Back To Ashes Review Summary

Engaging Gameplay & Value: Players find the core gameplay loop highly enjoyable, addictive, and rewarding, offering significant content for its low price. The game provides a balanced challenge without excessive frustration, featuring solid combat, good level design, and a satisfying loot system.

Strong Souls-like Inspiration: The game successfully captures the essence of classic Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, delivering a dark, challenging, and nostalgic experience. It blends this with Diablo-style looting, creating a unique and well-executed take on the genre.

Responsive Solo Developer: Players are highly impressed by the game's quality and scope, especially considering it's a one-person project. The developer is praised for being very responsive, quickly addressing issues, and consistently updating and improving the game.

Well-Designed Bosses & Enemies: The game features a great variety of tough but fair bosses and enemies with interesting mechanics. Boss fights are challenging, rewarding, and often repeatable, contributing to the game's overall difficulty balance.

Expansive World & Exploration: The game's world opens up significantly after initial areas, offering large, varied zones with different enemy types and rewarding exploration. The level design is praised for being well-thought-out, consistent, and full of hidden treasures.

Clunky and Unresponsive Combat: Players consistently report that the combat system feels clunky, unresponsive, and lacks depth. Issues include poor hit detection, repetitive animations, input lag, and a general lack of satisfaction, making it a major deterrent for a Souls-like game.

Poor Controls and Movement: The game suffers from unintuitive and unresponsive controls, including awkward default keybindings, limited dodge directions, and character movement issues like getting stuck on terrain. This significantly impacts the overall gameplay experience.

Camera Issues: The camera system is problematic, with issues like clipping through walls, jitteriness when locked on, and awkward movements during animations, negatively impacting combat and navigation.

Excessive Darkness and Monotonous Graphics: Many players find the game excessively dark, even with brightness settings maximized, making it difficult to see. Combined with muddy textures and monotonous color palettes, the visual experience is often unappealing and strains the eyes.

Confusing Level Design and Navigation: The level design, particularly in early dungeons, is frequently described as confusing and maze-like, with repetitive environments. This leads to players getting lost, revisiting areas, and struggling to find the correct progression path due to a lack of clear direction.

Challenging Combat & Difficulty: The game is noted for its difficulty, requiring patience and strategic combat. Players must manage stamina, dodge, block, and learn enemy attack patterns, as mistakes often lead to death. While challenging, some reviewers found it slightly easier than traditional Dark Souls games.

Souls-like with Diablo Loot: The game is consistently described as a Dark Souls-inspired experience, featuring challenging third-person combat with stamina management and a dark medieval setting. It differentiates itself by incorporating a Diablo-style loot system with random stats, affixes, and sockets on gear, making it a 'looter slasher' or 'hack-and-slash RPG' hybrid.

Extensive Progression Systems: Players progress through a combination of gear acquisition, character leveling, and a large, sphere grid-like talent/skill tree. This system allows for attribute bonuses and passive perks, encouraging grinding for both better equipment and skill points.

Control & Input Options: The game offers remappable controls and supports both mouse/keyboard and joysticks. However, some users reported issues with default joystick layouts when using Steam Input, suggesting it might require adjustments for optimal play.

Quality of Life Suggestions: Players have suggested several quality-of-life improvements, including adding a jump mechanic, refining stamina costs, and potentially expanding the world beyond caverns to include open areas and towns. Character customization is also a desired feature.

Minor technical issues: Players reported encountering a few crashes and inventory bugs, though generally not severe. Some also noted minor visual glitches like looking through textures. These issues are somewhat expected given the game's Early Access status.

Critical gameplay bugs: Significant bugs include getting stuck in objects, leading to fall damage, and severe lag during boss effects and cinematics that can result in instant death. These issues severely impact gameplay, even on lower graphics settings.

Performance stutters: Specific areas, particularly spiral staircases, cause noticeable stutters in performance. This indicates a potential optimization issue in certain environmental assets.

Good Steam Deck performance: The game reportedly runs well on the Steam Deck, indicating good optimization for portable play. This is a positive point for players who prefer handheld gaming.

Potential for Future Improvement: Many players see significant potential in the game, expressing hope for future updates, bug fixes, and polish. They are looking forward to the full release and believe the game could achieve a much higher rating with further development.

High Frustration, Requires Patience: The game can be frustrating and requires significant patience, particularly for learning combat and navigating menus. It is not recommended for players with low frustration tolerance.

Mixed Recommendations: Overall recommendations are mixed, with some advising against it in its current state, while others suggest giving it a chance. Many are waiting to see how it evolves during early access.

Recommended for Soulslike Fans: The game is highly recommended for fans of the Dark Souls series and other challenging action RPGs. Players appreciate its 'Old-School-Experience' and 'Souls-like vibes,' especially considering it's from a small development team.

Desire for More Content: Players are eager for more content, updates, and new features. They express excitement for future explorations and hope for additions like a New Game+ option.

Engaging despite rough edges: Despite some issues like crashes, controller remapping problems, or general 'jank', many players found the game intriguing and spent significant time playing, exploring, and finishing available content. This suggests a compelling core experience.

Game is still in Early Access: Despite not always being explicitly tagged, multiple players note the game's version numbers (e.g., 0.9, 0.9.6) and state that it feels like or is still in early access or beta, indicating ongoing development.

Inconsistent controller support: Players reported initial issues with controller support, including remapping difficulties and lack of key binding. While some found workarounds via Steam settings or noted partial support being added, it remains an area of concern.

Concerns about update frequency: One player expressed concern that the game might be 'dead' regarding updates, suggesting a desire for more consistent development. This is coupled with a suggestion for an equipment upgrade system over random loot.

Limited early game progression: Some players noted being stuck with the first sword or still navigating the initial dungeon, indicating a potentially slow or challenging early game progression.