When you’re exploring the land of the Enclave and taking up gargantuan bosses in Eternal Strands, you’ll unlock extra and extra magical skills that can assist you in your journey. However not like many video games the place magic may allow you to toss a fireball or Pressure push an enemy off a cliff, Eternal Strands has a distinctive strategy to the 9 physics-altering skills it places in your toolbelt, all of which permit for a formidable degree of freedom. Persevering with our month-long unique protection of the upcoming action-adventure sport from a new crew comprised of ex-BioWare and Ubisoft builders, immediately we’ll be taking a have a look at a few skills on the coronary heart of this battle-heavy odyssey and how they are often mixed in stunning and inventive methods.
In the identical manner that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom offers you a set of powers that permits you to manipulate the physics of its world as a way to remedy puzzles and get throughout the map, Eternal Strands offers you a equally playful toolset and asks you to convey them to bear in battle – together with towards the huge bosses that roam land of the Enclave. As a substitute of creating a makeshift boat with magnets and followers to sail throughout a river, you’re utilizing telekinetic wormholes to launch your self onto the again of a flying dragon or producing a block of ice to seal a big’s leg in place earlier than climbing up it to deal harm along with your sword.
That alone may be a lot of enjoyable, particularly when you uncover the attention-grabbing methods these powers have an effect on enemies and the encompassing atmosphere. For instance, when preventing a closely armored boss who makes use of fire-based assaults, you may uncover that extended publicity to ice assaults begins to make his armor brittle, which may then be cleaved off, exposing a new weak spot to put into. Or possibly you’ll be hounded by a big dragon who breathes fireplace down on you, and uncover that with the appropriate telekinetic capacity, you’ll be able to redirect these flames proper again at him. It’s particularly cool how the enemies themselves work together with you and the atmosphere, doing issues like selecting up bushes to lob at you or smashing by means of a construction that you simply’re within the center of climbing.
However afterward within the journey, when you’ve slain a few bosses and have claimed a bigger repertoire of powers from their corpses, you can begin to mix these skills in some stunning (and typically hilarious) methods. In a single occasion, I used the Kinetic Stream capacity, which lets you create a tunnel of kinetic power that throws something that passes by means of it at excessive speeds, to create a makeshift cannon geared toward a flying boss. I then used one other telekinetic capacity known as Launching Grasp, which helps you to choose up and toss issues, to grab up each fiery minion enemy within the space and throw them into the Kinetic Stream, pelting the boss along with his personal lethal allies. In one other encounter, whereas being overwhelmed by a bunch of closely armored goons wielding swords, I used the Percussive Blast capacity to create an orb of violent power, then switched to a fire-based energy to fill that orb with flames – when the hordes of enemies drew close to, I detonated my orb like a mine, overlaying the battlefield with flames that broiled them alive of their fancy armor.
Having the ability to combine and match your powers to confound and destroy your enemies is one of Eternal Strands’ defining mechanics. But it surely’s not solely helpful for sensible duties: it’s additionally excellent for fully impractical issues, whether or not you’re simply making an attempt to indicate off with a flashy transfer or see if some loopy new tactic may work. I spent about thirty minutes experimenting with a bow that created kinetic explosions to see if I may bounce myself into the air, then swap to a heavy melee weapon to do a downward strike on an enemy beneath. Because it seems, with sufficient observe, it’s not solely attainable, however fairly efficient – even when not notably possible generally.
Eternal Strands is all about being inventive and doing surprising or downright foolish issues as you battle and discover, and that absurdity and experimentation makes this action-adventure really feel like a complete lot extra than simply one other third-person hack-and-slash. After two days of hanging at developer Yellow Brick Video games’ places of work and goofing round with Eternal Strands’ magical repertoire, I really feel as if I’ve solely scratched the floor. I’m genuinely excited to see what streamers and show-offs alike are in a position to pull off after they get their fingers on it subsequent yr.
For extra, try our impressions of the epic blacksmith boss battle from Eternal Strands, or hear from the developer about the way it’s taking benefit of Unreal Engine 5’s new physics tech, and for all the things else stick to IGN.