Empyreal Review: A Celestial Triumph or Star-Crossed Letdown?

by Jim Smale · Published May 8, 2025 · Updated May 13, 2025

Empyreal Review delivers a gaming experience that blends breathtaking visuals with immersive mechanics, but does it truly live up to the hype? As we dive into this celestial adventure, we uncover whether Empyreal ascends to legendary status or falls short of expectations. Whether you’re considering your next epic journey or looking for a deep dive analysis, this Empyreal Review will guide you through every triumph and flaw, so read on to discover if this title is worth your time.

Empyreal Review Pros:

Beautiful graphics.
25.14GB download size.
Platinum trophy.
Graphics settings – brightness slider, motion blur, bloom, depth of field, and graphics quality set to performance or quality.
Colourblind support.
Controller settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, deadzone sliders, Ai assist strength slider, and five controller presets, and you set which ones to use on – primary, glaive, mace and shield, and canon.
Action RPG gameplay.
Character creator and you name them, and set your background from the choices – handsome devil, excitable tattletale, charming prankster, moose rogue, inscrutable warrior, wayfaring stranger, and inebriated rambler. Then just pick a starting special ability.
A full 3D game world and full 360-degree camera control.
Third-person view.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
Fully voiced characters,s, and you usually have a multiple-choice encounter with them.
Find and search Bismuth deposits for resources and materials.
Spherical caches can be found for loot.
Hack and slash combat.
Enemies can drop loot.
All loot has levels and rarity.
Reset charges act like lives, so using them all up sends you back to the hub.
You can pause the game!
The pause menu shows time since last save and total playtime across all saves.
Many resources, drops, and materials can be found in the game world.
Abilities require a charge to cast and will have cooldowns.
Perfectly timed dodges will slow down enemies.
You can see enemy health bars at all times, as well as stami, and, where depleting, that will stun them.
The armoury lets you edit and save loadouts of gear aswel as change gear in and out of your loadout and set abilities, etc.
three distinct weapon archetypes – Glaive, Mace & Shield, Cannon.
Dynamic difficulty is in play. Cartograms will show a difficulty rating based on the gear you currently have, so as you level up gear, the difficulty will go down.
Some gear you find may need to be identified before you can use it.
Buy and sell items at the shop in the hub.
Cartograms are what you use to open portals to areas for missions or exploration.
Big boss encounters.
I like how loot can explode out of enemies.
Checkpoints can be triggered.
Find mods to attach to weapons and gear to add abilities, buffs, or change stats.
You can get melee and ranged weapons.
The guns are actually kind of cool, they have a set of different ammo, and when you reload, do you just time it above the ammo you want, and you then swap to that ammo, it allows you to mix it up and exploit enemy weaknesses.
Cartograms will have a mission and a difficulty attached to them.
The areas you go to are huge and have loads of secrets and routes to explore.
It is going for a DARK Souls-like experience, actually no more Demon Souls as it’s self-contained levels and areas with a set boss at the end of it.
Quick equip lets you add buffs and power-ups to your character quickly. Things like adding coatings to your weapon or replenishing shields.
Cartograms can be shared between players using the in-game mail system.
It’s a game that gets going once you have gone through the ordeal of nailing which weapon suits your play style.
Find unidentified Cartograms and get them identified.
Buy and unlock more shop sticks.
The Cartograms system is really good, and once you start getting a lot of them, you can really shape your own playthrough.
Ultimate ability is where you rack up energy to cast them, amd they do mega damage and usually have a cutscene-like sequence.
Modding gear is a game changer with so many combinations and mods, you really can have a fair crack at making your own unique loadout.
Apparitions show up, and talking with them lets you claim some respawn spheres.
There is a training area in the hub where you can practice against enemies of different levels.
Identified Cartograms will show difficulty, boss name, any unique drops, and any special effects or modifiers.
Once you get a bit further into the game and unlock new locations, the game opens up more in terms of Area size but also in brightness and adaptability.
Play how you want is implied throughout from the Cartograms to the weapon builds.
At night, the hub will empty out and lock doors. Most of the time, everyone is drinking in the pub, but you won’t be able to do any smithing, shopping, etc.
After a boss fight, you have to choose to put a randomly chosen item into the Aether, which will then have it appear in a random player’s game at the end of a boss fight.
New Game+ raises Cartograms’ level cap, adds a new Arena and NPC duels for tougher challenges, and introduces an epilogue with an alternate ending for dedicated players.
Multiple endings that are determined by your actions and choices.

Empyreal Review Cons:

You cannot remap the controls.
The opening section is not that helpful and leaves you to figure most of the stuff out yourself.
No stay hard lock on feature.
Combat is very mashy, and it’s hard to counter enemies as you just don’t see the timings clearly.
You have to use the armoury to make any loadout changes, meaning no equipping gear mid-level.
At times, it feels like there is too much loot!
The game prefers to say new tutorial unlocked rather than giving you an actual quick pop-up for explaining what’s happening.
Guns and the ammo system took some getting used to because there’s the whole reload thing, but you still have to remember to dodge enemy attacks during it.
Loot can fall off the level or through walls; it has its own physics, so it flies out of spheres.
The health bar looks more complicated than it needs to be.
You can die from fall damage in the hub despite not being able to see your health bar or anything.
The identifying and loadout choices slow the game down a lot and are tiresome and outdated.
Boss battles are huge damage sponges, they will have a big healthbars then have like 8 blips underneath, which you guessed it, each blip is a healthbars meaning you have to smash down 8 odd health bars.
There is no real atmosphere, it’s a quiet game with no signs of life or ambient noise, or motion around.
The boss battles are very unbalanced and are definitely the most frustrating.
I don’t like how you can pick a weapon and go into a level only to hate the weapon,n but you are stuck with it unless you sacrifice a run.
The game is really trying to be a Dark Souls-like like, but it is putting so many things in that it loses its identity and only takes a few inspirations, making for an uneven, frustrating experience.
Too many times, I was consuming a power-up or buff, thinking it was going into my quick-equip loadout.
You don’t always have a health vial or booster, so you can go into a boss fight severely underpowered and unprepared.
Quitting a run will lose all your items collected.
Early on, you play the same level layout a lot, and it’s not fun when you see the same thing time after time.
No map in the hub means you have to memorise every location.
The stunned mechanic on both you and the enemy is brutal, as in the middle of a fight, you can just take a knee and breathe it out. What I’m saying is you die.

Empyreal:

Official website.

Developer: Silent Games Studio

Publisher: Secret Mode

Store Links –

PlayStation