AntharioN

This game is worse than it looks.

If its artstyle/graphics do not appeal to you, I can not recommend it.
If it does however, there's a good amount of fun to be found.
It starts pretty strong, but falls flat more and more as you progress.

+ great character/party creation with lots of races and talents
+ decent turn-based combat
+ all armors and weapons are visible when equipped
+ fun magic, although it could have more spell diversity
+ cool skill/stat/talent system

- extremely bad dungeon layout! probably the worst I have ever seen (you know when a dungeon has so many crossroads, you lose track and don't know where to go first, and having to go back to check the other path. EVERY dungeon is a maze like that to the extreme)
- very boring quests (fetch this, kill them)
- boring story and dialogues (after a while I didn't care to read them properly anymore)
- orientation is difficult as the minimap has low fidelity, cannot be zoomed in or out, and on top of that the overground world layout is very bad and maze-like too, you have to go back and forth a lot and remember where things are
- too long playtime for what it is

Nevertheless I had ~30hrs of fun with this game, after that I had to force myself to go on.
After defeating the endboss, it didn't end. Maybe it was not the endboss afterall, but I'm not willing to fetch more stuff for nothing. So I treat this as completed.

It's better when you can scoop it up for $2 but it's still worth the full price, a nice turn based RPG, nothing more. It does nothing special, nothing revolutionary. It is entirely derivative of 'old school' CRPGs from the late 90s.

Antharion is on sale right now for the first time in years, so I will drop a quick review here to say yes, the game is worth buying at the sale price if you like old school isometric CRPGs. It follows all of the conventions of the genre, right down to the basement rats tutorial, so don't expect anything innovative. However it gets (IMO) the most important things right: a large open world to explore, with no level scaling and a real sense of progression as your party levels up and journeys to more remote, more dangerous areas.

Both gold and XP are limited resources (there is no respawning) so you really have to think carefully about how to build your team and where to invest your gold. This is the kind of game where you might only be able to upgrade your equipment once per hour, but every upgrade is meaningful and adds to the feeling of progression. In that sense it reminded me a lot of Gothic, if Gothic was an isometric RPG with turn-based combat.

I played for 50 hours a few months ago, and I do not recall having any technical problems. It installs and runs just fine on Windows 10. In summary, a very good deal at the sale price for the amount of content that it provides.

AntharioN is a turn-based, open world RPG with a nostalgic feel. Explore, fight, quest: each of these has its own rewards. Spec your characters how you want, equipping them with a variety of items, and go forth to explore. Buy a house to settle down (or to save all that food and money you fought so hard for). And be sure to smack an orc with your handy mug (the best one-handed weapon I have found so far).

Underrated, but flawed gem. Don't expect good story, its mostly passable and generic with lots of fetch&kill side quests. But for a low price you'll get a solid 40 hour long turn-based party rpg with a main focus on exploration and combat.

I also dig the charming 2d art style with bobblehead-like characters. And the soundtrack is nice.

Antharion is an old-school fantasy RPG game and i am a great fan of RPG-ARPG Hack & Slash game but Antharion will not be one of my favourite little RPG game of the year, definitely not.

The game is similar to the serie of Ultima,possibly Avernum serie, the Avadon serie...However, the comparison stop there, because everything about Antharion looks and feel basic and simplistic
and is no mean as rich and deep as it's counterparts.

From the creation of your characters to the simplicity of the plot, the graphics aren't very attractive and the UI could have been done better.

Nothing really stand out in Antharion, nothing that can give the game a little something...a little something more than the other RPG games.

It sure gives you the possibility to create and fully customize your party, to enjoy a total freedom to play however you want to go wherever you want and do almost whatever you want
but so are most RPG games anyway and many doing it even better.

But what really gets me in Antharion is it is plagued with too many technical issues, bad design choices, hassles with UI interactions and most of all, the RNG system is well messed up,
Your party's statistics don't seem to actualy have a big influence in it. And to be honest with you, combat system is repetitive and has not much of any strategy involved.

Party Creation:
-custom build your party, you can distribute your skills points but not your attributes points.
-lacking in characters physical, visual selections, it's really basic
-party order can't be change during the game.

