A pretty good RPG at the core, suffering from a bland story and a severe lack of polish. As an oldhead LoL player who quit LoL itself years ago due to toxicity and multiplayer burnout I was excited for a single-player story-driven experience in this universe, but I ended up leaving the game unsatisfied.
Let's start with some positives. The visuals are generally quite good, with really nice looking in-game models and animations. The models do a great job of capturing something similar to LoL's aesthetic while adapting it slightly to fit into a more focused game with a different camera angle. The opening cutscene depicting the corruption of the Blessed Isles is gorgeous - on par with Arcane. The actual story cutscenes in the campaign unfortunately look terrible in comparison, but let's not get too hung up on that here. The music is great, with a very clear distinction between Bilgewater's music vs. the Shadow Isles'. The character portraits are all of extremely high quality, although I do kind of wish that there were a few variants for different facial expressions and such.
The core combat system is something that I immediately took to as a big fan of FFX. It uses a similar system of "turn-based" combat where the order of turns is fluid and mutable, but takes this concept to a much further extreme. You can change the cast time and cooldown of abilities in exchange for different damage values, you can delay enemy turns and advance ally turns, there's haste and slow effects, there's Doom counters, there's specific effects that trigger only if a character falls into a specific space on the turn order, the works. It's an extremely developed system and one that continued to keep my attention throughout the game's runtime, especially once I turned the difficulty up to Veteran and was suddenly at risk of my DPS characters getting 2-shot by most enemies if I wasn't paying attention. If the combat was worse, I probably would have dropped this game pretty early on.
The biggest issues by far all stem from a crippling lack of polish, in every sense of the word. This feels like a beta version of a game that needed another 6 months or more in the oven to iron out its myriad technical issues and other problems. Let's run through a non-exhaustive list of these issues. If you don't care about the details, feel free to skip this section while noting how large it is.
MECHANICAL BUGS. One of the final bosses turned off all of my characters' runes (passive abilities, essentially), making the fight much harder, but when I died and retried, all runes worked again. Puzzle mechanisms occasionally became frozen and un-interactable for upwards of 30 seconds, forcing me to wait until the game allowed me to progress again. Some (extremely slow) elevators would re-activate before I could get off, forcing me to make the whole trip again. Enemies would become grouped together in multi-wave battles even when they were way farther away than the visual "chain" indicator. Enemies can attack you while you're in a dialogue box or cutscene, and this can cause the whole game to freeze after combat.
VISUAL BUGS. Ahri's orb gets stuck easily and ends up lazily floating around after every battle you initiate with it. Quest markers sometimes show in the wrong spot or don't show up at all. Some chests and lore pickups don't appear on the map, or don't get checked off as "acquired" after picking them up. Miss Fortune's Level 3 Ultimate ability seems to involve her summoning a ship which fires upon enemies, but the ship is invisible making it look awkward and unfinished; the follow-up shot damage also often shows as "[AMOUNT]" instead of a proper damage number. Idle NPC dialogue occasionally gets stuck in a loop on your screen until you're sufficiently out of range. Buff/debuff icons from the previous battle are still active for the first few seconds of the next battle. Hazard and Boon icons sometimes stick around on the turn tracker even when they are not active.
INCONSISTENT ABILITY TEXT. Different abilities word similar effects in different ways, for example one will say "boosts crit chance" while another will say "increases [name of champion]'s crit chance". Some abilities that last a set number of turns don't mention this in the description, and some abilities that stack a buff and then do something at max stacks don't mention the max number of stacks. Some effects say "do X each turn" where "each turn" means your turn, other times it means ANY turn. Attack Power is alternately called Attack, Atk Pwr, and AP. Some abilities will modify values in the description when you upgrade them (e.g. "100 damage" -> "130 damage") while others will just tack on sentences (e.g. "100 damage" -> "100 damage. Deals 30 extra damage.") The description for Ahri's passive is repeated in the description of another unrelated ability of hers.
