Eternal Edge + Review

Have you ever played a game that was so incredibly broken – so riddled with bugs that you can’t imagine anyone had play-tested it even once – but you still somehow managed to enjoy yourself? That is just about the best description of Eternal Edge + I can give. It’s a complete mess almost at every turn, but yet I didn’t hate my time with it and even enjoyed it in the same way you might enjoy watching a bad movie.

Eternal Edge + started out as Eternal Edge, a Nintendo Switch release that visually was more voxel in nature. While it was shown some interest for its take on the Zelda formula, it was held back considerably by its myriad of gameplay issues and perhaps most by the nearly constant loading even in small spaces. Despite all of that, enough interest was shown that Righteous Weasel Games set out to make Eternal Edge +, presumably with the hopes that they could fix what plagued the original and capture more of those players who were so interested in the original but stayed away.

The team behind Eternal Edge + is not a large one. Largely developed by Sean Garland and Kevin Garland (who I assume are brothers), Eternal Edge + is larger in scope than you’d initially think, and while it borrows heavily from the Legend of Zelda franchise it obviously was made with a fair amount of heart. Unfortunately, heart alone does not a good game make, and Righteous Weasel’s attempt at upcycling its original title is a prime example of just that.

They waste no time exposing you to the bugs and jank as the opening scenes shatter your eardrums with slowly building music akin to boiling a lobster alive. You’ll need to just about turn everything down to the lowest level available in the game and follow it up with cutting the volume in Windows as well if you want to be able to hear the beauty of a laughing baby, or anything quieter than a truck driving through a nitroglycerine plant in your future. Getting past the intro sees you standing next to your perpetually sleeping wife in a temple of sorts with some gloriously nonsensical panning audio for the theme playing in the background. Explore the room a bit, and you’ll discover that two of the four walls protecting you from the elements aren’t really walls at all but instead are simply suggestions. No collision on surfaces is prevalent throughout the game, but it is as hilarious as it is telling that the first room you are placed in is as broken as it is.

When I say that surface collision issues are prevalent, what I mean is that there are a number of dungeons you can complete without collecting a single key or at the very least shave off large sections by avoiding collecting one or two. Not even the last boss dungeon is safe, as you can just squeeze right past the locked door and proceed to the final fight without completing the rest of the dungeon. This level of polish, or lack thereof, is observable in just about every aspect of Eternal Edge +. From inconsistent audio, to sound effects that make no sense, spelling errors in quest dialogue, mismatching quest requirements between the quest giver and the quest tracker in the UI, broken or mislabeled quest objectives, soft locks that range from almost understandable to blatantly obvious misses, broken or bugged enemy AI, poor weapon and armor balancing, and more – if there’s one thing you should know about Eternal Edge + going it’s that it plays like a game still in alpha.

You might be relieved then when you notice that, on Steam at least, the store page has it listed as an Early Access title. While that is good to see, it wasn’t always that way and it’s been cause for concern for early adopters and possible future buyers as well. When the game originally launched it was simply listed like any other final release. As a handful of reviews started coming in from players, some noticed that only a handful of days later the page had been changed to Early Access. Righteous Weasel posted a response shortly thereafter, stating that they had originally felt they had released a finished game but could see that was not the case. I was ready to give them the benefit of the doubt going in, but after having played nearly everything the game has to offer content-wise and seeing how little playtesting must have been done before submitting the game, I am not sure they’re being completely honest. As of this writing, there hasn’t been an update to the game since June 3^rd.

When you do finally hop into the game, you’re not going to be presented with a lot of surprises. As the visuals would have you believe, Eternal Edge + is very much a Legend of Zelda clone, though it does sprinkle some different mechanics on top to add its own flavour. You’re in the boots of Cross, a man known as an Eternal, who along with his also Eternal wife, is tasked with doing world-saving stuff. Whilst doing said world-saving, Cross’s wife got caught up with The Skeleton King who controls the lands around him by enslaving those looking for eternal life. You set sail to find your wife, lose your superpowers along the way, and find yourself regaining your strength as you attempt to both free the land from the Skeleton King and bring your wife out of her long nap in the process. It’s your typical fantasy stuff, that reads oddly like a mix of Shadow of the Colossus and any given Legend of Zelda, but that’s most games in this genre so it’ll do.

To accomplish these tasks you’ll have to gather some fancy magic pearls, all guarded by generals of the Skeleton King. These generals reside in their appropriately themed dungeons, and so it’s up to you to track those dungeons down and take those pearls back. Eternal Edge + features a very open world, and has decidedly few barriers to stop you from exploring wherever you’d like whenever you’d like. I really appreciate that in games like this, since most that claim to be open-world aren’t really that open to the player. Want to go straight to end-game locations to try and snag high-level gear? You can do that. Want to tackle the dungeons in any order you choose? You can do that, too. You’re pretty much left to your own devices and you can take everything at your own pace.

So now that you’ve lost all of your amazing power, you have to get it back somehow, right? Well to do that in Eternal Edge + your best bet is not to grind out the monsters found around the open world, but instead, the game encourages you to do side quests and events. Questing in general in Eternal Edge + is very much like an MMO. You’ll be killing X number of a certain monster or enemy, collecting Y number of some material for a merchant, or rescuing some helpless villager who has ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Events are placed around the world map, with each area being scaled for different ranges of player level, and can be completed once at any time. They range from simply surviving for a set time, to killing waves of enemies and helping stranded soldiers. You’re rewarded for doing all of these things of course, but the real reason to do it is for the experience.