The Game
-Minimum animation in the world, i find the graphic quit standard with no attention to details
-The mini-map doesn't expand nor can you drag it around.
-too many unnecessarily click and drag from left to right up and down in inventory and trading.
-Everything other than NPCs want to kill you, rats, crabs, seagulls, come on! they're just harmless animals.
-story line not really interesting and quests are dull and lack in depth.
-Items poorly designed, at their simplest no details or variety.

The Combat System
-RNG doesn't work very well, there are raging moments in fights when you cannot believe how bad RNG is, blind rats kill my party in medium/hard mode without a single miss when my team constantly miss or spells fizzle out.
-when character with high % hit keep constantly missing, you know that there's something wrong.
-tanking makes no sense when enemies can go around you to hit the range characters duh!
-when enemies and party are very close, it makes it confusing to see what is where.
-No auto health/mana regeneration in non combat mode, you have to eat drink potion or sleep.

Overall, Antharion failed in many ways to deliver an interesting RPG game that can provide hours of game play without quickly getting frustrating or boring to death considering the original tag price of £11
it is not worth buying because there are many cheaper and better RPG-ARPG games out there.

This game could have been quite good. Too many bad design decisions plague it however.

- Blind rats hit you more often than you hit them
- 2 rat attacks can kill your squishy characters
- "Very Easy" lockpick chance is 20%, and failing breaks your very limited lock picks
- No quick way to equip items other than dragging it to the slot it is used in
- Cant move UI elements which results in it being a pain to drag items from the left of the screen to the right just to trade between characters
- Small enemies are visually obscured by your characters graphics making it hard to click them
- Attacking takes all your AP, but doesnt seem to matter if you have 5 or 1 AP.
- VERY limited selection of screen resultions.
- No real graphic options


The devs of this game need to play other games out there for some basic, standardized UI/UX elements. The game is just too hindered by poor interaction with the UI and game itself, and many of the bad design decisions taking away any fun the game might actually be. You have to force yourself to keep playing.

AntharioN is enjoyable for what it is: A generic old-school style top-own isometric RPG PC game, and it's the one and only release from the now-disappeared Orphic Software. That being said, I hope this game remains on STEAM for a long time and I reccomend everyone who loves RPG's buy this very game (when it's on sale). I very much enjoy playing this game, I'm not putting it down and I would have liked Orphic to have stayed around a bit longer just to see what else they could have released! Not bad for a "one and only", some companies can't even get that right...

More about the game:
Gameplay seems a little unbalanced at first, you need to save before every door you lock-pick. Save before you open every door because of possible fights... everything else about this is a straightforward cRPG.
It's not the *best* by far, but its fun.

I was willing to overlook the absolutely generic game play of this indie game. What I can't overlook, however, is being 11+ hours in and having my saves corrupted for no apparent reason. I see this has happened to other users as well. I can't imagine I've just been lucky all these years and it's never happened before playing any other PC games, until AntharioN. I was willing to trudge through the mundane gameplay to the very end. But this? No way. I have two save files, both junk, both completely "blacked out" as other reviewers have mentioned. No chance of a refund now either for this "broken" game. It's becoming increasingly more difficult to support small indie teams with the dumpster fire that is Steam Greenlight, early-access promises that are never fulfilled, and abandoned games like this. Frustrating to say the least.

If you've played Spiderweb Software's Avernum / Exile series, you know what you're getting into here. Standard create-a-four-person party turn-based RPG with a big open world and tons of baddies to kill.

Pros:
+Solid graphics with a somewhat unique/cute art style
+Good interface design
+Fun, good-paced, intuitive combat
+Minimap, questing, dialogue and crafting features are fleshed out and functional

Cons:
-Slightly immature writing style, plot isn't anything to write home about
-Feels slightly derivitive

Essentially, if you enjoy Spiderweb's party games, you'll dig Antharion, but not for the plot or writing, for the gameplay. Big recommend.

