Alterium Shift Early Access Review
Contributed by DJMMT
Alterium Shift is a new turn-based RPG that just hit Steam early access on July 6th. As the title suggests, this is a review of the early access version of this game. What that means is that everything stated in this review is subject to change. So please be careful when using this review to ultimately decide if you’d like to purchase this game or not.
This was actually the first time that I tried an indie produced HD-2D title. The first thing I’ll say about the graphics in Alterium Shift is that they’re generally good, but inconsistent. I really like how they implemented the HD-2D for their landscapes and enemies. The movement animations for characters walking and attacking work really well for an experience that’s new but retro-inspired. However, there are parts of the visual experience that just don’t look good. It’s not the game graphics so much as it’s the things that make the game playable. For instance, I really don’t like the font they used for the text. It’s just ugly.
The menus and dialog boxes are very reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII in their simple blue and white style. But even Square Enix had a better looking font back in 1997. And really it’s just little things like that which hurt the experience for me. I think the game looks good, but many of the playable characters look bad. Not bad like their designs are bad, but bad like they look worse visually than the NPCs in many instances. I noticed this almost immediately. I assume it’s because of their more dynamic animation requirements. Similarly, a lot of the character art, outside of normal play, looks hand drawn. This is seen most often in the game’s title screen and the party menu. While this art doesn’t look bad, it really clashes with the rest of the game’s visuals. To a point where the art comes off cheap, even though the drawings are very detailed and honestly good. They just don’t mesh well with the rest of the game visually. And this is another attempt at emulating FFVII, but poorly by comparison. To be clear, there are some really nice visuals in this game. Like the boss fights look great. I especially like how the camera turns for special fight sequence introductions. It’s a cool effect that really sells the importance of certain encounters. There’s a lot of good here visually, but those little bad things do add up. I hate looking at the menus in this game, and since it’s a turn-based JRPG-style game, you spend a lot of time looking at menus.
I was really happy with the audio experience in Alterium Shift. From the very start, it’s clear that they took the music really seriously for this project. When you start the game, you choose between one of three playable protagonists. When you switch between them in the selection menu, they each have their own song. Overall, the music in this game is good. There’s a variety of tracks, the default sound mixing, which can be altered manually, is extremely well balanced, and the sound effects work well. One thing I liked was the fact that they chose not to do sound for movement. There are effects for lots of little things, like going upstairs, so I know they could have included a basic sound for walking/running. But they didn’t, because it would get super annoying. Not surprisingly, the effects are most pronounced during battles, which is how it should be for a turn-based RPG. Overall, I don’t really have anything bad to say about the audio in this game.
There are a number of things about the writing in this game that need to be said. For starters, this is not a single playthrough, on-rails JRPG. You have three protagonists to choose from, each with their own paths. Those paths do intertwine as you progress, but the stories are different. You don’t spend the entirety of the game with the same party members. So at the very least, this game has at least three playthroughs worth of content. On top of that, this game lets you make choices; and those choices actually do affect the story. There are big choices, like when characters ask if they can join/stay in your party. Obviously, these will have an immediate effect, because it will determine how many characters are in your party, which translates directly to how you approach combat. But there are also many smaller choices that affect how the story progresses. And this starts as soon as you begin the game. My story began with my character sleeping. One of the other of the three playable protagonists knocked on my door, asking me to get out of bed. The game let me decide if I should get up or keep sleeping. I chose to keep sleeping. The character knocked a few more times, and I continued to sleep. Eventually, the character got fed up with my laziness and left. I was surprised by this, in a good way. I thought the character would keep knocking until I finally decided got up. Instead, I was left without a companion for the opening sequence of the game. This in turn made battles harder. It was a great way to tell the player that their decisions matter and have a real effect on both the story and the gameplay.
Throughout the game, the player is hit with dialog options that seem to have a real effect on how things progress at both micro and macro levels. My character, Sage, starts off with a reputation for being an asshole. At first, I played into this. But I immediately realized how detrimental this behavior could be to how NPCs interacted with me. One NPC went as far as locking me out of their house permanently. What I really appreciated was that the game is talking to the player through the dialog options. It reminded me a lot of the Deadpool (2013) game in that regard. There are moments where the dialog options literally tell you that you can choose to hear the character you’re talking to explain the story in more detail or just move the plot along. It’s funny in how meta the experience is, but I do worry about the long-term repercussions of allowing players to so flagrantly ignore the writing in games. There is an actual story in Alterium Shift. More than one in fact. So it’s a little weird for the devs to throw it under the bus like that. But overall I found the interactions with the dialog options funny.
