Achilles: Survivor combines swords & sandals with bullet-heaven gameplay | Hands-on preview

The latest game to get the “Survivor” treatment is Dark Point Games‘ Achilles: Legends Untold, a serviceable but fairly middling action RPG that released last year. Achilles: Survivor takes the main character (well, the model anyway) from that game and transplants him into a “bullet heaven” survivor game with a few decent ideas.

Quite why this had to be a game based on Legends Untold is a little beyond me, though. It has none of the cool attack animations of its larger cousin, and Achilles strike enemies without moving his arms. In fact as Survivor games go, it’s quite basic in terms of the actual combat. You kill enemies and earn XP, and XP unlocks more skills. It’s pretty standard.

At certain XP intervals you’ll add a new attack to your repertoire, and at other times you’ll increase your base stats such as movement speed (which you really, really want to increase as much as possible). It’s all very straightforward and doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before – except for one key element.

After amassing enough XP, you can assemble defences at set points around the map. This allows you to create traps to funnel the enemy into, increasing your lethality. You can’t place them anywhere, which severely hamstrings their strategic importance, but it’s not a common element in Survivor games and so it’s the one mechanic in Achilles: Survivor that feels quite fresh at this point.

The demo only shows so much, of course, and there are alternate characters to unlock which may add a great deal of variety as they do in, say, Halls of Torment. This coupled with the defence building may be enough to mark Achilles: Survivor as one to watch in the genre. Survivor games, like Soulslikes, tend to follow a pretty straightforward template at their core, and it’s the flourishes and flavour added by different developers and IPs that let them stand out.

At present, Achilles: Survivor feels like a mostly serviceable version of the concept. It’s slower and clunkier than most I’ve played, and could really benefit from a little animation to give the player characters some personality. Being able to construct defences is a cool touch but limited by its rigid implementation, preventing you from really using it tactically in any way. If the additional characters prove to be more than just skins, though, it might be enough when combined with the building to elevate Achilles: Survivor to the upper end of the scale.

Achilles: Survivor is “coming soon” to PC via Steam.