Ash and Steel is an old-fashioned RPG and provides on-the-job training for fantasy adventurers
Blog Andrew Joseph 12 Jul , 2025 0
As part of the Secret Expedition, you are ready to take your life with adventure. But in third person ash and steel, you are not one of a trained, well-equipped paladin trying to execute the will of the king… You are a clever orphan, riding orphan cavalry because of the map of the island, the map of Greslawt is awful. Maybe they are bad because the island's periodic volcanic eruption is so devastating that it is covered with deadly ash that your lung cake and kills you, the eruption is so bad that the ship avoids the island for the entire year.
This is obviously why the brave cartographer Tristan agreed to go there. So like many fantasy protagonists, Tristan will soon cross his head – all because he wants to take risks – when the Paladin is all dead, and he is the only one left of the emergency legend. At least, this is the hands-on preview of the Beta build tutorial, and Ash and Steel's first few hours told me.
Ashes and Steel look like a traditional RPG, reminiscent of 2000s classics. It's unapologetic to not give you any quest marks or anything else except in a world-wide direction, but at the same time, it does highlight the loot on boxes that can interact when they are on the ground or near them. It's in its own way between Gothic and the first wizard game, agreeing with the survival-centric game of the past decade or so. While it doesn't survive and possess the full rank, Ash and Steel still have something outside of the 2019 RPG.
Most importantly, Ash and Steel feels like a game in the legacy of the creator of the Gothic, Risen and Elex series. This includes the iconic Campy performance, as well as some nice drama, as well as a lot of weird humor and unexpected humor. (An early task allows you to find a man's trousers that are stained when drunk, just break himself and leave the pants and clean it up there.)
Perhaps its oldest feature is the way it does not scale at levels in the world – it is always fixed level in a fixed position. You are warned early on that the walkway can be dangerous and every time a new enemy encounter is usually a problem close enough to see if it greatly exceeds your level before deciding to try and not take action and hopefully get good loot when you do so. Plus that kind of lethal but rewarding exploration is the basis of the survival system where keeping feeding and watering is a must to survive and establish shops at the scheduled campsites, allowing Tristan to rest and cook hit points to recover the click points and pick up the buff. It also goes through time, and what is useful in this world is that NPCs and monsters follow their own schedule, i.e. when they appear, even when they nap, and won't talk to you about your very urgent tasks.
Tristan has three skill trees, and perhaps the most urgent thing is to fight. Invest in combat skills allow you to fight from up to three different positions, each with different effects depending on which weapon you are wielding (axle, sword, club, dagger and cross and cross). Sadly, poor starter Tristan is not strong enough or competent enough to swing most of them.
This is a big part of what I think is the story developer Fire Frost tells with Ash and Steel. This is not a fantasy hero game where your character has the ability to win on any useful skills related to his current situation. It will be a story of Zero and Heroes, and as he becomes stronger, other characters in the world react to Tristan. “If you're treated as ragamuffin at the beginning of the game, then the character will actually succumb to your feet at the end of the game,” Fire Frost said.
In the preview game, there is a hint of a suggestion that, as before, seeing Tristan's character wearing only Threadbare costumes later had free words to say about the basic armor suit I purchased. Where they're just asking, are you really wearing it That? ” They later said, “Ah, when I was young I wore a solid suit.”
And a strong set of armor is very needed because the battle can become very cruel. Armor will help you with a few hits, but the stamina-based battle is indeed based on perfect timing Dodge and Paris. At least at the start of the game, Tristan's attack was slow and clumsy – he never fought. But when he gained his combat skills, he acted more confidently and picked out his ability to parry in the way he turned on the counterattack enemy. This blends with a quick knife, which puts him in a hit and then quickly recovers the guard. Still, there are some tweaks to do in the early stages of the battle – some will surely rebound Tristan’s clumsiness immediately, or just unfamiliar with the long-standing strategy of “training difficult enemies into nearby powerful NPCs.”
Speaking of trying to survive, that's what Tristan's other two skill trees are about: Survival and crafting. They are simply more down-to-earth, practical skills due to their nature. Survival allows you to keep yourself full and energetic while making equipment that can be upgraded and maintained. Handmade also does a very important job: making money. Of course, tasks and other weird jobs are a great source of experience and cash, but paying people to train all these new skills of Tristan isn't cheap.
It's cool that investments in money and skill points actually pay off in battle. A good craftsman can better improve the weapon to cause reward damage, or strengthen its armor for additional defense. Meanwhile, survivalists might pick up nasty tricks like throwing daggers and poisons on weapons – although Tristan's bad preview Tristan is too intellectually tedious and low-level to try these skills.
Even with all the advantages of all levels and time, all the advantages of Ash and Steel are sure to be your ass kick game. a lot of. I expect QuickSave is Tristan to be the greatest friend in the world. The enemy strikes hard, and the level is higher than you hit, even so fast that the low-level Tristan simply has no chance of reacting in time, let alone an attack. As a result, he was troubled by many things. He was haunted by a giant rat. Trampled by a big mistake. Eat with lizards. Dismembered by all kinds of bandits, whether alive, they are obviously immortal.
The only reason Tristan isn't emitting by this giant troll is because when everything can shock you, well, you get really fast in running and climbing with dangers in running and climbing.
While some might find that kind of frustrating thing, at that number, ash and steel are very good. Action-RPG's battles are clumsy than from software games, but after a while his own rhythm gets caught in his own pace and hopes to gain more and more skills and abilities throughout the game.
Don't expect the miracle of ash and steel, but the preview is evidence of a promising mid-term RPG that might appeal to your old genre purists while still being easily accessible and fun enough to attract lovers of more modern character-driven action.