- Publisher: Yellow Brick Games
- Release Date: Jan 28, 2025
- Also On: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
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- By date
- Unscored
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Feb 26, 2025Eternal Strands is undeniably fun, but it struggles to offer anything truly exceptional. Across five acts, you'll climb massive monsters, wield epic magic, and craft stylish gear. However, the story and characters feel like empty filler, and combat against smaller foes serves mostly as a playground for your magical abilities.
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Feb 14, 2025Eternal Strands is filled with great ideas. But sporadically, the game’s execution and exposition can’t match these lofty ambitions. At best, the game is a thermodynamic playground that lets you experiment with frost and flame. But once you’ve absorbed its principles (and the weaknesses of the game’s bosses), the game’s appeal might dissolve like ice in an inferno.
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Jan 28, 2025If we were to blend Shadow of the Colossus, Assassin's Creed and Zelda games in one place, I think something like this would come out. The game is not bad, it entertains, but it gets very repetitive and boring over time.
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Jan 27, 2025Made up of highs and lows, great moments and dull ones, Eternal Strands is a real rollercoaster. Still, even its less successful moments aren't enough to drown out the tremendous fun of taking down giant foes, armed with a pocket full of spells and a whole lot of creativity. The pace of the narrative isn't always constant and enjoyable, but the amazing work of the voice cast gives it a lot of vivacity, and fortunately, Eternal Strands doesn't stretch too far to the point of losing its magic.
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Jan 27, 2025I can’t make heads or tails of Eternal Strands. If we talk about polish, art direction, music, and combat I think it is a great title that will entertain for quite some time. But once all was said and done, I struggled to remember anything aside from a few cool combat encounters. The progression system aside from spells is a little uninspired, and the story outside of its charming cast isn’t much to write home about either. If you want to know if this game is for you or not, I highly suggest you give the demo a go. If you like what the game is putting down after completing that, I think you’ll enjoy it. If you don’t, I doubt the rest of the game will make you fall in love with it either. While I’m walking away from Eternal Strands with my hunger sated, I would’ve liked more adventurous appetizers and a dessert alongside the filling main course.
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Jan 27, 2025When Eternal Strands is good, it’s very good, thanks to exciting boss fights that iterate upon Shadow of Colossus’s gigantic encounters better than just about any of the other games that have used it as inspiration. While its story is underwhelming and some aspects of its gear progression are especially convoluted, the combat is built on an extremely strong foundation thanks to a versatile set of powers that encourage and reward creativity, especially in the showstopping Great Foe battles. The novelty does begin to fade after a while, especially when you’re forced to fight those same bosses and enemies again in the same locations, occasionally with frustrating weather effects, but the high points of Eternal Strands mitigate the low points enough to still make it an action RPG that’s easy to recommend.
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Jan 31, 2025Eternal Strands is a straightforward action-adventure game. The physics-based magic system adds a lot of fun and satisfyingly strategic energy to Brynn's regular run-ins with colossal enemies, but smaller threats rarely rise above being a tedious hindrance. And although the history of the world is interesting to uncover and conversations with Brynn's party members a regularly lively delight, the actual moment-to-moment story beats don't feel all that compelling. It's a shame that Eternal Strands' lows drag parts of its experience down, because the narrative and gameplay have clear highs that would excel in a game that wasn't holding them back.
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Feb 5, 2025This is an ambitious, confident debut by a small team that is swinging for the fences. When a game like this arrives, bubbling up improbably from an industry that all too often rewards one million-dollar-sequel after another, it stands to be celebrated. I’d go out into the glittering ruins of Dynevron and rumble into a boss fight and then, somehow, lose the boss, and get sidetracked by some flowers I needed to find, and then go and unlock a teleport gate, and then organically find the boss again stomping obstinately past a fallen cupola, and I’d think "this is a blast, I’m having a blast, this is great." And sure, I don’t tremendously care about any of these people, and it’s never been less physically satisfying to swing a sword at these dogs, but right about then I notice that there’s this beautiful cliff about ten feet away and I can pick things up with my mind and in a matter of seconds all my problems have been forgotten.