"Clash: Artifacts of Chaos" Review - Good game, terrible name

Published by: Nacon

Developed by: ACE Team

Available for: Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Every once in a while I like to scour the bottom of the steam or playstation store barrel in search of indie gems. It seems like every year I find at least one GOTY nominee by doing that, and I always love to be surprised by something nobody is talking about. Enter Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, a game with seemingly zero people playing it (judging by the minimal digital footprint the game has) that serves as the third installment in the ZenoClash series: an old, old series of first-person brawlers that had a cult following in their time. In spite of the name being truly horrendous, I found myself intrigued by just how weird the cover art looked, so I decided to have a look, and things only got more strange from there. A brief look at the art style, the world, the characters, and the gameplay intrigued me, and I found that I needed to see what this was all about. And dear reader, let me tell you....this game isn't for everyone, but it's 100% for me, so read on to find out if you might also enjoy yourself!

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos takes place in the punk apocalypse world of Zenozoik: a land inhabited by strange beings consistent with what you'd find in an edgier Jim Henson production. It's a brutal land where almost everyone is constantly looking for a fight, and in these lands, there exists only one law. If a fight is about to break out, or if one wishes to force another into a fight, they can invoke this law and force the fight to happen, but with the advantage-holder left up to chance. The law is a ritual in which both parties lay down a small cloth with four quadrants. Both parties then put down an "artifact": a magical piece of wood in various shapes that signify certain consequences. They then roll however many dice they have on them, and naturally one party has a higher number, but this isn't the end of the ritual. The parties then take turns using special modifiers to alter the dice numbers (for instance, one person might use a modifier to decrease the value of all dice in a circle by 1). After both participants have used all their modifiers, whoever has the highest score wins, and the consequence suggested by the winner's artifact must be visited upon the loser. Certain artifacts might, for example, demand that the loser's foot be leased to a tether, restricting their movement during the fight. Others are far more serious, such as forcing the loser to drink a slow-acting snake poison at the beginning of the fight. This is the one law of the land, and despite how brutal and otherwise lawless Zenozoik is, all its denizens (save for a group of outlaws) abide by it with honor. You play as Pseudo, a hermit who largely keeps to himself until he stumbles across a boy who has just lost his grandfather to a stranger who invoked the one law to force the frail old man to fight. After rescuing the boy, Pseudo decides that it would be best to take the boy to Gemini, the 8-10 headed woman who serves as Zenozoik's de-facto ruler, to see where he should go. But as it turns out, this boy has a miraculous healing power, and Gemini has already put out a reward to anyone who could bring the boy to her. When Pseudo doesn't agree to hand over the boy, Gemini begins to send her most powerful people after him. These bodyguards she sends wield some of the most powerful artifacts in the land, and Gemini herself wields the artifact from which the one law flows: the artifact of pain, which she can use more than once, and without even having to win the dice game. With such powerful enemies after these, Pseudo and the boy embark on a journey across Zenozoik in search of 4 legendary artifacts said to have been created specifically to nullify the effects of each of these uber-powerful artifacts. Does this world sound like an utterly interesting place to you? Because it did to me! And the kicker is that the world just keeps getting weirder and weirder as you go along. It seems like around every corner there's some brand new interesting concept, and such unbridled creativity goes a long way with me. It goes so far, in fact, that I can end up forgiving some missteps...which this game does, unfortunately, have plenty of.

For starters, while I found the gameplay enjoyable generally, I find it hard to say that I ever got good at it with a straight face. I can tell there's a way to play it correctly, but I just never quite got it...at least, I don't think I did...I beat the game, so obviously I got better than I was at the beginning, but it's one of those situations where it kind of feels like I just cheesed things even though I didn't make an effort to do that....does that make sense at all? I guess it might be better to say that I "got the hang of it" instead of "got good." And the thing is, until you get the hang of it, you're likely going to find yourself frustrated. Contrary to its predecessors, this game is a third-person brawler, and it simply does not play how you'd expect one to play. Whatever muscle memory you might have from titles such as Yakuza is worthless here, and the gist of what I'm saying is that I never quite learned what to replace that muscle memory with. But let's get more into what the gameplay actually consists of. At the start, you choose from one of three combat stances, and the stance you choose determines your attack style, speed, and the distance an attack covers. As the game progresses you can unlock the stances you didn't choose at the beginning plus several others. In addition to this, you can unlock various special attacks activated by pressing the triangle button on PS5 and the equivalent inputs on all other available platforms. You can have two stances equipped at a time and switch between them freely, and you can have four special attacks equipped, which you assign to slots corresponding to directions you can push the left stick. By pressing the aforementioned button while the left stick is pushed in any given direction will trigger the special attack assigned to that direction. When it comes to actual moment-to-moment gameplay, which stances and special attacks you equip will largely depend on your needs/wants in terms of attack speed and distance, so finding out what works best for you is what will make the gameplay more intuitive. That basic combat that your loadout will help out with consists of using basic punches, those special attacks, and dodges...shocking, right? But again...whatever instinct might be coming up in your head based on your experience with third-person brawlers, put it out of your mind. Evidently the key to gameplay is dodging right after one of your attacks lands, but again, it's hard to say if doing that ever really worked or if I ever really did it right. I was able to get through combat encounters with relative ease by finding loadouts that worked for me and playing like I would expect to play, so rest assured that you'll probably find a way to get through this game's intense difficulty even if you aren't quite getting it. If all of this sounds a little...damning...then I suppose from an objective standpoint it is, but as I've already said, I generally enjoyed the gameplay quite a lot once I got the hang of it and wasn't just banging my head against the wall. What little (and I mean little little) discourse there is on the internet has been largely negative when it comes to gameplay, so I guess if you're like me and a strong concept can get you through some missteps in gameplay you'll probably enjoy yourself. Use your best judgement!

