Empyreal

"Keeps making the journey feel pleasantly curated despite its semi-random elements."

Empyreal is quite successful at providing an excellent combat experience, but if you want more to support that, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Empyreal's ambition to do something different is commendable, but it's ultimately the only thing it truly has going for it. While character customization and the Cartogram system are solid enough, the forgettable and generic story and characters, average and clunky combat and the lack of proper multiplayer mechanics make the game a frustrating experience that gets tiring very quickly and one that only the most diehard ARPG fans might briefly appreciate.

Emperyal offers intriguing ideas and a solid artistic direction, but its story feels shallow and the combat falls short of expectations. Despite its innovative gameplay concept, repetition and simplicity take a toll on the experience. It’s worth a try for indie fans, but it doesn’t go much further than that.

Empyreal offers a deep dive into a mysterious world with challenging gameplay and rich features. Dive in for a rewarding action RPG experience!

Empyreal, Silent Games’ new title, tries to do too much at once, but between misaligned ambitions and technical issues, it ends up failing more often than it succeeds.

Empyreal is a decent ARPG, but really misses all its marks. It may have an interesting-looking world for an indie, but it clearly misses having a good story, engaging combat, or exploration. The game tries to be challenging, but only ends up being a bland fighting experience loop that just progresses to be even more frustrating. Overall, if you’re a die-hard ARPG fan, you can still find a good time, but there are many better titles to play this year.

As part of the CompleteXbox Review team I play a lot of games and have a finite amount of storage space. Normally, Empyreal would have been removed from my hard drive and I would be looking for my next contestant. This is the biggest compliment I can give Empyreal. It’s going to earn that disk space on my console and I don’t see it going anywhere else soon. A crushingly difficulty RPG/Soulslike that if you take the time to learn the blocking, dodging and attack patterns, you will spend many hours happily finding your next cartogram to conquer. However, those that dislike the difficulty curve will not find satisfaction here.

Empyreal offers a fun combat if you can understand and manage the progression and gear systems, but other than that, the story, world and character design, and atmosphere feels empty and disconnected from the player and their avatar's perspective and experience.

Some people enjoy the hard slog of grinding away at combat to progress others like to have a bit of challenge but ultimately be able to progress without feeling like they are just locked in a combat Groundhog day. If you enjoy the tough grind then Empyreal may well be right up your alley. If you believe that the easy setting on a game should mean just that and not seemingly be completely ignored when the game starts perhaps give it a miss.