Ever since FromSoftware’s Souls series started rising in popularity, the vast majority of action role-playing games developed by smaller and more established studios have been inspired in some capacity by the Japanese developer’s franchise. While many of these games are great experiences on their own, they highlighted how the genre is suffering from some homogenization, where very few are the games that try to break from the mould and offer something different. For this reason, I could not help but appreciate Empyreal’s approach to the genre when I first tried it in February. While the game doesn’t leave a great impression going from the visuals alone, some of its gameplay mechanics felt unique enough to give the game a very peculiar identity. Even then, however, I felt that there could have been some issues, but I expected elements to come together better once I could experience the game from the very beginning and go through the onboarding process. Unfortunately, experiencing Empyreal from the beginning only made it more evident how these issues result in a game more frustrating to play than fun.

Empyreal is set on an unnamed unexplored planet where a colossal structure known as the Monolith has been discovered. As the first Expedition that set foot on the planet quickly realized, this Monolith isn’t just something left behind by a lost civilization, but a mysterious place that is still very much alive, filled with powerful automatons and all sorts of dangers that feel geared towards preventing anyone from reaching its deepest recesses. With the Expedition on the brink of complete failure, a gifted mercenary reaches the planet to do what it failed to accomplish, and discover what truly lies inside the Monolith that no man should have ever awakened.

From the premise, it’s clear that Empyreal’s story is somewhat uninspired. It’s not particularly bad, to be honest, but it really doesn’t feature anything that makes it remarkable. The characters don’t fare much better, as they have a paperthin predictable characterization, going from the grumpy Expedition leader with a bone to pick with anyone that isn’t a member of the Expedition itself, the helpful but a little airheaded scientist, the welcoming and mostly helpful quartermaster, the wacky merchant and scrapper-meets-blacksmith and so on. None of them is particularly annoying, to be honest, but they fail to make an impression so much with their limited development and generic design that it is easy even to forget their names. Overall, the story and characters in Empyreal are nothing more than a backdrop to justify the exploration of the Monolith and a way to access some critical services needed to complete the game.

With the story not being particularly involving, nor the characters much endearing, it’s clear how developer Silent Games placed greater emphasis on gameplay in Empyreal. During your first trek into the Monolith after creating your character via a character creator featuring a decent selection of options, you will experience a good portion of what Empyreal has to offer: intricate locations with plenty of side paths to explore filled with additional items that can be sold for silver and gear of different rarity and levels, powerful Automaton enemies with varied movesets and configurations that require players to strategize on the fly to deal with the most annoying enemies first before handling everyone else using one of the three weapon types – Glaive, Mace & Shield and the Cannon – and abilities with cooldown mechanics that can be unleashed at will without having to worry about spending resources like AP or MP, and some items coming with both supporting and offensive support. The game generally does a decent job introducing its central mechanics throughout the first few journeys to the Monolith, and though there’s a general clunkiness to movement and attacking, it’s easy to see the potential, especially with some of the unique defensive mechanics the game features which combine a relatively straightforward parry and perfect dodge mechanic, depending on the weapon, with a charging bar beneath each enemies’ names that indicates when their next attack will go off, almost giving some turn-based feel to the experience.

After gathering a few Cartograms, blueprints which determine every aspect of every trek into the Monolith, including level, biome, elemental affinity of enemies, loot table, and bosses, and going through stages a couple of times, however, what was only a thought in the back of the mind becomes reality. Empyreal is a game that’s more frustrating to play than fun, due to the average execution of its mechanics. The clunky movement and stiff animations are only two of the reasons the game becomes frustrating fast. For starters, there is no lock-on, an interesting choice for a game that wants players to go after specific enemies first due to their supporting capabilities that only makes matters more frustrating, as not only the camera needs constant readjusting to have a good view of the battlefield, but enemies also attack from off-screen without any indicator, with a few exceptions, which makes it very difficult to avoid their attacks. In addition, a good portion of these attacks teleport the Automatons to the player or have insane tracking, so unless your parries and dodges are on point, you will eat a lot of damage quickly. The fact that enemies are not staggered by regular attacks and a good number of abilities unless the bar below their health bar has been filled, leaving them staggered and open to a powerful critical attack, often resulting in your character being defenseless after unleashing them.