While I recommend and find myself coming back to this game, it is not without some reservations. I'm a big fan of turn based RPGs, so it scratches that itch. However, there are some things that irk me about it. The A.I. in combat is pretty bad. Enemies pretty much just rush at you and frequently get stuck on barriers or switch directions for no apparent reason. Fetch quests. Dear god so many fetch quests. "Oh hi, I lost my [insert item]. Can you get it back for me?" And that pretty much summarizes the plot too. There are some magical items, and you must fetch them to stop an evil power. If you can ease up your expectations where these things won't be a deal breaker, then you will probably manage to enjoy this game. Exploration, leveling up, and a good variety of cool weapons, armor, and other items keep things interesting as you progress.

I tried so very hard to like this game. Put almost 5 hours into. It reminded me alot of an online version of D&D i found years ago, and really enjoyed. This game is not balanced in anyway. Gold is hard to come by. You have to build the perfect party in the beginning, or you're kinda screwed. There's definitely potential here, but it's not finished.

EDIT: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've had a change of heart. I still stand by comments before about needing particular party construction. The original party I started with, I can't recall the specifics, but it didn't workout. I admit I reacted too soon. This is a great little game and worth the $$. Any classic RPG fans out there: do yourself a favor and pick this up. :)

Sigh. I went in really wanting an old school isometric RPG.

The artstyle isn't my favorite, minimal animations and awkward characters all looking directly at the camera, but I dont think it really hurt the game that much.

Music is very ambient. Nothing toe tapping. Which isn't bad, but I found myself turning the music off to listen to Spotify more often then not.

The minimap doesn't expand, so your map at any given time is super small. I found myself getting lost over and over again. This wasn't helped by the absurd dungeon design. Random hallways branching off into more random hallways. It sort of made sense in a sewer, but all these dungeons and tombs feel like they were all engineered by mad men purposfully making them into unnavigatable mazes. If these areas were at all intuative, I don't think I would have really minded no map. Getting lost in a game can be fun. Getting actually lost, isn't so much.

So a lot of people are complaining a ton about the difficulty. I really didn't mind it all that much, its somewhat challenging and yes, your white mage spells can fizzle leading to your tank's death, but death isn't permanent, so as long as you can squeek through a fight everybody whos unconscious comes back to life. There is also a lot of complaining about no respawning monsters leading to a lack of xp or food, which I again didn't really find a problem with. There's plenty to do in the game if you look for it, and as long as you save scum your lock picking you'll be awarded with enough XP to power up enough to face whatever they throw at you.

So its not the difficutly that bothered me. And everything prior is really small beans compared to the lack fo depth I experienced in this game. I felt like I've been repeating the first 2 hours of gameplay over and over. Your melee and archer units will never develop any attack skills, so their whole role is just to swing away. Forever. Your tanks can't effectively tank, since enemies can just walk around you at any given point. You can't really flank the enemies either. If you have two melee, you can make a two person wall and hope that they keep swinging at you. And thats about all the tactics you can really use, despite maybe knowing when to retreat.

Which leaves mages. I found my casters were either out of mana, or spells were fizzling left and right. Perhaps this changes late game, but it seemed like the more MP I got, the longer rests I would need to take to fill my meter back up. Perhaps mages gain flashier spells later on, but in my game I was only able to afford a few spell books, and none were really show stoppers.

Which leaves us to story. I thought they were joking when I walked up to the innkeeper and she said to kill the rats in her basement. Its a western RPG rite of passage. But then somebody asked me to give them 10 crab meats. Then 5 seagull furs. Which brings me back to lack of depth. I was never gripped or engaged by a quest or any dialogue. I'm back in vanilla World of Warcraft grinding boars. Again, perhaps this changes late game, but I'd yet to find anything original or gripping.

So thats what I had to say. The combat became repetative real fast, and I was never gripped into continuing to play. Sigh... back to looking for a new iso rpg...

Old school role playing games (RPGs) are making a resurgence thanks to the many successful Kickstarter campaigns spearheaded with Wastelands 2 (inXile Entertainment) and Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian Entertainment). And what the term ‘old school’ mean is that, it’s mainly referring to the mid to late 90s with isometric viewpoint plus turned based combat. So with this revival, you have to be careful as there could be some duds along the way. Thankfully AntharioN from Orphic Software isn’t one of them. Yet the entire game doesn’t display anything new for which is a shame, it does provide an average experience at best.