POOR QUALITY OF LIFE. Maps are extremely large and fast travel points are scarce, despite a lot of mandatory backtracking both in the main quest and especially in side quests. Potions with the same name but different rarity don't stack, even when the effect is identical, and they aren't sorted in any logical way in your bag, so it's a chore to find a particular kind of potion or tell how many you have. The long intro logo animations when booting up the game are unskippable, and the intro cutscene has to be skipped by holding a button for 3 seconds every single time. Weak enemies are hard to avoid when backtracking even though they give virtually no experience, and even "scared" enemies who try to run from you often get in the way or run directly into you, triggering combat. Non-linear stats make stat increases hard to understand, particularly in the Enchanting menu where you aren't given a preview of the actual difference in effect.
GENERAL LACK OF POLISH. Some quest NPCs abruptly appear or disappear at the beginning and end of cutscenes. Ahri's Level 2 Ultimate ability has a shot where it cuts to all of your enemies standing stock-still off-center from the camera, which looks really bad. A handful of dialogue options have icons next to them which are never explained or used anywhere else. The lore rewards spoil every character who will eventually join your party from the first minute of the game. Braum's mustache is black even though it's brown in LoL and other Runeterra media.
Any of these problems, or even a few of them, would be easy to overlook. But there are simply SO MANY bugs and other problems that it seriously affects my enjoyment of the game. If this game was polished I could easily see myself giving it an entire extra star in this review.
With all that out of the way, how is the actual game despite the bugs? While it's not bad per se, it's unfortunately not much to write home about. While the core gameplay concepts are good and highly engaging, the game is not super well balanced. Miss Fortune in particular is so strong that I could never find a reason to take her out of my party, and Illaoi is so much better than Braum - being a tank that can also heal and revive instead of a tank that has clunky CC which bosses are immune to - that I never used him once I had 4 total party members. And while I like the Enchanting system in theory, the game throws new gear at you quickly enough to make it feel pointless. Spending rare resources on giving a powerful enchantment to a piece of gear only for it to be summarily outclassed by something you pick up 10 minutes later feels really bad.
Not every game needs to be a mechanical masterpiece though, right? What about the story? Well, beyond the initial "wow" factor of seeing characters and places I love from a new angle, it didn't do much of anything to interest me.
Minor spoilers follow.
A large part of the story's intrigue, the mysteries and reveals that power the first 50-70% of the runtime, hinge on dangling questions that I already knew the answer to as a LoL fan. I'm not questioning if Gangplank is dead, because I know he survived. I'm not wondering about who the Ruined King is, because I've seen his story already. I'm not intrigued by the vague hints Yasuo and Ahri give about their pasts and their true nature, because I'm already intimately familiar with both of them. I realize that these things might go over better with someone who isn't already a fan, but not having that perspective really makes it clear how much of the story is simply dangling the prospect of answering various questions in front of you. The actual STORY of what is happening for most of the game is that you need to go through a dungeon to find a macguffin, which then unlocks another dungeon where you can get another macguffin. The story feels like it could've started and ended within 5 hours if there wasn't an endless stream of magical barriers that can only be nullified by spirit stones buried in lost tombs. The latter half of the game is especially egregious with this - just when you think you've reached the climax you're instead thrown into multiple barely-relevant dungeons just so you can power up the most important and magical macguffin of them all.
On the note of plot points that barely feel relevant: everything concerning Ahri and Yasuo comes across as tacked on. These are two characters from a faraway continent who have nothing to do with either of the regions at stake in this story. The story bends over backwards to invent new lore about Ahri's tribe and awkwardly try to connect them to the Shadow Isles, but as someone who knows a lot about both the Isles and Ionia from other media this was hard to swallow. Yasuo and Ahri were included because they're popular characters, not because there was an important story to tell about Yasuo's past and Ahri's tribe that related to Bilgewater and the Ruination. Braum is in a similar outsider position, but the story is by contrast very happy to just let him hang out in the background and be Braum. No one tries to convince me that there's a secret lost civilization of Iceborn in Bilgewater or that the Watchers actually originated in the Shadow Isles. Braum is just here to be fun, and he is.