All of the above often forces players to use hit and run tactics with the two close-range weapons, or in a costant parry and counterattack playstyle that gets very old fast. In addition, even the parry and dodging mechanics feel clunky, as both are mapped to the same button, which is not ideal. As if all this wasn’t enough, there are times when some maneuvers go off for no apparent reason. A few times, I had a ranged counterattack with the Glaive going off for no reason during a boss battle, which essentially teleported me towards an untimely death. Ultimately, things get a little better by using items, but too often I felt I was fighting against the mechanics, rather than against the enemies. Even boss battles are not exempt from this. The contrary. Their tendency to constantly call in minions only adds to the frustration, and what could have been challenging duels become a constant hit-and-run fight that’s not very fun.

It’s a shame the central combat mechanics are not executed too well, as Empyreal does a few things right that would have made fans of classic ARPGs like the Diablo series quite happy. The gear customization system, for example, is well-developed, allowing players almost from the beginning of the adventure to customize their equipment using specific materials that can enhance attributes at the expense of others, randomly roll properties, and more. With an emphasis on elemental properties, Empyreal also offers different slots in which to save loadouts for quick switching, which ultimately incentivizes going into stages with very different elemental properties. The three weapon types are also quite diverse from one another, and even offer different playstyles in combination with a good selection of abilities obtained by using silver and sometimes items at the blacksmith, which range from purely offensive skills to support skills that also have unique effects by just equipping them. Level design is also varied enough, although things get a little repetitive within a specific biome, which is to be expected, but still, with so many materials to collect, the game does a solid job providing players with a reason to go off the beaten path and to shoot for things other than the final boss of each Cartogram. Even in terms of endgame content, Empyreal gets things right, offering a New Game + mode with an increased level cap for Cartograms, new NPC duels and an epilogue with a new ending.

Even if one were to look past some of the issues above and enjoy the best features Empyreal offers, it won’t take too long for the gameplay loop to become tiring. Proper multiplayer features may have provided some more incentives to grind, but in this regard, Empyreal doesn’t offer much besides some asymmetrical mechanics that allow players to receive gear from other players as a gift, a free immediate respawn during boss battles, and a simple sharing and trading system for items and Cartograms. In conjunction with the frustrating combat, this makes it almost pointless to delve deeper into anything that isn’t strictly story-related.

As mentioned above, Empyreal doesn’t exactly strike a good impression as the Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals are not very good. While some of the biomes inside the Monolith have a distinct look, most of the game’s locations aren’t particularly good-looking. The worst offender is definitely the main camp, which looks terribly generic and almost lifeless with its flat lighting. The character and enemy models don’t fare much better, as they are just as uninspired and dull as the main camp.

Empyreal also leaves something to be desired in terms of performance on PC. On the machine used for the test (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM), the game ran considerably worse than I expected, given the undemanding visuals it pushes, struggling to run past the 90 FPS average range at 4K resolution with NVIDIA DLSS in Quality mode, no Frame Generation and high settings. A benchmark session held in an area generated in the Monolith’s first biome, Man & Church, using a mid-game Cartogram ran at an average of 93 FPS and 16 FPS 1% low, which is way below what a system with those specifications should have delivered in an undemanding game. I did not experience any major stuttering, to be honest, so the experience was definitely playable, but systems with lower specifications than mine may have some trouble running the game properly, even with the supported upscalers, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and UE5’s TSR, and frame generation tech, DLSS and FSR.

Empyreal took only around 18 hours to complete, but many of these hours were not particularly enjoyable. While the game has a few things that work well, they are not enough to salvage an experience that could have been something more than the frustrating one that ended up being. With some tweaks to combat and maybe proper multiplayer, the experience crafted by Silent Games has the potential to become something else, so I sincerely hope the studio will have the opportunity to do so, as some of the ideas implemented in the game are definitely solid.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

5.5

WCCFTECH RATING

Empyreal