Astral Chain was developed by PlatinumGames, so you’d know the combat system will be stylish and will be where most of the focus on the game will be. Although the combat does start off very limited in the first few hours, and you’re left wondering if that is it. Get past the first hour and it starts to open up and persist for around three hours before it finally gives you more options and extra variety, to the point where you can start experimenting and enjoying yourself.
The game is set in the future where the world is under attack by these things called chimera. They’re invisible to most people, and they appear whenever red gates appear. They posed such a threat to humanity that they have created an “ark” where the chimera supposedly cannot never reach. Of course, that didn’t completely work out and now humanity needs to fight against these enemies again.
Upon starting up the game, you’ll select either the male or female version of the character. The other gender will become your sibling. Unfortunately, the character you picked will be a silent protagonist, while the other sibling will be fully voiced. It’s a weird design choice. Anyway, your character will soon gain the ability to see the chimera. When you join Neuron, the police taskforce dedicated to fighting the chimera, you’d learn that they come from the Astral Plane, which is basically a gate to another dimension. The only way to fight these enemies is with Legions, which are chimeras that have been chained to the person utilizing them.
The premise may sound interesting, but the initial (and eventual) developments are anything but. The story ends up being overly generic and it takes a long while to get going, even though the graphics are nice to look at. The highly stylized cel-shaded graphics look fantastic. The story is via “files”, which are basically chapters and they’re all structured very similarly to each other. There will be a beginning section where there will either be an investigation section, or a free roam section to do sidequests, followed by the combat section that moves the story forward.
This is an action game and it’s not your typical one. Your character has a basic attack, with the twist here being the Legions. You can summon a Legion with the press of a button and can control them to a degree. Leave them alone and they’ll automatically attack the enemy, however all special attacks will be reliant on your control (whether is a special ability that you activate manually, or a “sync attack” where you press a button when the light flashes). They utilize the chained nature in a way, such as using the right stick to move them around an enemy to immobilize them or pull the chain tight in the trajectory of their charge to trip them over.
Combat may sound and feel awkward at first, and it is, but when you gain more abilities and get a hang of it, it is fast paced and fun. You cannot leave your Legion out all the time as there is a depleting gauge that acts as a countdown timer which forces your Legion to disappear. The Legion is also worked into the platforming segments. Eventually, you’ll gain additional Legions that fight differently, and the ability to upgrade them. Unfortunately, with the fast-paced action, battles are often chaotic and it is hard to keep track of what is happening. There are too many times where you end up fighting in a tight space, and for a game with a problematic camera, this is a big flaw.
The camera often doesn’t quite know what to do. The enemies like to jump around, and the default setting has the camera trying to follow them around. The camera moves around quickly, and it becomes disorientating. You can disable the auto-follow but then you’ll have to manually try to track down the fast-moving enemies. It’s a tough choice as neither option is the perfect solution.
Even though combat is a big focus, a huge chunk of the game is other non-combat stuff. The characters are part of the police force, so they’re often investigating what is happening. Usually, it is something to do with the chimeras, but you walk around and talk to other characters, investigate the scene, and through that, you’ll gain clues to eventually unveil what happened there. There is a view that you can activate to show all the objects of interest in an area.
Sadly, the non-combat stuff ends up being menial as their mechanics are poorly designed. The same goes for the environment and level design. The cyberpunk setting looks great at first, until they constantly reuse the same environments. You’ll come to dread the platforming, stealth and minigames. Everything else feels shoehorned in. The platforming, for example is not precise enough to feel good. It is awkward and you’ll probably lose more health by accidentally falling off a platform than damage from enemies. The non-combat sections break the pacing too much, grinding all action to a halt with their half-baked mechanics.
There is a lot of padding and filler content where it drags the game out with barely any meaningful story content. It wants to be JRPG, but it is an action game, so a lot of the things it tries to do feel out of place. It manages to stretch the game to around 15 to 20 hours to complete the story mode, which has an underwhelming ending that ends quite abruptly, only to then give you some still images with a voiceover as the finale. Sadly, it never reaches any heights with its storytelling as it’s just so bland all the way through.
The postgame is comprised of numerous combat sections, which is also tedious in its own way. The biggest replay factor will be replaying each of the different Files as you are ranked in each of them. Ranking comes from completing all side missions, finding all items, and stylishly defeating enemies. On top of that, there are multiple difficulty options, with the easier ones allowing you to completely ignore all the ranking stuff so that you can progress and enjoy the game for its story.
Overall, Astral Chain had a lot of potential, especially coming after Nier: Automata, and having such an interesting premise. Unfortunately, it falls down on two key areas, that being a bland story, and too much padding and filler content that detract from what makes the game fun. Combat is its saving grace but even then, it takes a while to get into and can be finnicky to master. It will take time and effort to learn, which not all players will have the patience for.
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