The other misstep this game unfortunately makes is one that doesn't require anything quite so nuanced as "your best judgment," and that's the technical front. Firstly and most importantly, while I love it when games don't include a super-readable map and force you to find your own way to your objectives with no help whatsoever, that enjoyment largely depends on the environment being readable enough that you can actually handle that navigation yourself. But Artifacts of Chaos unfortunately doesn't boast environments designed well enough to suit that particular design choice. The issue here is that the incredible level of detail in the world is, at times, used in ways that defy traditional gamer knowledge. For instance, you can't really jump in this game, you can just leap across chasms. So, without a way to bound over obstacles, what would you, as a gamer, infer from seeing an elevated patch of land, say, up to your character's ankles without a little slope leading up to that height? You'd likely assume that it's a boundary and the game is communicating this boundary to you by relying on your knowledge of your movement capabilities, right? Well, in this game, that's only true some of the time. Furthermore, a lot of the plot-necessary routes are either obscured from being so small, obscured from the general disorienting nature of the area, or obscured from excessive detail distracting you from the ground. The developers have largely remained silent except for general advertisements about the game, but the difficulty that fans have had with getting around the world is the one direct comment I've seen from them concerning fan feedback (at time of writing), so serious is this issue. I desperately tried to find my way around without guides (not that there are any guides other than full playthroughs on Youtube), but it was downright impossible for me at one or two points. So to be clear, my issue with this isn't that the game doesn't hold your hand and you have to navigate the area for yourself, it's that the environments are developed in such a way that sometimes the way forward is hidden behind signposting that normally signals the end of an area or an uncrossable boundary. Thankfully this is the biggest technical problem, but it's a biggie. Besides this, there are also your usual slew of what we'd normally call "Eurojank"...which is a misnomer in this case because the development team is located in Chile...a recent interview with the director of the Final Fantasy series comes to mind...but I digress! There are little technical flaws and oddities that tend to be associated with either low-budget games from overseas or beginner game development projects, such as in-game menus that seem like they're just kind of hovering over the screen (you'd understand what I mean if you saw it), stark differences in volume between the soundtrack and dialogue/environmental noises, rough transitions between gameplay and cutscenes, framerate drops exclusively at certain loading zones between areas, soundtrack pieces that start/stop playing at these same loading zones with no smooth transition into stopping/starting, and even some fades into actual loading screens at very specific loading zones. Other than in the situations I've already specific, I didn't notice any framerate drops or texture pop-in. The game's gorgeous pencil-drawn-looking art style probably contributes to the texture aspect, but a gift horse needs no oral inspection. I also never had any hard/soft crashes or bugs worth speaking of. So this is the rare instance of game that feels like it should be much more of a technical disaster than it is. It still is a technical disaster, but the ways in which it isn't are kind of impressive in their own right.

Folks, unless you're one of the few people I've spoken to about Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, I'd bet a fair bit of money that you'd never heard of it until seeing this review! And that's the kind of title that I enjoy reviewing the most: the one that could possibly turn you on to a gameplay experience you'll love! As the subtitle says, I would, in fact, call this game "good." I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. Learning about this fascinating world, trying to see all the secrets therein, all of it was one of this year's most memorable gaming experiences for sure. But in spite of that, I can't give it a blanket recommendation to everyone, and it's likely you've already realized if you're the kind of person I can't make that recommendation to. But if you're like me and a cool, unique concept set in an interesting, otherworldly location can make an otherwise widely-flawed experience work, then I'd ask you to at least give this one a try if it sounds even remotely interesting!

Let us review:

Unintuitive gameplay - 1.0

Unintuitive environments - 1.0

Other Technical shortcomings  - 8.0

The final score for Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is...

7.2/10 - Good

Fingers crossed, ACE Team, fingers crossed