Ashen

 More Souls  clones are always an interest so this being co op and 3d it was no brainer

Ashen is a total Dark Souls clone in almost every area. The first thing you will notice is the bizarre artstyle and the blank faces which feels like both an artistic and techincal decision/limitation. Since the developer is a low budget indie studio, they decided to go with a somewhat cartoonish Windwaker cell shaded artstyle for aesthetic and techincal reasons. The graphics are decent with some visually impressive vistas and long draw distances, some gigantic memorable NPC interactions and decently detailed locations .

You have a Hub world town which admittedly is not that memorable. its a tiny generic village with not many landmarks or things of interest, just NPC and some upgrade tables. Through the progression of the game this hub world slowly expands and new buildings get built but you never really feel all that familliar with it and you find yourself getting lost even after 10 hours. Its not that bad, it just doesn't hold a candle to any of the Souls hub worlds in its lack of unique identity.

The actual co-op was a main interest here, and how does the co op work? Well it has a sort of passive cooperative mode, where you can only spawn eachother outside of the hub world. At first, this is a real pain in the ass, as you have to attempt to try to explain to your friend on microphone where exactly to stand to spawn eachother. Its incredibly awkward and doesnt work very well. I know it didnt work well in original Souls but did they hav eto make it so annoying here as well?  You find yourself saying "No, stand near that bush by the cave"  "No, not that one, the bush by the cave with the hut in front of it"  for minutes on end trying to position yourself in the same spot, while spamming the Up button on Dpad to do a 'call' action, which then attempts to connect you to your partner.
 Now, in the beginning of the game this really sucks, however, as the game progresses you unlock the ability to fast travel between 'bonfires' so this becomes much less of an issue. Instead of having to awkwardly try to tell your friend the vauge area you can stand, you can instead just say "Ok lets both teleport to X" and then you can instantly connect to eachother, sometimes without needing to do anything.
Overall, the co op connectivity is hit and miss, but when it works its OK. Unfortunately, you cannot even see your co op partners custom apperance, just some generic NPC, which causes a lotof confusion because sometimes you can easily mistake your Co op buddy for another monster because they look kind of the same.

Besides all that, the co op is very enjoyable and great. It has a system where you can go down once and your buddy can help you, but if you go down again youre permanently out until you both respawn eachother. Progression in co-op is seemless and you dont have to do everything twice like in Souls games, so for example you can your buddy can both do an entire area, kill the boss, and never get disconnected from eachother or have to go back and do it again for the other guys world. This was a breath of fresh air, as in other Soulslikes it got real tiring having to do everything twice.  However, sometimes you will randomly disconnect from eachother because one of you happened to wander slightly too far into another area, causing the awkward confusion of trying to dictate where to spawn eachother again.

The actual combat and mechanics are a faithful and solid Souls experience. The weapons boil down to One handed and Two handed without much variety. All of the weapons are either Axes, and Clubs. Thats it. Theres no swords or anything else. Just those two. Which felt a bit disappointing and limited. Theres a lot of them, but they dont have any special stats or unique abilities, they mostly seem to do the same thing with slight varietions in moveset. So that part is just OK. The actual core combat is pretty enjoyable though with attacks feeling satisfying and impactful, some interesting enemy variety with some really intense enemies in particular being able to grab you and pin you down, which encourages intense co-op action calling for your friend to come save you.

The actual RPG mechanics are quite limited I will admit. All you really collect 'souls' for , is to upgrade your weapon, upgrade your health potions, and thats about it. You easily upgrade your health potions to max about halfway through the game, and your weapon as well. Then you find yourself not caring about souls anymore as theres simply nothing left to buy.

Theres no upgrading armor or anything. Theres only one armor slot. While finding new armors is exciting, the stats are not all that complex. The only real stat on armors is the stamina cost and how much damage reduction, but I found it not worth using armor at all really and instead opting to use the armor that just gives the most stamina.

The exploration and loot in the game is very enjoyable I found myself wanting to explore all over the place just because you can see the little loot icon in the distance, it was enjoyable to find diferent items and armors , upgrade abilities, etc, and wanted to go out of my way to find those things.

The level design is decent to good , but it does have a habit of reusing caves and underground locations way too often.
A lot of roaming countrysides,caves, some scary dark areas where lanterns become a major mechanic and also something that encouraged co op play. It is very useful for one partner to be one handed, and carry a lantern, and the other to be two handed and hit harder. Which is what we did for most of the game .
Really the main type of locations in this game are dark underground areas and countrysides, it does get a bit samey but there are some places that mix it up such as a deserty area and a challenging cool palace at the end of the game. Theres a mechanic where you can use spears to 'hookshot' across various statues, and it introduces an element of platforming into the game that was a bit refreshing and exciting to slingshot around the area in different ways to find new items etc.

There are a lot of sidequests in the game and the way they are introduced and scattered nearby all the main quests meant they were not a hassle to do and infact exciting. I actually completed all the side quests which is very rare in any game. They were just out of the way enough to be a consideration, but also not super tedious where it felt not worth it -

This is because the ONLY way to 'level up' in this game is by completing quests. This goes back to the limited RPG mechanics. Everytime you complete a quest you see '+Health" or "+ Stamina"  and also "Unlocked new skill ability"   so because of this, we were very interested in completing as many quests as possible. And maybe this is designed in a clever way to sort very much encourage you to do them. We could have easily avoided them and stil gotten through the game easily, it didnt feel forced, but we just felt like doing them because it was fun. They are not that varied it usually involves dropping by a location and finding and item or killing an NPC .

I will admit that probably the biggest and real flaw with the game is the total lack of bosses. I think the entire game has like four bosses including side quests. The side quests have Zero bosses. It was not uncommon to go hours at a time without fighting any bosses. For a souls clone this is devastating, as almsot the main draw for this kind of game is fighting constant new and exciting bosses, but there were hardly any. The ones that were in the game, were very easy relatively. Most bosses were killed first or second try. The last two bosses were finished in two attempts. Pretty disappointing bosses.

The game is just challenging enough to warrant your full attention, but it never felt bullshit or frustrating. I would say the difficulty was perfect, it forced us to work together and be dilligent, but we never felt like invincibile gods that shrugged everything off. Plenty of intense heart racing moments.  

The story Is decent but its not really in the way, as it should be.
When cutscenes happen, its interesting because they are rare and you actually care. The voice acting is roughly the same the whole game, nothing really stands out, but the writing isn't bad or anything. Everything about the characters and story felt as middle of the road as possible. im fine with that. I couldnt really tell you what the game was about, but I dont feel the need to know. The writing is laced with all sorts of grim and dark spooky stuff, it sets the tone right.

Music in the game is notable for setting a consistent and enjoyable tone throughout, the hub world has a calming safe sound, and music otherwise isn't intrusive or annoying.

While it has minminal RPG mechanics, an inconsistent co-op experience, disappointing lack of bosses, and mostly repetivie and forgettable levels, the actual core gameplay is solid enough to be a good game. In a way, the minimal RPG mechanics almost help the game be more enjoyable, but its a pro and con. For a game that has only 1500 reviews on steam from a small indie dev, consider me impressed.  is Worth playing alone for a competent co-op experience with fun combat. Maybe the best Soulslike i've played so far!

7/10