Something interesting about the gameplay experience, which I’m including in the writing section of my review, but it may be more suited in the gameplay section, is that you can play three games concurrently. Each of the three playable characters have their own dedicated save slots. This allows you to jump around the game at your leisure and experience multiple plot lines at once. There is even a moment in the first act of the game where you can switch paths mid-game, as opposed to going to the start screen and loading up a different save. The problem is that the game is entirely unclear about the effects of doing any of this. There are three protagonists to follow, but I don’t know if playing these paths concurrently have an effect on each other. Is there any reason for me to play more than one path other than to see different plots? I couldn’t tell you. That’s not to imply that a game with multiple plots needs to be interconnected directly in that way. It’s just that the game makes it seem like there’s more to it than simply playing three different games; but it fails to clarify itself one way or another. Really, that lack of clarity was one of my biggest complaints about the game in general. I’ll clarify that point more later in the gameplay section of the review.
Simply put, this is a classic turn-based RPG in the style of the original Final Fantasy VII. I specifically used that game for reference because this game offers multiple-area exploration, turn-based combat, special attacks that you build up with a bar over time, AP based skills and basic attacks, traditional items, and the ability to miss and lose party members. There are plenty of other examples that can be used, but these developers are basically trying to do their own version of FFVII in HD-2D. That’s especially obvious when you look at the aforementioned menu designs in this game. As far as combat and exploration are concerned, they did a solid job. The combat is well-balanced, looks good, and works as expected; and the game has full controller support. Thankfully, unlike FFVII, there are no random battles in Alterium Shift. You can see the enemies on the map before you engage with them. Though some of them do hide and jump out to surprise you. The point is that you can choose to avoid a large number of enemies, if you want to. I’ll note that enemies respawn when you leave and return to an area. So grinding is available for those who feel the need to farm XP.
I chose the mage character of the three playable protagonists. At first, I was worried about the AP problem, given that I had no other teammates, but they managed this very well. Rather than MP and AP as separate types of energy, AP applies to all sorts of skills and spells in the game. I prefer this simplified system, honestly. Your HP and AP refill whenever you level up. Early on, this happens frequently enough to manage playing solo. Not too many levels in, the mage character learns the ability to regenerate AP at the cost of one turn, without wasting items. When coupled with the fact that your defense can be high enough to literally take 0 damage, regenerating AP becomes easy enough to not have to rest frequently. You can also keep multiple manual saves for each character, so save scumming is easy enough if you need it. That said, there are sequences where you can’t save at all, and some of them are very long. This got to be annoying when I needed to stop playing at times. I was forced to leave the game on for fear of losing my progress.
One QoL decision I really liked was that when you die the game automatically reloads your latest autosave. In most cases, this will be when you entered the specific area you were in when you died. In general, we’re looking at a very standard turn-based JRPG. There are optional tasks characters give you rewards for completing, quest boards, gear, and most of the standard things you expect to see in this genre. And it’s all competently made. The game runs very smoothly. I didn’t encounter any performance problems. That said, and again this is still in early access, Alterium Shift is missing a number of QoL features that would really improve the game overall.
For starters, it needs a map. Either a mini-map or an area map in the pause menu, but this game desperately needs a tool to help with navigation. There are a lot of areas to explore, and items to find in them, but it’s super easy to get lost. There is a cool scanning mechanic that helps you find hidden items and points of interest though. As of yet, I haven’t reached a point where fast travel is available yet, but I really hope it gets introduced sometime later. Another crucial missing function is a bestiary or some type of indicator of information about enemies you’ve already discovered. Elemental weaknesses are a big part of the combat, but you have to remember them all yourself. I hope you can unlock a passive scan ability at some point, so you can see weaknesses and the amount of HP enemies have left. A major feature that’s missing is a journal or objective indicator of some sort. Characters tell you what you’re supposed to do next, but you have no way of referencing that information other than returning to the specific character that gave you your current objective. There’s no section of the menu that tells you what you’re currently supposed to be doing, what side tasks you have, or where to go. You could spend quite a while blindly searching for the location of your next objective. Especially when coupled with the lack of map. There are quest boards, but they only show quests for the specific town you’re currently in. Really the game is lacking information resources. It wants you to remember everything on your own and doesn’t care to explain things that might be important to how you approach the game. The combat tutorial was fine, but that’s about all the explanation you get in Alterium Shift.
There are a few little extras the game has to try to set itself apart. For example, there’s a fishing mini-game. It’s simple, but I like it a lot. In this game, defeating enemies nets you gold, XP, and items. There are standard items like potions, gear, and so on. But there are also animal parts. These parts can be traded for items at vendors. Not traded as in sold and then the gold is used for vendors. I mean they can be traded directly for certain things. While none of these little extras are revolutionary, I appreciate the character they add to this game.
While not a perfect game, I think Alterium Shift does a lot of things well. It needs polishing, and a number of features I consider a requirement for a turn-based exploration focused JRPG in 2023 are currently missing. But as far as indie JRPGs go, it has a lot of potential. It seems to be loaded with replay value, the combat works exactly how I would want it to, and the writing is entertaining at a minimum. If you’re looking for a turn-based JRPG that you don’t have to pay $60+ for, I don’t think Alterium Shift is a bad option. That being said, again this game is in early access, so it’s impossible to say how the final product will turn out. As it’s not a finished product, I will not provide a numerical score in this review.
