The Relic: First Guardian Reviews
The Relic: First Guardian has been available on PC and PlayStation for a while. Accordingly, I’ve been waiting patiently to give this a go on Xbox. With Souls-like elements, unusual mechanics, and a rich and dark lore-filled story, this appealed to me. However, there are plenty of performance issues and bugs that hold it back. Project Cloud Games has developed this action-adventure, Souls-like title. It is a semi-open world game that encourages you to investigate every building, ruin, and cave you encounter. However, you must stay frosty throughout as monsters roam everywhere and danger is around every corner. This single-player affair focuses on bitty lore, impressive passive abilities, and seamlessly never-ending boss battles. The huge and often hideous bosses test your skills as you dodge, weave, block, and slice your way to victory.
The Relic: First Guardian is hardly a bad action RPG, which makes its failures all the more aggravating. Its fierce fighting, exciting parries, occasional exploration surprises and tougher boss encounters hint at the potential of a far greater game.
The true dark fantasy of The Relic: First Guardian is all of the potential it squanders; an energetic action game marred by its own shambolic state and broken in too many inexcusable ways.
The Relic: First Guardian is a game with good ideas, but it ultimately fails to execute them. Performance issues, recurring bugs, and the lack of essential navigation features make the experience feel unfinished, leaving the impression that it needed more time in development.
The Relic: First Guardian feels like a case of a smaller developer overextending itself. It brings an aggressive twist to combat and features a host of bosses to battle, but that's not enough to overcome the game's flaws and weaknesses. A flurry of patches have arrived since launch, but you're currently still better off waiting to see if they can address more of the core issues.
The Korean studio doesn't quite hit its stride. Despite this, and provided the technical aspects are quickly fixed, The Relic: First Guardian is a dark ARPG that rewards initiative without ever becoming too frustrating or punishing; it's not a mere imitation of FromSoftware's work.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Relic: The First Guardian is not so messy as to be unplayable. In fact, the game’s combat can be excellent at times, and the use of Korean folklore twisted into a dark narrative is an interesting idea.
There are things about The Relic: First Guardian that I absolutely loved. The game's exploration also leaves something for you to find, and the game's combat is satisfying and rewarding. It's just a shame I had to suffer through major bugs that kept me from progressing or finishing quests.
The Relic: First Guardian is a purgatory of tedium and glitches dressed up to look like a heavy-hitter action RPG.
The Relic: First Guardian's unpolished edges almost undermine the experience, but atmospheric exploration through a haunting world will pull you through.
Between rough gameplay feel and mechanics, The Relic: First Guardian doesn't present itself with a bang, but with a wimper.
Relic: The First Guardian has the foundations of a solid action RPG, with an impressive roster of over 70 unique bosses and a respectable variety of Relic-based abilities that keep major encounters engaging. Unfortunately, those strengths are constantly undermined by shallow combat mechanics, clunky animations, inconsistent voice acting, poor audio design, technical issues, and surprisingly amateur translation errors. Rather than a true Soulslike, this is a straightforward action game weighed down by an overwhelming number of avoidable flaws. With more polish, it could have been a pleasant surprise. Instead, it ends up as a frustrating experience that rarely allows its best ideas to shine.
Review in Persian | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is ultimately a game full of promising ideas that rarely reaches its potential. Its departures from the traditional Souls-like formula initially make it stand out, even if its relentlessly bleak atmosphere won't appeal to everyone. Unfortunately, those innovations are undermined by frustrating boss encounters that highlight weaknesses in the core combat. Throw in inconsistent presentation, sparse PC options, and missing quality-of-life features like key rebinding, and the result is a game that's difficult to recommend in its current state. With enough patches and thoughtful refinements, it could eventually carve out its own place alongside the genre's best, but for now, it remains an ambitious experiment that falls short of its goals.
The Relic: First Guardian is a work of violent contrasts, a crossroads where an almost moving authorial passion collides head-on with undeniable production and technical limitations.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian delivers an accessible mix of RPG and soulslike elements, backed by more than 80 bosses, dynamic combat and beautifully crafted environments. However, chaotic group encounters, a clumsy camera and repetitive mission design hold back an ambitious adventure that still needs further refinement.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
After trying to give The Relic a fair shot I just could not continue. The bosses are unbalanced, and combat is just too janky to really enjoy it. Statues effect are very punishing with some of the first few bosses you will encounter. I’m not sure why the game decided to riddle the world with notes, and make them right next to each other at that. With me even counting 11 notes exactly one after another, that just led to a boss fight. An empty, lifeless world with side-quest that end up feeling like just filler. But honestly from the 8 hours I spent with The Relic, the whole time has felt like useless padding. A very large amount of my frustration comes from just how bad the hit boxes are. Tie that with the severe dropping in frame rate over nothing going on in the world. And even worse when you actually fight one enemy let alone a group or boss. Everything is just a chore, and I just couldn’t push through. I really don’t have any praise for The Relic: First Guardian. It’s definitely the Thumb Culture Bronze Award.
Unfortunately, The Relic: First Guardian disappointed us. It has plenty of ideas, quests, and bosses, but everything feels a bit slapdash and poorly polished. You can sense the passion and dedication, but productions of this scale require more structured teams and a significantly larger budget. It would have been better to lower the bar a bit, reducing the quantity of content in favor of higher quality—both in terms of the combat system (the game’s core) and the technical aspects. We hope this first project will serve as a learning experience for the developer to understand where they went wrong, because there’s no shortage of ideas, passion, and love for the genre.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is certainly an ambitious debut project from the studio Project Cloud Games, promising a vast open world, eighty unique elite enemies, and a simple yet conceptually strong story. However, that ambition ultimately hindered development, resulting in a product that fails to deliver on any of its initial promises in a polished state. This forces those who have already purchased the game to wait for numerous fixes before it reaches the level of quality promised by the trailers and promotional material.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
either a soulslike nor an action RPG, The Relic: First Guardian is a huge wasted potential due to its lack of technical polish and severe stability issues.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is a game that dared to be different and suffered for it. In the pursuit of challenging what has been tried and tested, it put forth a plethora of great ideas: equipment-based tactical combat, non-respawning enemies as progression, and genuinely great boss battles. Unfortunately, it also revealed why those ideas weren’t the norm. Poor animation implementation, questionable camerawork, and forgettable narratives all end up making this a much lesser product than the sum of its parts. In fixing what wasn’t broken, it only revealed the cracks within itself.