When you do level up, however, you’re not gaining experience points in the traditional sense. There is some scaling that comes with reaching new levels but most crucially, leveling allows you to more effectively use weapons and armor that are of a higher level. So long as you’re within five levels of the weapon or armor you’re using, you’ll gain the full benefits they provide. Choose to use something higher level than that, and you’ll only get a fraction of its stats. The latter is pretty generous, however, and so it’s not uncommon to be better off equipping some super high-level gear you manage to acquire versus something closer to your level. Honestly, they should probably tweak this as it all but makes it useless using at-level gear.

Leveling your stats, or more specifically changing how your stats scale, requires you to gather Eternal Essence – orbs that are hidden in chests all over the world map in various locations both in the open fields and in dungeons. You can upgrade your health, damage with melee weapons or ranged weapons and items, and your various resistances. Unfortunately, during my playthrough, the dexterity stat was bugged and wouldn’t let me upgrade it. It wasn’t a huge deal, however, as I decided early on given how the game seemed to work combat-wise that I’d simply go glass cannon with melee weapons which, in case you were wondering, was wonderfully effective if not broken.

Your gear is also upgradeable and can be done so by combining similar gear. Combine three of the same item and it will level up providing a small stat boost. Usually, gear can be leveled up to three times, and while it’s a neat albeit not new idea, the stats gained from leveling the gear is usually not worth the hassle of grinding mobs for sacrificial pieces. Oddly, they chose to only make shields have durability with the possibility to eventually break and require repair. Weapons and armor do not have durability, which is probably for the best. Even the highest-level shields break far too quickly and shield repair kits are not easy to come across, nor are they particularly inexpensive – especially in the early game.

Combat is about what you would expect given what you’ve learned about the game up to this point. It’s clunky, rigid, and the enemy AI is all over the place. Any enemy attack that includes them jumping will almost certainly result in them landing nowhere near you, some enemies have incredible leashing ranges, and others will simply freeze up in combat altogether. Magic-wielding enemies tend to have a long-range missile attack which is rarely used, and a cone AOE attack of sorts that they usually default to and use until they run out of magic while never actually going near you. This is probably a good thing, as magic does incredible damage – even if you have decent resistances. A melee attack may do 100-200 damage to your 2500-point health pool, but a magic attack will hit you for 800 to 1000 plus. Want to block it with your highly magic-resistant shield? It’ll be destroyed in less than a second. In general, it's best to simply run around until you have an opening but there are incredibly lengthy i-frame windows on melee attacks that you can abuse as well – if the game decides it doesn’t want to ignore your roll dodge, of course.

Visually, Eternal Edge + isn’t about to win any awards either, but it’s not the worst-looking game I’ve played and it even enjoys some nice views when traveling the various open fields. As mentioned, it screams Zelda very loudly, and even Cross himself looks like Link. In general, it feels like they were going for a cell-shaded look but it doesn’t land all that well as textures often look overstretched, or inconsistent with the rest of the environment. Many areas are comically large and/or feature just as comically large objects that make it sometimes feel like you’re wandering around in buildings and dungeons built by giants. Texture seams are all over the place, as is clipping, and attention to detail is sometimes sorely lacking. For example, your wife in the game’s scant few cutscenes has long blue hair but her in-game model has a brown buzzcut and essentially looks like a totally different person.

The world itself is quite large, and you may be surprised by the scale given the size of the team crafting it but, unfortunately, it’s not filled with much to engage you. There are enemies scattered about, some areas more densely than others, but otherwise, you’re moving around pretty empty spaces whether you’re inside a dungeon or outside in a field. It seems they wanted it to feel epic in scale but without anything filling the space, it ends up feeling more unfinished than anything. Interestingly enough, one of the dungeon types scattered around the map is done much like a top-down Zelda dungeon. The controls don’t hold up well in this view, and there’s very little variety among them but visually they’re a nice change of pace all the same.

The audio is just as inconsistent if not more so. Its worst offense is simply how loud the game is by default and may, in fact, be leveled to 0db across the board, which if you aren’t careful will absolutely damage your hearing. Past that, the musical scores throughout the game are actually pretty good albeit as derivative sounding as the game is visually and otherwise. You’re not going to likely be playing the soundtrack in the background while you work, but it mostly suits the game and does the job well enough so long as you really like the piano. Sound effects, however, are nearly universally awful with few that make any sense at all. Doors especially seem to have an identity crisis, and many actions have no sound whatsoever. You of course wouldn’t expect any major voice acting given the size of the development team, and so it’s no surprise that there is nearly none. I say nearly because, for whatever reason, one enemy has a voice line where they say “It’s the Eternal!” and another character gets some combat grunts but that’s it.

You would think, given the fact that nearly every facet of this game is a janky mess, that I’d have hated every minute of it. The truth is, that’s not the case. Whether it’s simply the nature of the genre, or that it gets just enough right to be brainless fun, Eternal Edge + has some x-factor that kept me interested against all odds. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very broken, very much incomplete game that needs a lot more time to become something I could recommend to anyone. With that being said, I think it’s worth noting that I didn’t hate my time with the game and feel like if Righteous Weasel really put some effort into it, it could become a hidden gem. Not many developers have had the balls to so blatantly duplicate the Legend of Zelda formula, but I’m surprised more haven’t done so because there’s a reason it works and I think there’s room for more of it within the genre. I think it speaks volumes that this game has gotten the attention it has just based on some screenshots, so with any luck, the folks at Righteous Weasel Games won’t waste the opportunity.

As it stands, Eternal Edge + isn’t ready for the big times. It’s far from the complete product the developers claimed they thought it was, and it’s certainly deserving of the Early Access label. It’s clunky, woefully unfinished in ways that make me believe it was barely play-tested, and there is no small amount of work to be done to right the ship. Despite its appeal and its ability to provide some brainless fun should you have the patience, Eternal Edge + is currently not worth more than a spot on your wish list in the distant hope it realizes its potential in the future.