Ashes: Afterglow
By Vostyok - N/A Maps (non-traditional structure)
Format: UZDoom
[Download]
Started: January 14th 2025
Finished: January 17th 2025
Status: Completed
Afterglow is an incredibly impressive sequel, though despite all the improvements it doesn't quite nail everything as well as the original does. The first half is practically perfect, all the maps are great, the more open level structure with a central hub and a bunch of key locations connected to it works really well, and the expanded story and dialogue system is really neat. Once you leave the first hub the game becomes linear for a bit which is a really nice change of pace, with more great maps as usual. Then you get to the second hub and things crash and burn. The maps are really meh aside from one single one, the hub itself is a little annoying to navigate, and your cool new vehicle gets basically zero usage despite how much it can actually do. There's also some very buggy branching narrative elements which theoretically are cool, but its far too easy to basically softlock yourself with some one-way dialogue trees and a set of key NPCs that look exactly like normal enemies. Thankfully Afterglow brings it home with an insanely good set of final maps after this point, redeeming the first game for its horrible final boss and ending with one hell of a song for its final sequence. Overall Afterglow is still an extremely good game, and a great evolution of the formula from the first game, but the not great second hub makes the middle chunk of the game pretty wack to play through. Hopefully episode 3 (if one ever gets made) manages to fully nail the open level structure, but let's just say I'm glad to know that Hard Reset is linear like the first game.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Favorite/Least Favorite Map skipped due to Afterglow's very different structure (and because this was played/reviewed before I started doing that in the first place)