Eternal Strands review: "Flawed but fun behemoth battling"

I love a good David versus Goliath battle. Throw a giant monster at me in Dark Souls or Shadow of the Colossus and then demand I take it down with little more than a toothpick and a deathwish and I'm in gaming heaven. I'd readily believe both games were well represented on Eternal Strands' inspo board. After all, no triumph feels sweeter than one where you're the underdog with all the odds stacked against you.

You play as Brynn, an enthusiastic young Weaver (basically, a spellcaster). Unfortunately, Brynn lives in one of those surprisingly common fantasy universes where everyone hates magic users. There's been a major magical calamity called the Surge – the first of many proper nouns in the plot – that's basically gotten every magic user cancelled. After a brief prologue, Brynn and a caravan of equally chipper companions end up inside the area where the Surge kicked off. Time to start researching what happened by seeking out monsters to kill, resources to plunder, lore to skim through, etc. There's a world to explore and big enemies to fell, Yellow Brick Games taking more than a few notes from Monster Hunter World and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – though that's no bad thing.

Casting a spell

It's a colorful but somewhat overfamiliar fantasy world that feels very Fortnite, with its cartoony aesthetic and admirable amount of destructible structures. Combat is the usual hacky slashy affair with a sword and shield, with the option of using a bow for ranged action. So far, so basic. Far more interesting are the spells that Brynn has in her back pocket. You start off with one that can grab and hurl objects and enemies, much like the game-changing Half Life 2 gravity gun. Somehow even better is Ice Wall, which lets you fire torrents of the frozen stuff that can provide protective barriers, as well as locking enemies in place.

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Not every spell you gain is spectacular, but there's some seriously inventive and joyous magic to be found if you poke around. I'm particularly fond of the little fiery companion you can summon to distract and fight enemies. I'll even forgive his annoying habit of exploding when he dies, often with me in the blast radius. I adore Kinetic Blast, a circle of kinetic energy that you can make nice and big on the battlefield, then trigger whenever you wish to send foes – and yourself – flying. It's great for removing shields or just smugly ejector-seating monsters towards bottomless pits.

New spells unlock at a decent clip and there's plenty here to keep combat consistently enjoyable and varied. I like that your fire and ice spells are deadly to yourself if used carelessly too, forcing you to think rather than just hold down the 'burn everything' button. Even the duller swordplay gets better once you find blueprints for more interesting weaponry out in the field. Collect enough resources and you'll be able to craft a two-handed weapon that shoots waves of ice, or a brilliant sword and shield combo that also messes with gravity to make enemies spin around helplessly in your orbit. There's plenty of rubbish blueprints too, naturally, but more than enough good finds to incentivize exploration, each new pickup making you think about the possibilities.

That exploration uses a climbing system that's been pilfered from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Basically any vertical surface can be climbed, so long as you keep an eye on your stamina meter. Eternal Strands is a much less strict parent than Zelda, too, with more generous stamina and few qualms about letting you scurry across ceilings Spider-Man style. It's a little jankier than Nintendo's masterpiece, but reliable enough to be forgivable.

Less so is the world you explore with it. There's a reason Nintendo filled Hyrule with loads of Koroks to find and secrets to uncover. Scaling Eternal Strands' tallest trees and highest peaks is often rewarded with… nothing at all. It feels like a missed opportunity, given the climbing you're capable of and how central finding new weapon and armor blueprints is to the game's core loop. Making falling into a bottomless chasm an instant game over, punished with losing a lot of your gathered resources, also seems a little overly harsh for a game that otherwise clearly wants to encourage exploration. Especially annoying when so many enemy attacks throw you into the skies. Fatal plummets are common.

Big Bads

The clear highlight of the game is far and away the fights with the Great Foes. Gigantic monsters that stalk each area, often brilliantly introduced with a brief cutscene that shows off their sheer scale and power. I'm delighted to report they meet the hype. Many can take off most of your health with one foot stomp and are more than happy to prove it. You have to clamber up them and pick away at their health bar with your pathetic sword strikes (or your much mightier magic, naturally), all while keeping a watchful eye for counterattacks.

Often they'll try and shake you off, but you don't have to worry about that. Because the game helpfully shouts "hold triangle to cling" at you about a month in advance. It's irritating that they didn't just let the monsters' impeccable animations do the talking. Luckily, it's the overly helpful exception, and the rest of these encounters do rely on you paying careful attention. To your stamina, to the temporary weak point you're currently exploiting, and to that massive monster hand that is about to grab you. There's great tension here because you're only ever a few stupid mistakes from downing all your health potions and having to flee to get more while the Great Foe happily chases you across the level. Each one you take out rewards you with a new spell too, more than enough encouragement to run head-on into the game's toughest encounters.

Is it a significant leap from Shadow of the Colossus, the 20-year old PlayStation 2 game it's cribbing from? Well, Colossus' fights were more about puzzling how to reach a colossi's weak point, whereas the more generous anything-can-be-climbed mechanic here makes it a far simpler case here of just scampering to the glowy weak bits, then going ham with your swords and spells. In its defense, Eternal Strands is going for a very different vibe. A fun swashbuckling spell-shooting adventure, compared to Shadow of the Colossus' introspective and bleak misery.

Shadow of the Colossus also never demanded I repeat Colossi battles, although Eternal Strands does make this feel somewhat fresh. To upgrade your spells, you'll need to extract a Great Foes' essence. Essentially, that means meeting a set amount of criteria that'll open a weak point. These criteria remain a mystery until you find a certain amount of lore in the world, upon which the game just tells you exactly what you need to do. It feels like a missed opportunity for more inspired sleuthing.

Still, having an extra set or rules in your head does reinvigorate these fights. I loved having to slowly take out several specific points on a Great Foe made of fire, all while my potion of fire resistance was far-too-quickly wearing off and said monster's patience with me was wearing equally thin. When you get the spell that lets you create tunnels of kinetic energy, and can start literally throwing yourself at the Great Foes, it's easy to forgive a lot of other flaws.

Which is for the best, as dynamic play is where Eternal Strands shines. That's certainly not the case for its story, a serviceable if inelegant cliché-ridden fare that just about gets the job done. Endless visual novel-style conversations with bland characters break up the fun monster hunting so often you'll long for Shadow of the Colossus' borderline wordless storytelling. I'm not knocking it for using a lower-budget solution to not having many 'proper' cutscenes, but the pace slows to a crawl when the cast really starts to monologue. It feels like it's overcompensating, too, as Brynn's fantasy-codec that allows characters to waffle during the action feels like more than enough on its own.

This becomes more of a problem as you near the 20-hour mark, where the 'Eternal' part of the game's title starts to feel like a threat. There's just too much backtracking between dull companions for more story beats. Too many fetch quests. Too many repeat visits to long-plundered locations, which inevitably run out of new monsters or fresh spells to excite you.

If you manage to connect with the game's characters, its fantasy technobabble, and its cringeworthy constant-praising of your abilities as the protagonist, there's plenty packed in. But I couldn't shake the sense that a tighter experience would better play to Eternal Strands' strengths – instead, it ultimately feels diluted, and you spend a lot of time waiting to get back to the action.

I respect the ambition of trying to take the best of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Shadow of the Colossus, even if too many bad ideas counter its good ones. Once you've got some decent spells and have started a scrap with a Great Foe, Eternal Strands can be a real thrill ride. But getting to those moments can feel like a bit of a chore. There's potential in the premise, and some real highs (especially when launched into the air), but it's the kind of game that makes you yearn to see what a sequel could accomplish by iterating on what worked – perhaps then we'll be in for something truly magic.

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