Since the game’s release, there were nine patches in total that mainly involves balancing the game. This certainly shows dedication on behalf of the developers to ensure the game plays well as intended instead of exploiting any bugs / features. For example: previously with the barter skill, you can sell higher than the buying amount if you got a decent amount in it (as it wasn’t too hard to do) hence the characters can always get the best gear pretty much during the onset of their adventures. This naturally has been nurfed now however it’s a bit odd considering the game advertises that barter is an awesome yet overlooked skill to have.

As mentioned before, AntharioN doesn’t produce anything new to the ‘old school RPG’ genre. It is indeed a grand game filled with a decent array of main / side quests (yet the desert / tundra regions feels like an afterthought), its shortfalls is a fair amount to fathom. It’s not a bad game however it can do a lot more especially educating the player the game’s mechanics. This will be extremely useful to those who is new to this type of genre however it seems that it’s more tailored to the ‘old school’ fans than gaining a new crowd. If you are a fan of turned based with isometric viewpoint, it’s a fine game to play only if you have nothing else better to play. Newcomers best to look elsewhere before tackling this. But with a budget of $22k (with the asking price of $10k), it's passable.

Full review: http://www.gamespot.com/antharion/user-reviews/2200-12693023/

5.5 / 10

A lot closer to when it came out I bought this and gave it a particularly nasty review because the RNG was so bad that it was difficult even to get past the starting area and even after that the game became nigh on unplayable. But the aims of this game have always drawn me back.

So I bought this game again at a far later date and have found it to be much improved. Percentages now seem to actually mean something and getting out of the starting area is pretty straightforward. You still need to be very wary before moving in to fight creatures you have not dealt with before but that is not game breaking and you at least have the opportunity to improve your characters and it's now actually quite fun. It's still difficult but not unplayable and I like this because every time you complete a minor quest or level a character it feels like a significant achievement.

It's by no means the prefect game but it is absorbing and rewarding and that's good enough for me to change my big negative into a positive. In fact the more I play Antharion the more I'm finding that I like about it. It now really deserves more people to give it a shot.

Antharion is an open world RPG by indie developer, Orphic Software. It took me about 44 hours to beat the game. I explored just about as much as I could. I may have missed a few islands that aren’t on the in-game map.

It starts by requiring you to create a party of four which you will use throughout the game. There are 8 classes to choose from plus the custom class option. You can also select gender and race. Each race has different levels of attributes. Male characters have more strength. Female characters have more wisdom.

Class customization is very open in this game. You have complete control over how you allocate your attribute and skill points. If you want to create a warrior with lots of intellect and wisdom, this game will allow it. My party was a warrior who specialized in 2-handed weapons, a sage who specialized in alchemy and lore, a gray wizard, and a thief who specialized in lock-picking and archery.

All of your characters share experience. No character will be a higher level than any of the other characters in your party. Experience is gained by killing monsters, completing quests, and successfully using certain skills such as alchemy or lock-picking. When your party levels up, each character will gain five attribute points and five skill points that you can choose where to spend. The number of points you gain per level decreases when you get to higher levels.

Combat in Antharion is turn-based. Every character on one side goes and then the other side goes. The side that starts appears to be random. Your characters will always go in the same order.

The difficulty settings in the game have the most influence as to how difficult combat is. The game features three difficulty settings: easy, normal, and hard. The easier the difficulty setting is, the more likely your attacks will hit enemies and enemy attacks will miss your characters.

Antharion is an open-world game. While I’m not a big fan of that genre, it does this well. Most of the overworld map and many of the dungeons are there just for you to explore, fight monsters, and find treasure. Your characters will need to eat in order to replenish health or to use one of the fast travel features. There is also a lot of character customization in terms of stats and skills.

You’ll have to do quite a bit of exploring just to level and gear up to complete the storyline. The storyline plays a very small part in the game but does feature a “choose your own ending.”

What I don’t like is combat. The combat system, especially at higher difficulty settings, is quite dependent on RNG regardless of how well you min and max. You can have the correct strategy and still lose often to things like a crowd control spell missing its target or the enemies being allowed to go first.

I’m also concerned about the lack of a separate inventory for quest items. You have to be careful about what you sell because you can sell quest items. If you do, you could lose that item permanently and not be able to complete the game.

