Achilles: Survivor Review – Heroes, Harpies, and Hordes

Achilles: Survivor Review

There are lots of AI music generators now where you can enter style keywords and the program will spit out something actually coherent. Want dubstep mixed with K-Pop with a Celtic flair? Why not. Achilles: Survivor is like that, minus the AI generation. It takes characters, monsters, and heroes from the hack-and-slash Achilles: Legends Untold and remixes them. What comes out is an auto-shooter survival, roguelike, and tower defense game, and it works. Quite well, in fact.

Swarms of Snakemen and Harpies

Achilles: Legends of Untold was a pretty good Diablo-style ARPG that flew a little under the radar. Not unlike Titan Quest, it used ancient Greek heroes, monsters, and mythology as the foundation. Achilles: Survivor borrows a lot of assets and settings from Legends Untold and re-purposes them for a frenetic bullet hell game with tower defense mechanics. Runs can be 10-minute blasts (or longer), bite-sized and perfect for a quick bit of fun.

You start with the choice of two heroes, but over time, you can unlock over two dozen more. The primary goal is to survive escalating hordes of enemies and progress to the next area level. Killing monsters earns orbs, which allow for upgrades to your four abilities, all on cooldown timers. But wait, there’s more! The other aspect of Achilles: Survivor is its resource collection, building, and tower defense mechanics.

There’s only one resource, stone, and while frenetically fighting, you need to stop long enough to collect and/or build mines to harvest resources. I’m a huge fan of tower defense games, a genre that could use a little more love. In Achilles: Survivor, there is a very wide range of tower types. The game gives you potential building spots, you collect the stone, and construct your tower. Then the fun begins, as you kite massive swarms of enemies right into the path of the flamethrower or turret of spikes. Towers have a pre-defined life, so you constantly need to build new ones.

Overwhelmed

Survivor’s heroes lean into broadly different types, like melee, ranged, and area-of-effect damage dealers. No doubt every player will have a favorite, but most of them are viable. Because Achilles: Survivor is also a roguelike, runs earn XP that can be used to unlock permanent upgrades. Some of the upgrades are general, others for specific warrior types.

Achilles: Survivor is an auto-shooter, so input consists of running around the level, building structures, and constantly making choices about upgrade powers and new abilities. On one hand, it’s mindless fun. On the other hand, there’s a fair amount of actual strategizing — especially at the harder difficulty — and balancing between speed, power, and survivability. There are also level objectives in addition to survival, like building a certain number of structures or finding treasure chests. Completing these earns permanent upgrade rewards.

Born to Run

There’s a nugget of narrative driving the game, something about Achilles escaping Tartarus and bringing hordes of monsters into the world. Achilles: Survivor isn’t a game you’ll play for the story, but for the action. The game looks pretty good, with a surprising number of graphics options to play with. The game’s combat effects are nearly nonexistent, and the music is fairly repetitive. The monster variety is excellent, and the number of enemies on screen gets crazy.

I played on PC with a controller and everything ran well, with the exception of a bit of input lag during the upgrade screens in matches. Mouse and keyboard are faster and more responsive, but Survivor is not a game I want to play huddled over the keyboard.

Talk About Value

Although there’s no doubt that Achilles: Survivor is built on the foundation of Achilles: Legends Untold, it has its own and very definite identity. For a bargain price of $5.59US, there’s a lot of content. The merger of tower defense and auto-shooter is a perfect match, and the game is addictive and fun. It does one thing, but does it well, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***