As far as the actual character writing, it's about what I would expect from something set in this universe. For as much as I love these characters they are LoL characters at the end of the day, and LoL characters tend to be pretty one-note in their source material. Expanding on that to the point that any of these people have a halfway-believable personality is commendable, and for the most part I think Airship Syndicate succeeded at this. Braum is still mostly a wholesome comic relief, but that's a good role for him, and he can be more serious on occasion. Pyke rarely has much to say that doesn't concern dragging captains to the depths of the sea, but considering he's a cursed revenant who barely does or thinks about anything else this simplicity works out and is even fun to watch interact with the more complex characters. The one stickler in my opinion is Illaoi. Illaoi can barely get through a single sentence of dialogue without mentioning Nagakabouros or her faith. Every other word is about motion, Mother Serpent, faith, worthiness, visions, guidance, etc. I understand that's the core of her character, and that her arc in this game is supposed to be about stepping outside of her all-consuming religious fervor, but it's just exhausting to deal with especially when she gets more screen time than most of the rest of the cast. Characters like MF and Yasuo have similarly simple goals or ideals at the core of their character, but they are still given room to talk about other things.
And through all the dungeons and Ionian distractions, what is the story at the core of it? A bog-standard tale of the good guys beating the bad guys with almost no additional complications. Your plans always work and you defeat each villain the first time you encounter them. Everything is played so incredibly straight that it's difficult to ever feel like there's any tension or stakes to what's happening, even when the world is on the verge of ruin.
At the end of the day this is a mechanically-sound RPG soured by a boring story and heaps of technical issues. Despite playing through the whole thing I would find it hard to recommend to almost anyone - fans will be bored by the reveals of information they already know, while newcomers will likely be uninterested in what seems like an extremely generic fantasy tale. I really wanted this game to be great, but it couldn't live up to those expectations.
Let's start with some positives. The visuals are generally quite good, with really nice looking in-game models and animations. The models do a great job of capturing something similar to LoL's aesthetic while adapting it slightly to fit into a more focused game with a different camera angle. The opening cutscene depicting the corruption of the Blessed Isles is gorgeous - on par with Arcane. The actual story cutscenes in the campaign unfortunately look terrible in comparison, but let's not get too hung up on that here. The music is great, with a very clear distinction between Bilgewater's music vs. the Shadow Isles'. The character portraits are all of extremely high quality, although I do kind of wish that there were a few variants for different facial expressions and such.
The core combat system is something that I immediately took to as a big fan of FFX. It uses a similar system of "turn-based" combat where the order of turns is fluid and mutable, but takes this concept to a much further extreme. You can change the cast time and cooldown of abilities in exchange for different damage values, you can delay enemy turns and advance ally turns, there's haste and slow effects, there's Doom counters, there's specific effects that trigger only if a character falls into a specific space on the turn order, the works. It's an extremely developed system and one that continued to keep my attention throughout the game's runtime, especially once I turned the difficulty up to Veteran and was suddenly at risk of my DPS characters getting 2-shot by most enemies if I wasn't paying attention. If the combat was worse, I probably would have dropped this game pretty early on.
The biggest issues by far all stem from a crippling lack of polish, in every sense of the word. This feels like a beta version of a game that needed another 6 months or more in the oven to iron out its myriad technical issues and other problems. Let's run through a non-exhaustive list of these issues. If you don't care about the details, feel free to skip this section while noting how large it is.