Overall, this game is kind of “meh.” It’s not bad. If you like open-world games, maybe you’ll like this game. I don’t feel there is anything else that is well done about this game to recommend buying it.

Antharion is quite a charming little game.

- The gameplay feels a lot like Lords of Xulima. Focus on dungeon crawling and character building. The exploration mode also feels similar because your party is lumped together in a group. Combat is simplistic but through spells and such, variety and interesting challenges are created. Combat, overall, is quite satisfying due to good encounter design, here you fight spellcasters and such that are actually quite threatening due to the use of spells and disablers. I also like how small things you do can affect your victory in battles, and the power curve of your characters is also deeply satisfying.

- I like the fact that the game unabashedly doles out "Collect 10 Crab Meats" type of quests. There's almost too much self-seriousness and "progressiveness" in newer RPGs and having this sort of playful throwback to older times is great. I also really liked battling The Butcher, I love throwbacks like this to older games. A game that respects it's roots and it's forerunners is itself worthy of respect. Overall though, there is barely any plot or story, and what there is is very pulpy and light-hearted, but this is really not the sort of game you play for dialogue and character interaction.

- The skill system is excellent. Almost everything feels useful and rewarding, and having to balance the combat and noncombat skills across characters makes for very involving gameplay. The game itself does a really good job of balancing combat versus non-combat skills.

- Itemization is great, and I love how the cool stuff I am finding actually shows up on my characters. Sometimes, less is more. Before trying the game, I assumed the simplistic graphics would be a dealbreaker but they're actually very charming.

- Money has a lot of value, and specially early on in the game, resource management is quite critical. There's so much you are tempted to spend on but at the same time, you need to hoard for better things later on.

- The game really knows how to create the feeling of "exploration". You wander into corridors only to come up to a dead end. Sometimes you find some treasure, sometimes a secret passage. You never know what to expect. Encounters are usually appropriately spaced out, whether in dungeons or overland.

Overall, a very good, solid, old-school dungeon crawl.

First of all, let me say I do not hate this game. I was torn between giving this game a positive or negative, and given the slew of positive reviews I decided to be one of the negatives. (This is what happens when steam doesn't give players a neutral choice)

AntharioN is party based dungeon crawler very similar to games such as Avernum or Dragon Age Origins. Sadly it dosn't live up to either of them, especially given the full price of $18. Given its an indie game, I'm willing to make concessions, but the room for improvement is enormous and the game comes off feeling unfinished with the many things the game does right bogged down by the many things it does wrong. Let me just list them off to keep it simple.

PROS (Or the things I never have to explain as to why they are good)

- A fully customizeable starting group with plenty of race and class options
- A (fairly small) open world that can be almost entirely explored after leaving the first dungeon without leveling up, if you really want to.
- Enjoyable music
- Complete freedom in allocating skill points and specializing characters upon level up, or through trainers, regardless of class
- Excellent well detailed sprites for characters, monsters, NPC's, and practically everything else.
- What you see is what you get equipment, if your character is wearing it, it appears on thier sprite.
- Plenty of hidden areas and secrets that can be found by exploring

PASSES

- Though the sprites look good, there is no variety between buildings and city scapes. Other than the texture job on the walls, each building looks like the next and each town looks like every other town. You wouldn't even know you were in the land's capital city if the game didn't come out and tell you. As its not important to the gameplay, its not a con, but could certainly be improved.

- Unoriginal maze-like dungeons with no variety in terms of layout. Different environmental textures and musical themes saves it from being a con, but just barely.

- Limited item variety in terms of gear. This plays into some things I will discuss in a moment, but the limits on the amount of gear itself is not a con due to the games general length.

- Lack of story: This one is barely a pass, as I generally value story in RPG's and this game is not only lacking, but is full of heavily overused tropes such as starting as a group of prisoners. I decided not to con it as the game has (just) enough lore to keep my interest, and what there is of the story dosn't get in the way of exploration and dungeon crawling.

