Etherlords Review

Having seen Etherlords only a month ago at Gamescom and previewing it, I decided I may as well write up about the game in full now that it is fully released. My time with the game at Gamescom was quite short, so I was quite happy to be able to spend more time with it, considering the fact that I enjoyed the experience.

In Etherlords, you play as an… Etherlord. These are powerful beings that sculpt the world, one which is split up into ‘Shards’. The first Etherlord created everything, but a cataclysm decimated the land, knocking all the Etherlords out of action. Slowly, however, these Etherlords were re-awoken. Not as powerful as they formerly were however. With the worlds and Shards in shambles, they must rebuild everything from scratch.

In order to do this, you require Matter, which you collect by battling other Etherlords (other players) and their assortment of creatures. These creatures come in three different types: Vitals, Kinets and Chaots. Vitals are green creatures that specialise in protection and regeneration. Kinets are blue, rare and powerful creatures that specialise manipulation of magic energy, and the Chaots; red creatures that specialise in chaos and utter destruction. You use this Matter to build a certain object in the land, whether it be a glade, an ice river or a piece of land made from a certain number of tiles.

The combat in Etherlords is a turn-based mechanic, but with a slight twist. Instead of just simply having your enemy choosing an attack, and then you choosing an attack back, you trade light blows between turns and then you choose one of your creatures special abilities. These can range from a healing spell, to a protective shield, to an AoE attack that damages all opponents. Having the right creatures and picking the right move each turn is the vital difference between victory and defeat in Etherlords.

Your army of creatures is limited to only three. My personal setup was one brute character that dealt massive damage to one creature at a time, an assassin-like creature that did a moderate damage AoE attack and a healer. Many other people had a very large variety of layouts (as there is an extreme amount of creatures to choose from) and it was interesting to see other player’s tactics.

You can improve your creature’s abilities by leveling them up. They don’t actually level up by using them in fights or having them kill opposing creatures; instead, you use other creatures as… sacrifice? I don’t really know how else to describe it. You level up your creatures by offering up other creature’s power; the higher their level, the more the host creature will be upgraded. They get bonus experience if the offered creature is the same colour as them, and even more if it’s the exact same creature. This unique form of leveling up is quite a mixed blessing; it costs Ether (in-game currency) to upgrade creatures, meaning if you’re low on Ether and stuck with low-level creatures, you’re kinda screwed for a while, yet if you have a lot of creatures/Ether, prepare for an epic ride.

You may be thinking that, because you fight other players, you must need an internet connection to play, right? Wrong. Don’t ask me how, but you are able to play offline (I assume it takes player’s loadouts that you’ve previously fought and auto-picks moves), meaning you don’t need an internet connection to play. However, you DO need an internet connection to download the next level after you’ve completed your current one, but with offline PvP, this can easily be ignored.

There were a few issues with the game itself however. I found the game crashing and sending me back to the home screen, normally before a boss fight. Also, if I left the app to switch to something else for more than a few seconds, the game would crash when I tried to go back into it. Whilst not major problems, the frequency of them caused them to be quite an annoyance.

Also, I found I never actually lost any battles until the third chapter. I still don’t know whether this was because I had a stupidly good set-up, everyone else had a stupidly bad set-up, or the game kept matching me with players which were behind me in the game. Funnily enough, after this loss, it kept sorting me with players that had a rating that was about twenty points higher than mine (it rates you based on your creatures and what level they are). Yet somehow I was still able to beat the majority of these players.

Overall, Etherlords is a fun and quite interesting title, with unique twists to the usual turn-based strategy games, unfortunately let down by crashes, a lack of change after playing it for a while and a rather odd matchmaking system.