a story as Abraxas does, they’re just not given the time or design space to stand out in the same way. The last story is about Djehuty, a scribe who has been condemned in death, now on a journey to confront Anubis to defend his righ🍰t to a peacefuꦇl afterlife. Like all the characters, Djehuty has remarkably unique combat options and mechanics.
In one hand he wields a staff that can be thrown like a javelin, or charged up to fire blasts of undead energy at your enemies. He can also rip off his own head and throw it at enemies to possess them and leech their health pool, and let me tell you, reaching up to pantomime ripping your own head off and throwing it is a fascinating experience. His last tool is his most interesting: a ring of prayer beads that becomes a shield when it's stiff, a whip when it's slack, and can be stretched to open up portals. Once opened, you can pass through the portals, or throw your staff through it and watch it fly out the other side. The portal mechanic could have been completely game changing, as it opens up countless new opportunities for unique puzzle solving. There’s an entire game series based around this mechanic, after all. I think there’s only three times I ever had to use the portal to solve puzzles, and they were all incredibly simple.
What I remember most about Djeuty’s Saga is a combat gauntlet in which you glide across a chasm, land on a platform, and fight a bunch of monsters in an empty room. You then repeat that process seven times. Seven! I don&🐭rsquo;t know if the studio ran out of time, money, ideas, or all three, but it certainly feels like this game was dragged out way longer than 🌄it should have been, with dramatically diminishing returns the longer it goes on. In its ambition to become the most impressive VR game ever, it ends up far less enjoyable to experience than it should have been.
You can see this happen with the followers too. The first few anthropomorphized animal compa𒁃nions you recruit are a lot more flesh🅠ed out than the followers in the original Asgard’s Wrath. You find each of them in a dire situation and have to complete a dungeon to rescue them, after which they can help you in combat, provide new mechanics for puzzle solving, and even transform into mounts to let you more easily travel across the vast semi-open world maps that connect the dungeons.
Asgard's Wrath 2 Hands-On: I'm Loki Hyped For This
Sanzaru Games returns with another 60-hour VR epic that's even more packed than💫 the original.
Subira, the first companion, has a tragic backstory that explains the circumstances in which you find he🧸r - trapped in a cage at the bottom of a sinking ship - and informs her spicy, stand-offish personality. The game is able to keep that up for the first few companions, but by the time you encounter the fo🤪urth companion, a hippo named Mereret, you walk up, give her a high-five, and recruit her to the party. It feels like Asgard’s Wrath 2 starts sprinting towards the finish line when there’s still half the game left to play.
There is so much packed in to bulk out the back of the box checklist, but so little of it adds much to the experience. You can fish, cook food, hunt world bosses for crafting materials, upgrade your weapons and armor, spend experience points on your skill trees, participate 🍸in community events, and earn friendship levels with your followers. It’s sawdust that makes a juicy meatloaf bigger and drier. Each map is filled with optional caves and side paths, rifts that need to be closed, materials to gather for bounties, monster camps to raid, and hidden treasure chests to find. It’s all of the things that triple-A RPꦇGs have, so Asgard’s Wrath 2 is obligated to have them too. Maybe piles of shallow systems are the mark of a triple-A game, but they also take away from the things this game does best.
The Serpopard boss fight is incredible the first time, and there’s a dozen more sequences that are just as captivating that will stick in my mind for years to come. There’s a fight with a monster at the end of the Scorpion cave where you slowly rip off each of its limbs, changing the fight with each additional dismemberment. There’s a platforming-puzzle sequence where you have to realign Thoth’s Astrolabe, which spins and pivots under your feet and ascend it like a transformi𓂃ng mountain. The aforementioned turtle stomach is a mission to cure its indigestion, which involves switching back and forth between the mortal you p🍰ossess and your god form to reposition ramps so you can redirect a big ball of gunk to make it roll out of its guts. It’s great.
I love all the multifaceted weapons and tools, like Cerene’s Squid harp that opens its fins to make a shield, can be strummed to fire magic arrows, and can play music to control water spirits. This ✅game has the best combination of platforming and puzzle solving anywhere in VR, and conquering some challenges made me feel physically accomplished in a way no other game ever has. But it is the epitome of bloated design: a game that suffers from trying to do too many things instead of focusing on the things it does best. Something half the length with a bigger focus on unique encounters would have made me feel like the game had more respect for my time. Asgard’s Wrath 2 is definitely the biggest VR game, but that comes 𒁏at the cost of being the best.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Asgard's Wrath 2
- Top Critic Avg: 91/100 Critics Rec: 93%
- Released
- December 15, 2023
- ESRB
- 𒁃 M // Blood and Gore, Suggestive𒐪 Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence
- Publisher(s)
- 😼 🅠 Oculus Studios
- Incredibly ambitious, the biggest triple-A VR game ever.
- Fascinating character loadouts that each feel unique in both combat and puzzle-solving.
- Some brilliantly cinematic boss fights.
- Stuffed with shallow systems and mechanics that make it feel bloated.
- Each story feels more rushed and underdeveloped than the one before.
- Repetitive enemies, dungeons, and bosses.
