"I have nothing against reusing assets, but Achilles: Survivor needs to do more than reuse great-looking assets from Achilles: Legends Untold if it is going to succeed in the highly competitive action roguelike genre. "
Singleplayer.
It is only fair to say that while the tone of this review will be ultimately negative, that is mostly because of issues that should be addressed during access.
If these issues are addressed before leaving early access, I will give Achilles: Survivor a much higher score and happily recommend it.
Until that time, I can only review what I right before me.
While some people feel that reusing assets is lazy or a sign of a greedy developer, I feel that it is a very prudent use of resources that can allow for more frequent releases, helping to migrate the lengthy development time required to release an entirely new product.
I am all for smaller “stop-gap” releases that reuse assets if they are well made, fairly priced, and help keep people employed. Achilles: Survivor is one such game.
Reusing the high-quality assets and textures from Achilles: Legends Untold has allowed Dark Point Games to release a game that looks fantastic and is fun to play, or at least fun to play in small doses.
Titles that allow players to choose between playable characters must ensure that each character is somewhat equal to every other character on the roster.
While it’s perfectly fine to make faster characters with less armour or slower characters with more health points, each character must be viable.
Unfortunately, that just isn’t true with Achilles: Survivor.
As of February 2025, we have:
I love a good section of enemies as much as anyone; games like Vampire Survivors offer players a selection of easy-to-kill-kill mobs mixed with far more challenging encounters, which help make each round enjoyable.
Unfortunately, Dark Point Games seems to feel that the only way to make each round challenging is to include hundreds of exploding spiders, which turns each round into a game of dodging the exploding spider by the time the counter reaches zero.
There is nothing wrong in including a few AOE-focused enemies; however, when you combine Achilles: Survivor’s current poor controls and ongoing performance issues with waves consisting of dozens of exploding spiders, playing Achilles: Survivor starts to feel more like a form of punishment than any even resembling a good time.
Like the unbalanced heroes we discussed earlier, abilities, and upgrades in Achilles, Survivors can be divided into three main groups.
I have witnessed firsthand that some abilities melt the final boss of a zone in a matter of seconds. In contrast, even when fully levelled, other abilities are so weak that they cannot kill the boss before the player is overwhelmed.
In an action roguelike title, all abilities should be equally viable, so players can create a build that best suits their playstyle instead of being forced to use an exact build if they want to succeed.
Right now, that is not the case with Achilles: Survivor, with roughly half of the abilities being essentially worthless on more difficult maps in their current state.
Unbalanced progression is a major issue affecting almost every aspect of Achilles: Survivor.
While I understand challenges are supposed to be challenging, they should be possible with any character unless otherwise stated (e.g., kill 10k enemies with X character).
Unfortunately, this is not the case in Achilles: Survivor, in which several challenges require a specific combination of character, upgrades, and pure dumb luck to complete.
Common feedback on the Steam forums for Achilles: Survivor is players commenting on how it is impossible to complete some challenges without a perfect streak of RNG upgrades, resulting in players being unable to unlock certain heroes and making overall progression more difficult.
While I like the ability to construct various structures in each round, they do not last very long.
Even fully upgraded buildings fall after less than a minute when facing off against a focused attack, even if players were lucky enough to get offered the correct durability upgrades and somehow avoid the performance issues that make defending structures from exploding spiders next to impossible.
While this system has promise, the developers need to find a way to make structures feel more sturdy, even if that means increasing their costs and reducing the amount required to complete some challenges.
Most action roguelikes slowly ramp up in difficulty to allow players a chance to level up a few times before things get faster and more difficult.
Achilles: Survivor, for some reason, maintains a sluggish pace for roughly 30% of each round before throwing hundreds of relatively slow-moving bullet sponge enemies and exploding spiders at my equally slow-moving character until the timer runs out or the round ends in victory (or defeat).
Cutting enemy HP by 50% and increasing the overall speed of the game by an equal amount would make Achilles: Survivor so much more enjoyable and more respectful of the players’ time, which, with so many good games competing for attention, is in short supply.
I understand Achilles: Survivor is in early access, and optimization will come later, but I have played hundreds of titles, including well over 100 early access games, and I have never seen FPS drops this severe and sustained, with FPS randomly dropping from rock solid 144FPS down to single digits for no apparent reason.
While I understand that more enemies on screen at a time (especially when they look as good as the mobs in Achilles: Survivor) affect performance, certain mobs dramatically affect performance, with FPS taking a nosedive without moments of them first appearing.
Combined with the issues we have outlined above, performance is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Unless these issues are addressed before leaving early access, I will not return to Achilles: Survivor except to update my coverage when required.
As you can see, almost every aspect of Achilles: Survivor that I have an issue with has positive elements, and with minor (and occasionally major) adjustments, it could be far more enjoyable to play.
Achilles: Survivor is not a game without merit or hope; rather, it feels like a pre-alpha masquerading as an early access release, and one that frankly should have spent a few more months in the oven before being made available for purchase in any capacity.
6 months from now, Achilles: Survivor could be a great game, but it will take a miracle for the wider gaming community to forget its poor start and give it the second chance it needs to do more than stumble out of early access and die shortly after launch.
Achilles: Survivor is a action rogue-like video game developed and published by Dark Point Games, it was released on 29 January 2025 and retails for $4.99.
Achilles: Survivor is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Achilles: Survivor is unrated and contains:
I wanted to love Achilles: Survivor, and perhaps one day I will, as there is already a lot to like about it in its current (somewhat sorry) state.
However, until the developers find a way to balance multiple aspects of the game and, most importantly, address some of the worst performance issues I have ever encountered in any game (including other early access releases), I cannot recommend it at this time.
Ultimately, Achilles: Survivor is fairly priced, looks fantastic, offers a decent amount of content, and has loads of potential. However, whether it will become a good game is yet to be determined.
We found Achilles: Survivor to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
Note: This title is in Early Access, meaning it is publicly available but still evolving. The rating shown reflects its current state and may change as development continues.