MECHANICAL BUGS. One of the final bosses turned off all of my characters' runes (passive abilities, essentially), making the fight much harder, but when I died and retried, all runes worked again. Puzzle mechanisms occasionally became frozen and un-interactable for upwards of 30 seconds, forcing me to wait until the game allowed me to progress again. Some (extremely slow) elevators would re-activate before I could get off, forcing me to make the whole trip again. Enemies would become grouped together in multi-wave battles even when they were way farther away than the visual "chain" indicator. Enemies can attack you while you're in a dialogue box or cutscene, and this can cause the whole game to freeze after combat.
VISUAL BUGS. Ahri's orb gets stuck easily and ends up lazily floating around after every battle you initiate with it. Quest markers sometimes show in the wrong spot or don't show up at all. Some chests and lore pickups don't appear on the map, or don't get checked off as "acquired" after picking them up. Miss Fortune's Level 3 Ultimate ability seems to involve her summoning a ship which fires upon enemies, but the ship is invisible making it look awkward and unfinished; the follow-up shot damage also often shows as "[AMOUNT]" instead of a proper damage number. Idle NPC dialogue occasionally gets stuck in a loop on your screen until you're sufficiently out of range. Buff/debuff icons from the previous battle are still active for the first few seconds of the next battle. Hazard and Boon icons sometimes stick around on the turn tracker even when they are not active.
INCONSISTENT ABILITY TEXT. Different abilities word similar effects in different ways, for example one will say "boosts crit chance" while another will say "increases [name of champion]'s crit chance". Some abilities that last a set number of turns don't mention this in the description, and some abilities that stack a buff and then do something at max stacks don't mention the max number of stacks. Some effects say "do X each turn" where "each turn" means your turn, other times it means ANY turn. Attack Power is alternately called Attack, Atk Pwr, and AP. Some abilities will modify values in the description when you upgrade them (e.g. "100 damage" -> "130 damage") while others will just tack on sentences (e.g. "100 damage" -> "100 damage. Deals 30 extra damage.") The description for Ahri's passive is repeated in the description of another unrelated ability of hers.
POOR QUALITY OF LIFE. Maps are extremely large and fast travel points are scarce, despite a lot of mandatory backtracking both in the main quest and especially in side quests. Potions with the same name but different rarity don't stack, even when the effect is identical, and they aren't sorted in any logical way in your bag, so it's a chore to find a particular kind of potion or tell how many you have. The long intro logo animations when booting up the game are unskippable, and the intro cutscene has to be skipped by holding a button for 3 seconds every single time. Weak enemies are hard to avoid when backtracking even though they give virtually no experience, and even "scared" enemies who try to run from you often get in the way or run directly into you, triggering combat. Non-linear stats make stat increases hard to understand, particularly in the Enchanting menu where you aren't given a preview of the actual difference in effect.
GENERAL LACK OF POLISH. Some quest NPCs abruptly appear or disappear at the beginning and end of cutscenes. Ahri's Level 2 Ultimate ability has a shot where it cuts to all of your enemies standing stock-still off-center from the camera, which looks really bad. A handful of dialogue options have icons next to them which are never explained or used anywhere else. The lore rewards spoil every character who will eventually join your party from the first minute of the game. Braum's mustache is black even though it's brown in LoL and other Runeterra media.
Any of these problems, or even a few of them, would be easy to overlook. But there are simply SO MANY bugs and other problems that it seriously affects my enjoyment of the game. If this game was polished I could easily see myself giving it an entire extra star in this review.
With all that out of the way, how is the actual game despite the bugs? While it's not bad per se, it's unfortunately not much to write home about. While the core gameplay concepts are good and highly engaging, the game is not super well balanced. Miss Fortune in particular is so strong that I could never find a reason to take her out of my party, and Illaoi is so much better than Braum - being a tank that can also heal and revive instead of a tank that has clunky CC which bosses are immune to - that I never used him once I had 4 total party members. And while I like the Enchanting system in theory, the game throws new gear at you quickly enough to make it feel pointless. Spending rare resources on giving a powerful enchantment to a piece of gear only for it to be summarily outclassed by something you pick up 10 minutes later feels really bad.
