Towers of Aghasba early access impressions – Fun, until it isn’t

When I first saw the trailers for Towers of Aghasba, I was pretty excited to get my hands on the game. A gigantic, beautiful world with tons of areas to gather resources, explore, and uncover secrets – it seemed like it would be a blast. Now that I’ve spent some time with this one, some of my excitement was misplaced. In its current state, Towers of Aghasba is disappointingly slow and underbaked, which ultimately makes it a slog to play.

Towers of Aghasba is an exploration, crafting, and building-based survival game set on a long forgotten island, and is the first title developed by Dreamlit Games. You play as an architect-in-training who recently shipwrecked onto the ancestral island home of your tribe, the Shima. It is up to you to adventure across Aghasba collecting resources in order to build settlements and heal the island from a poisonous blight.

To put things bluntly, you’ve seen the main gameplay loop of Towers of Aghasba countless times before. The world is a blank canvas, ready to be improved upon thanks to your efforts. Saunter around the landscape grabbing rocks, cutting trees, mining ores, hunting animals, planting crops to amass enough resources to build settlements. Upgrade settlements with new craftsmen, specialty buildings, and farms to increase their populations and advance your civilization. Interact with the world’s systems, plant trees and breed animals to let nature retake the island, and raise structures out of the ground to grow your towns. Advance enough to fully explore the world, and thrive from there. A barebones story holds things together, but it's not integral to the experience as a whole.

Sounds like the makings of a decent survival game, right? The foundations are definitely there, but the inherent fun that can be had with said foundations doesn’t stick around long. A lot of the joy of survival games – the beauty in the mundane, the fulfillment of routine – isn’t present here. Resource gathering is slow and punishing, with many crafting recipes requiring heaps of materials to accomplish basic things. Exploration and traversal can be fun, but get old fast when there’s really no exciting loot or resources to find besides the occasional scenic view. And don’t even get me started on combat.

Combat is excruciating. The health bar disappears during combat making it really hard to know how you’re doing. Switching weapons requires a menu. Eating (healing) takes a while. Enemies sometimes don’t register your attacks, but you almost certainly always register theirs. Even small, unimposing enemies can kill you in just a few hits in the early game, so it's best to just avoid fighting altogether.

Look, I like survival games as much as the next guy. The explore, collect, upgrade, and build loop present in most of them is usually enough to hold my attention for a solid amount of time before moving on to the next thing. That being said, the biggest factor for me when playing a new survival game is novelty. What does this game do differently compared to similar ones? Subnautica has an undersea theme with wholly unique systems and a mild horror element. The Forest is a full on horror experience with a dash of homestead building and defense mixed in. Towers of Aghasba, though often fun to play, just does not bring anything as truly novel to the table. I feel like I’ve been here before and ultimately exhausted this loop.

With the negatives out of the way, it cannot be understated how pretty the game is. Aghasba is a land of dormant natural beauty forced into hibernation by the arrival of the blight and the exodus of its natives. It is only once you unlock this beauty through planting seeds, farming, spreading plant life, and tending to and domesticating wildlife that Aghasba starts to truly shine. This is admittedly one of the game’s most rewarding loops; though it takes a while to make the world truly bloom, it is well worth it to see a formerly brown and drab area turn lush with exotic flora and fauna.

Wait, sorry, one more negative. There are a ton of bugs. Visual glitches, sketchy performance, terrible hitboxes, and sound errors were the most prominent for me. I recognize that this is early access, and recent patches have done work to begin improving things on this front, but the bugs are often annoying and sometimes gamebreaking. I experienced one crash in my short time with the game, which was frustrating but not uncommon for early access. Hopefully most of these get sorted out sooner rather than later.

I wasn’t expecting Towers of Aghasba to change the world, but I was expecting to feel something – anything – while playing. For survival fans, it could provide a few hours of silly fun with a memorable view or two. But sadly, I did not connect with this one. Though it is still in early access, and I do hope for the best for Dreamlist Games, I honestly can’t see myself returning down the line for the 1.0 release.