CONS (hold onto your buts, there are some doosies)

- Armor is practically meaningless : Perhaps the biggest turn off of the game for me due to the fact I like playing tanks. The armor amount on items might as well be randomly generated given the farmer's shirt I found as a "gimme" item in the first dungeon had just as much armor as an enchanted chainmail shirt. The plate armor I bought from a travelling merchant was quickly outclassed by a leather ciurass by a whole 90%. The only real armor in this game is your constitution stat and HP, so if you want a tanky character make sure to dump points into it. Even with a high armor shield, a chainmail shirt, a decent helm, and leather leggings, my tank was still taking as much damage per hit as my mage.

-Utility skills are not balanced: Lockpicking is required for every party, unless you want to pass up roughly 75% of the loot in the entire game. Bartering can become incredibly broken with how cheap it will quickly make everything, especially trainers. Persuasion is generally not worth the points. Lore is incredibly powerful as it unlocks treasure rooms. Alchemy and foraging have some use, but given the need for lockpicking and/or Lore you may not have the points to spare.

-RNG hates everyone: The RNG is so bad in this game you will swear the success rates above the actions are lieing. I really don't know how else to describe this problem, but when a character with a hit% of 85 misses 3 times in succession, 2 battles in a row, something is definitely wrong, and don't get me started on the amount of lockpicks I burned through to open a chest with a 64% success chance.

-Magic is unreliable: Due to the games terrible RNG, spells in general just arn't worth taking. Healing spells will frequently fizzle when you really need them to work (especially with the broken armor system) and damage spells are often too limited, or too weak, for the frustration. Control spells remain worthwhile however, so a single mage can still work for most parties, but you're better off with a few fighters, a ranger, and an alchemist, as potions only cost 1 action point instead of a whole turn, and never fail.

As I said before, AntharioN is a promising game bogged down by some poor choices in mechanics and an unbalanced skill sheet. Everything needed for a great game is there, lieing just beneath the surface, teasing at ones desire for the next great adventure. It just never really surfaces. If the problems are ever fixed (and if a decent story is ever added) AntharioN and Orphic software could well give Spiderweb and it's Avernum franchise some much needed competition. As it stands however, AntharioN is a mediocre entry into an underserved field. Perhaps that's enough to warrent a purchase, it was for me, just don't go in expecting the next greatest series in four man dungeon crawling.

I finally picked this game up after reading some rather negative, and in hindsight, truly terrible reviews. Many reviewers claimed that there were no quest markers, which is simply not true. Perhaps they could not find the M key on their keyboards because once you press it you get....wait for it.... Quest markers! One review claimed that you had to choose all warriors at start if you hope to survive; I have chosen a ranger, fighter, black-mage, and custom druid, and I have happily found that the classes are so balanced that no character has a clear advantage, each becoming my favorite at different points in my adventure. And Finally one reviewer claimed absolute critical powers by claiming after only a few hours of play that the game was worth exactly 11.99$ less than the asking price. In line with this way of thinking I hereby proclaim that I find this game to be a detailed, lengthy, charismatic adventure Worth exactly 74 Dollars and 12 cents more than that reviewers opinion, or after arbitrary calculation, 25 bucks... or whatever it's worth to the preferences of the user...or maybe... 23?...3?...2000?

I guess i'm just frustrated because I have loved playing this game. It is my kind of rpg full of exploration and i can heartily say to anyone that enjoys classic turn based RPGs, give it a shot, you will most likely love it.

Overall I had fun with this game in the beginning. It has a decent amount of exploration, and it's fairly difficult, which is something I like in my RPGs. However I got tired of it after a few hours. The problem is that it's very repetitive. Other then a few spells, there are no skills to use in combat. Combat is just a matter of hitting attack over and over, with the occasional heal thrown in. The monsters are the same way, so fights get really repetetiive really fast, and fighting a group of rats is identical to fighting a group of skeletons in every way except the graphics. Character development is fairly limited,for each character archetype there are usually only one or two combat skills that are worth putting points into, although there are some noncombat skills like persuasion which you can put points in as well.

In the end I wouldn't recommend this game to most people. I know that it's meant to be retro, but I've been playing games since the 80s and most of the retro games that it's based on had at least a little more depth. The world does seem pretty large though and there seems to be a fair amount of exploration. So if you don't care about the repetitive combats, you might be able to enjoy exploring and looking for loot. For me though it felt a little closer to an Iphone game than a $17 game.