Not every game needs to be a mechanical masterpiece though, right? What about the story? Well, beyond the initial "wow" factor of seeing characters and places I love from a new angle, it didn't do much of anything to interest me.
Minor spoilers follow.
A large part of the story's intrigue, the mysteries and reveals that power the first 50-70% of the runtime, hinge on dangling questions that I already knew the answer to as a LoL fan. I'm not questioning if Gangplank is dead, because I know he survived. I'm not wondering about who the Ruined King is, because I've seen his story already. I'm not intrigued by the vague hints Yasuo and Ahri give about their pasts and their true nature, because I'm already intimately familiar with both of them. I realize that these things might go over better with someone who isn't already a fan, but not having that perspective really makes it clear how much of the story is simply dangling the prospect of answering various questions in front of you. The actual STORY of what is happening for most of the game is that you need to go through a dungeon to find a macguffin, which then unlocks another dungeon where you can get another macguffin. The story feels like it could've started and ended within 5 hours if there wasn't an endless stream of magical barriers that can only be nullified by spirit stones buried in lost tombs. The latter half of the game is especially egregious with this - just when you think you've reached the climax you're instead thrown into multiple barely-relevant dungeons just so you can power up the most important and magical macguffin of them all.
On the note of plot points that barely feel relevant: everything concerning Ahri and Yasuo comes across as tacked on. These are two characters from a faraway continent who have nothing to do with either of the regions at stake in this story. The story bends over backwards to invent new lore about Ahri's tribe and awkwardly try to connect them to the Shadow Isles, but as someone who knows a lot about both the Isles and Ionia from other media this was hard to swallow. Yasuo and Ahri were included because they're popular characters, not because there was an important story to tell about Yasuo's past and Ahri's tribe that related to Bilgewater and the Ruination. Braum is in a similar outsider position, but the story is by contrast very happy to just let him hang out in the background and be Braum. No one tries to convince me that there's a secret lost civilization of Iceborn in Bilgewater or that the Watchers actually originated in the Shadow Isles. Braum is just here to be fun, and he is.
As far as the actual character writing, it's about what I would expect from something set in this universe. For as much as I love these characters they are LoL characters at the end of the day, and LoL characters tend to be pretty one-note in their source material. Expanding on that to the point that any of these people have a halfway-believable personality is commendable, and for the most part I think Airship Syndicate succeeded at this. Braum is still mostly a wholesome comic relief, but that's a good role for him, and he can be more serious on occasion. Pyke rarely has much to say that doesn't concern dragging captains to the depths of the sea, but considering he's a cursed revenant who barely does or thinks about anything else this simplicity works out and is even fun to watch interact with the more complex characters. The one stickler in my opinion is Illaoi. Illaoi can barely get through a single sentence of dialogue without mentioning Nagakabouros or her faith. Every other word is about motion, Mother Serpent, faith, worthiness, visions, guidance, etc. I understand that's the core of her character, and that her arc in this game is supposed to be about stepping outside of her all-consuming religious fervor, but it's just exhausting to deal with especially when she gets more screen time than most of the rest of the cast. Characters like MF and Yasuo have similarly simple goals or ideals at the core of their character, but they are still given room to talk about other things.
And through all the dungeons and Ionian distractions, what is the story at the core of it? A bog-standard tale of the good guys beating the bad guys with almost no additional complications. Your plans always work and you defeat each villain the first time you encounter them. Everything is played so incredibly straight that it's difficult to ever feel like there's any tension or stakes to what's happening, even when the world is on the verge of ruin.
At the end of the day this is a mechanically-sound RPG soured by a boring story and heaps of technical issues. Despite playing through the whole thing I would find it hard to recommend to almost anyone - fans will be bored by the reveals of information they already know, while newcomers will likely be uninterested in what seems like an extremely generic fantasy tale. I really wanted this game to be great, but it couldn't live up to those expectations.