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Developer FLINT and publisher HYBE IM’s presents a modern rendition of classic side-scrolling RPGs with ASTRA: Knights of Veda.
Having made it’s debut on PC and mobile devices on 2 April 2024, let’s see what this game has to offer.
A World Haunted By Death
Right from the start, the art of ASTRA: Knights of Veda is certainly a sight to behold. Done by the same team behind the last FLINT game, Dragon Blaze, the art style does not skimp out on quality at any point in the game. It does a good job to convey both the nice and gruesome elements of the world in vivid detail, stopping just short of showing any actual blood on screen.
In addition, every single scene is fully voice acted in English, Japanese and Korean, including the side quests and daily quests. For those not particularly interested on the story or find them too long, all cutscenes are skippable and can be rewatched at any time.
Unfortunately, almost all the pre-rendered cutscenes struggled to play properly on my mobile device, despite having 8GB of RAM. While the audio elements played perfectly fine, I would be lucky if I even got to see anything on my screen that didn’t come across as a very slow PowerPoint presentation.
Hack, Slash, Swap, Shoot
The main gameplay of ASTRA is a 2D side-scrolling RPG revolving around entering short stages and clearing out the enemies with a squad of up to 4 Knights and yourself. Combat is quite decent and encourages building a team with skills that synergize well with each other, as well has having multiple different elements (called Power of the Stars) as enemies can build a temporary resistance after repeated exposure to a singular element.
The immediate issue I noticed was that the lighting makes certain stages unnecessarily harder as enemies blend into the background at night. In addition, your characters can easily be juggled by enemies if you get downed, and the same sadly does not apply to them.
It doesn’t help that my small flying companion will not stop mentioning loudly that I was out of stamina or low on health every time I was trying to activate a skill that was almost out of cooldown, which I only found can be turned off in the settings after 3 days of playing.
A small detail I do appreciate is that even across characters that use the same type of weapon, the nature of their charged attacks can vary from charging up a single attack, blocking and deflecting damage, and even a repeated barrage of attacks. It does incentivize you to mix and match their Knights not just from sheer numbers, but also a play style that suits you.
This applies to the main character as well. Although the Master of the Book is typically not selectable, if for some reason all your knights fall, you get to control them in combat as a last stand, with their stats scaling based on your player level.
Multiplayer Elements
ASTRA: Knights of Veda is mainly a single player game, but that doesn’t mean that it is completely devoid of interactions with other people. The game encourages you to group up with other players through both the co-op and guild systems.
Stage co-op lets you invite up to 2 other strangers or friends to tackle the stage together. All 3 people will be able to bring their entire 4 Knight squad into the stage and switch freely between them at any time. From my experiences so far, I have not noticed any significant difference in the time it takes to kill a stage boss in co-op and single player mode, but it certainly is easier to survive when it has 3 targets to choose from instead of 1.
Upon reaching player level 5, the Guild function will unlock. At the moment, the only perk of guilds is access to the guild shop which sells all sorts of enhancement materials and even 3 standard banner pulls per month. Keep in mind that the guild shop only accepts guild medals which are obtained by members completing content on a weekly basis.
Are You Sure This Isn’t a Hoyoverse Game?
It’s about time to address the elephant on the room, and that is that the game systems has clearly taken hefty amounts of inspiration from Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. Some of the similarities I have noticed so far include:
- Similar appearance and layout of menu, achievements, and quest lists
- Standard banners and rate-up banners use different currencies (Crystal of Fate and Crystal of Destiny, respectively), both costing exactly 160 starstones per pull.
- 5-piece relic system for enhancing unit stats, complete with 2/4 set bonuses and random effects obtained after leveling up relics.
- The ability to grant unique enhancements to Knights via duplicate pulls, with 3 skill level increases at the 3rd and 5th duplicate.
Although I would not call it plagiarism, I also admit that Astra has not made much noticeable innovations to the systems to make it unique.
Final Thoughts
ASTRA: Knights of Veda presents a game that manages to be both horrifying and stunning to look at, accompanied by a world crawling with undead and beasts. It’s also one of the best renditions of side-scrolling RPGs that I have seen in the past few years with combat mechanics that encourage diverse usage of Knights. Unfortunately, I doubt that ASTRA: Knights of Veda will not be escaping the accusations of being a 2D version of Genshin Impact anytime soon.
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