When trying to construct a compelling action RPG adventure, there’s no doubt that taking a look at the Legend of Zelda series would be a great place to start. Even before Breath of the Wild and everything that it introduced to the genre with its open-world gameplay and other surprises, it was a great template for how to combine exploration, combat, and a compelling storyline to get people excited. While only to a minor degree, you can see some of that spirit in Astor, it’s just unfortunately hobbled by a mix of bad decisions and some inconsistent overall design.

To the game’s credit, it has a colorful and mostly appealing look. With its environs shifting pretty radically from one biome to another, it’s obvious some care went into trying to differentiate the look and feel of different zones, keeping things colorful all around. It’s a shame that it can tend to get quite washed out in places with an oversaturated haze, but you can see that design effort. I do wish that the world didn’t often feel quite so empty, which when paired with how long it can sometimes take to get from one point to the next can make things a bit dull. Combat can be a saving grace, at least to a degree, but that isn’t without its issues either. Despite eventually getting your hands on a fair variety of weapons, and having a number of skills at your disposal, your fights do have some visual flair and flourishes, I just wish that it didn’t feel like the control scheme was designed to work against you.

Out of all of my complaints about the game, unfortunately one of the biggest is its control scheme. Forgoing the traditional use of Y as your primary attack and Z as your secondary, for whatever reason they opted for the awkward Z as the primary and A as the secondary. When your brain has pretty well been trained to default to another control scheme, the base one deviating from the norm and then there being no provision to customize it or at least switch to another that’s not almost as bad can be very frustrating. Now, though you’ll be able to unlock added combos, finishers, and other elements that add some flavor to your fighting, not enough was done to address something more fundamental, and that’s the ability to quickly and effectively lock onto enemies, but then be able to manage multiple enemies at once. Granted, this can’t be something that’s easy to do, but there’s no doubt the developer fumbled a bit again in this area. At best it’s a clumsy system that can be unreliable, leaving it to you to try to manage both your combat and the camera yourself, at worst it’s a design flaw that feels disinterested in you being successful, instead chipping away at your patience and resolve as it slowly makes you less effective.

While I wouldn’t consider Astor a particularly flawed game, it at least has enough warts that it can be harder to love, especially since the asking price feels relatively steep overall. There is an adventure here that improves the further along you go, so there can be some rewarding time worth spending with it, you just need to be a bit patient through some earlier growing pains as the experience tries to find its rhythm. There are absolutely some worse choices out there in the eShop, but there are also plenty that stand out as better titles as well.