Astral Chain review: A tedious button-mashing journey

Astral Chain certainly has a lot of great ideas, but they’re mostly poorly executed

(Nintendo)

Astral Chain is Nintendo's and Platinum Games latest foray into the action-adventure genre. As a huge release for the Switch and one of the first proper hack and slash games published by Nintendo, it promised to be a thrilling ride from start to finish. It certainly looks gorgeous at first blush, but once you scratch the surface of the actual gameplay, you’re left with a tedious button-mashing journey through an equally bland world.

Set in a cyberpunk metropolis, you take control of a rookie police officer who becomes part of a special unit of people who can use living weapons called the Legion. These are essentially aliens which have been enslaved to do your bidding.

While the characters are all designed beautifully in an anime style, you can’t ignore that the story is nothing more than something we’ve seen a thousand times: the whole world is slowly but surely being invaded and destroyed by marauding aliens.

If that wasn’t enough, after certain events in the game, everyone else who uses the Legion living weapons end up losing them. So of course that means your character becomes the only one who can save the world.

This is where the Legions come in. As part of this special police force, you are trained to handle them and work together to become an ultimate crime-fighting and alien-busting duo.

Using the police headquarters as a hub, you depart on missions which sees you travel to different districts of the city. Your whole job is to fight aliens, save civilians and solve a few cases while you’re out there. While it sounds fun in theory, in practice a lot of this quickly becomes mindless filler - in terms of overall pacing, it throws the game off entirely.

(Nintendo/Platinum Games) (Nintendo)

When you start playing, the combat feels fun and in-depth, but after two or three missions the repetitiveness sinks in. The variety only really comes in the 5 different Legions you have access to and unlock as you play through.

However, you can only partly control your Legion. While each one might have different strengths and weaknesses, they’re never fully utilised as you’re reliant on the AI making the decisions to attack.

Holding down a button on the controller will allow you to position it and activate an ability or two, but that’s all really, otherwise it acts autonomously. There’s certainly no shortage of awesome cinematic and flashy moments, but it’s never varied enough to keep things consistently enjoyable.

Other action games like Devil May Cry almost suffer from this fate, except they save themselves with the addition of a style gauge which judges and rewards you based on each combat encounter.

This simple function encourages you to add some creativity in battle and would’ve done wonders here. Of course all the combat animations look silky smooth, but with no such system in Astral Chain giving you that incentive, combat is boring button mashing while your Legion does most, if not all the heavy lifting.

(Nintendo/Platinum Games) (Nintendo)

Sure, Astral Chain has some stylish combos and it does feel incredibly awesome the first time you execute linked attacks with your Legion, but when all is said and done even this feature becomes nothing more than something nice to look at. Arguably, the best part of the combat is that they added a co-op function so you can play with a friend.

Astral Chain does deserve some praise for the co-op, even though it’s poorly implemented and a confounding button-fiddling nightmare, it actually offers chances for truly enjoyable and rewarding gameplay for you and a friend.

Each mission starts with a bit of exploration through a rather linear area. And having just uninspiring dialogues to lead you on, you mindlessly run from point to point trying to progress with the story. But when the awkward controls make platforming and navigating somewhat difficult, you’ll want to be done with these parts as soon as possible.

At times you enter into the alien’s realm through portals they use to invade. Initially, it’s a nice change of scenery but after spending more than one mission in there, the environments turn into a mixture of red featureless platforms and jarring screen effects.

(Nintendo/Platinum Games) (Nintendo)

Admittedly, the police station acts as a decent enough hub. The characters are bursting with life and expressions and exploring around is fun to begin with. In the hub you can talk to your fellow officers, customise and level up your Legion or change your outfit all of which is implemented extremely well. Good customisation options and variation on Legions are a small anodyne which do add some much needed difference and life to the game.

Astral Chain certainly has a lot of great ideas, but they’re mostly poorly executed. One example being at the start of the game. Here you can choose to play as a male or female avatar, and the one you don’t pick gets all the voice lines and character development, while your choice becomes a silent protagonist which is just plain bizarre.

What you’re ultimately left with here is a bland story told a thousand times, mixed together with uninspiring combat. While it’s truly great to see Nintendo do new things that’s so different from much previous by them, the execution leaves a lot to be desired in terms of its core gameplay mechanics.