Approximate amount of time to 100%: 25 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1 + chapter selection
Is there a good guide available: Not yet when I write this. I hope there will be video guides on where to find all the collectibles in the future
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Finding all the collectibles feels as a grind
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Astor: Blade of the Monolith is a great Action-Adventure in which you play as Astor. You'll go on a journey to try to understand the world around you. Some crazy things are going on. However, the more you unravel the more confusing it gets until you find the real answers. I keep this a bit vague on purpose because I think that the story hits much more when you experience it for yourself.

What I love about Astor: Blade of the Monolith is the story in combination with how beautiful the game looks. The game is much bigger than I would have expected before starting to play it. And the further you get the more powers you unlock to play around with. And very early on you get a mount! Which is so lovely in this huge world.

The combat takes a little bit of time to get used to, because the buttons for hitting and heavy hitting are on different spots on the controller than I would expect, but it is quite easy to get used to them and just enjoy the wonderful story this game has to tell.

Many of the achievements are for completing the story, and the others are for upgrading everything and finding all the collectibles. There are also achievements for beating enemies with a specific weapon. Most of those you'll already unlock without even really trying to get them as long as you switch to the new weapon when you unlock it. You can always have 2 weapons equipped: the newest weapon and the second one you get to choose. You can switch between them at any moment and they all feel different.

The only achievement I struggle with is with finding all the collectibles. Gladly there is a chapter selection system, and during chapter selection, it even shows you how many out of how many you already have. Even more importantly, when you get new collectibles, it is saved and you don't have to complete the whole chapter. However, the chapters are quite big, and sections of a chapter are closed off until you get to that stage or get locked out when you get to the next stage of that chapter. So most of the time you can't walk freely around to search for them through the whole chapter. This is one of the things that prevent me from getting the last few achievements at this moment. I wish you would feel more overpowered after finishing the game, but it feels like the strength of the monsters stays the same, so it is never a walk in the park to go back to a previous chapter and rush through it. On my end, I also have a bug during chapter selection that the game doesn't show where the next objective is. The weird thing is, so far the developers haven't been able to reproduce this and they are busy looking into what causes this. I hope nobody else encounters this bug, as it makes replaying older chapters more challenging than it needs to be. I can say that the developers are very responsive and that I found a few other bugs but those were fixed in just a few hours.

I give Astor: Blade of the Monolith 3,5 out of 5 stars.

Feels like I'm playing a really dang good Playstation 2 game and I'm here for that. Amazing art direction. I just love how everything looks.

Amazing little gem that feels like a throwback to zelda of old. I've read some reviews where the review says the game is souls like....don't know where they got that idea...this is not a souls like game, not even close. difficulty is far more forgiving then any souls like game. If you are a fan of the old Zelda game this is going to be right up your ally.