It’s hard to review Asura’s Wrath like any conventional game.
Thanks to long years of clichés, you’ll think this is a fancy way for me to praise it. It isn’t. Asura’s Wrath at times tests its classification as a game, because the actual game design is elementary bordering on novice. Like independent production Dear Esther, Asura’s Wrath is first and foremost an experienced narrative and incorporates almost the bare minimum of gameplay elements. Unlike Dear Esther, it has no time for your puny mortal concepts of “subtlety” and “minimalism” when it comes to the events taking place onscreen. Those starships won’t blow themselves up, you know.
Unlike Dear Esther, Asura’s Wrath is completely off-the-wall insane. It has one sense of scale: ridiculous. At the least, one has to respect developer CyberConnect2’s devotion to telling exactly the story they want to tell, logic and basic game design convention be damned.
We’re introduced to our protagonist, the mighty demigod Asura, swinging his fists in the thick of battle against malevolent projections of a planet’s corruption alongside his fellow demigods. The scifi twist on the mythic realm is that Asura and his fellows are cyborgs flying alongside starships, soaring in orbit without paying heed to such piddling mortal concerns as hard vacuum. Within the first hour he’s punched out a continent-sized, laser-spewing maw and staved off the downfall of all civilization for a little while longer. Already we know Asura is reckless, violent, and irritable – but he has a good heart, and seems quietly but marvelously bewildered by the affections of his loving wife and daughter.
But just as quickly, Asura’s entire world is stolen from him. His demigod comrades seek to build a new order on a foundation of human souls, and he’s a convenient scapegoat. His wife Durga is murdered; his daughter Mithra is kidnapped and used as a living power source, and he is framed for the murder of his Emperor and hurled down to burn in re-entry by his former comrades, including his brother-in-law Yasha. A dying Asura swears vengeance – and millennia later, claws back out of the underworld resolved to get his daughter back and dethrone the traitors who now rule over – and exploit – the humans of his world as false gods.
So. We have a demi-divine protagonist enraged at the arrogance and caprice of gods in a solitary war against the heavens. If this evokes memories of God of War, that’s to be expected; marketers have consistently sold Asura’s Wrath as God of War through the filter of Southeast Asian myth with a dose of science fiction. But beyond the superficial, the two games actually have little in common, and the comparison is not necessarily to Asura’s Wrath‘s benefit.
Admittedly, you don’t instantly want to kill everyone on screen, except perhaps for melodrama. Even at his worst, Asura is far more likable as a protagonist than Kratos – his plight and compassion for the hapless mortals caught in this war of gods humanizes him, and the very fury that gives him impossible strength only furthers his suffering. Where God of War began as Greek tragedy but quickly devolved into puerile slaughter fantasies, Asura’s Wrath falls more in line with the elemental storytelling of the early heroic epic. Each character on screen is a primal archetype – the schemer, the sadist, the honorable master – but they get enough screen time, thanks to the copious cutscenes, to at least make an impression.
Like the epics it imitates, Asura’s Wrath likes doing things big. Annihilating flotillas of spaceships, battles with skyscraper-sized gods, a duel on the Moon’s surface – climactic episodes for any other game are business as usual for Asura. There’s no use of the Hero’s Journey; it’s quickly rather obvious Asura is effectively unstoppable so long as his rage matches the odds against him. You play to see what catastrophe he’ll cause next, not because you doubt he’ll win after an appropriately godly amount of anguish.
But there’s no dancing around the most damning problem with Asura’s Wrath. All that awesome scale and apocalyptic grandeur go into the cutscenes; the gameplay is not only pedestrian, but so mundane it actively disrupts the game’s mood. There are no platforming sections, no exploration, and outside of cutscenes environments are basically generic and interchangeable stretches of blasted countryside or humble-looking ruins that don’t seem to match the narrative.
Some sections are soaring rail-shooter segments, which at least present a spectacle of sheer size, but the hand-to-hand brawler sequences are sabotaged by how little Asura can do – and the lack of enemy and situation variety. Most brawling sequences amount to mashing the same simple attacks against the same enemy types in unremarkable square arenas. Then there’s the quick-time event sequences, which have the decency to avoid reminding us how restricted the world of Asura’s Wrath we interact with actually is, and therefore maintaining its illusion of size. Unfortunately, they also highlight how perfunctory our interaction is, because for the most part passing or failing them just adjusts your score at the end of an episode.
Fortunately, the game is basically more cutscene than played game. Perhaps it’s best appreciated as an interactive anime – right down to its half-hour “episodes” with momentary intermission screens and next-episode previews. This would seem the result of rushed development or depleted funds, except it’s so clearly a design choice – the core gameplay mechanic is literally bashing on (or shooting) a target until Asura is angry enough to trigger the next cutscene!
It’s hard to either endorse or condemn Asura’s Wrath entirely; as a Steam title it would have been above and beyond the call of duty, though it’s doubtful its scale could have been possible in a non-AAA release. As a full-priced gameplay experience, it’s unsatisfying; worse than that, the spectacle of its plot conjures up images of the spectacular adventure-brawler it could – should – have been, particularly since the marketing and promotional material coyly suggested we were getting just that. If we were really getting the Hindu-flavored spectacle brawler the marketing promised, it would have been one of the year’s more impressive titles.
But it’s equally unfair to not admit Asura’s Wrath is an experience like few other games on the market, or that I was grinning like a loon during some moments. Perhaps that’s its virtue – gaming as tool of immersion alone in the action of a gloriously insane tale. If you play it in the episodic fashion its structure suggests, it’ll hold your attention for a good while. Just give the game a rental, or buy it used, before you commit to it.