Achilles: Legends Untold Beginner’s Guide

Give yourself a fighting chance in Achilles: Legends Untold's tough opening hours.

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Achilles: Legends Untold drops you into a hostile world full of challenging enemies. While death, tough lessons, and perseverance will sharpen your skills, we want to give you a fighting chance in those first opening hours.

In that spirit, we pulled together some top tips we’ve picked up during our time with Dark Point‘s Soulslike Action RPG, touching on combat, skills, loot, and everything in between. Welcome to our Achilles: Legends Untold beginner’s guide!

This Ain’t No Diablo

Achilles: Legends Untold looks like a blend between Blizzard’s Diablo and Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 star-studded Troy, and developer Dark Point has no qualms listing Blizzard’s seminal slash-em-up as an inspiration. However, this is purely cosmetic, and the resemblance is limited to the isometric perspective. Achilles: Legends Untold’s gameplay and combat lean far more heavily into the Soulslike tradition.

You’ll want to approach enemies cautiously. Track and learn their attack patterns, find a suitable opening, then attack before dodging away. If their health drops to a sliver, you can throw caution to the wind a little and spam attack to finish them off, but the general rule is to play slow and steady.

These tactics make one-on-one encounters pretty trivial, so grab any chance to lure an enemy away from the pack for a swift takedown before moving on to the next one. Letting a group of enemies surround you usually ends badly. If things get hectic, don’t hesitate to sprint away and re-engage when the odds are more in your favor.

Find and Visit Shrines of Hades

As you progress through Achilles: Legends Untold, your first goal in any new area is to find a Shrine of Hades. Interact with a Shrine, and you’ll revive there when you die. Their placement throughout Achilles: Legends Untold means you’re never too far from a checkpoint, so you don’t need to worry too much about lost progress.

Shrines also act as resting points, restoring your potions and health, but note that resting respawns all enemies. Visiting a Shrine also allows you to access the skill tree where you can spend souls on boosting your stats.

Past a certain point in the early game, Shrines also become fast-travel teleport points. Visiting one, you can jump to any you’ve already discovered and interacted with, granting you an easier time getting across Achilles: Legends Untold’s hostile world.

Keep An Eye on Your Stamina

Stamina plays a huge role in Achilles: Legends Untold. In combat encounters, the meter depletes whenever you dodge, roll, attack, or sprint. The costs are also fairly substantial; a brief flurry of movements often leaves you with next to no stamina, a sitting duck open to devastating attacks. This can be particularly lethal if you’re close to an enemy and can’t pull off a vital dodge.

Try and keep an eye on your stamina bar when in combat. It’s your most precious resource. Use dodges and rolls sparingly, and avoid sprinting where possible. Don’t hesitate to spend souls raising your stamina attribute throughout your run. There’s no such thing as having too much stamina in Achilles: Legends Untold.

What’s Achilles: Legends Untold’s Blue Gauge All About?

Achilles: Legends Untold’s prologue does an excellent job of introducing you to the game’s main mechanics but makes no mention of the blue gauge below your health and stamina bar. It represents Fury, a resource needed to fire off special abilities such as shield skills.

It’s unlikely Fury comes into play until you have a few hours of play under your belt, but it’s worth knowing that it doesn’t regenerate until you rest at a Shrine. You can pick up regenerative potions throughout the world to replenish your Fury in small bursts between checkpoints, though.

Visit Hephaestus Regularly

As you progress through Achilles: Legends Untold, you’ll stumble on various swords, spears, axes, shields, and other weaponry. If you get on well with one of them, visit Hephaestus. He’ll upgrade them in exchange for souls and resources, usually bronze. Doing so boosts physical damage and ancillary stats like damage reduction and Dark/Magic/Divine damage.

Search For Loot

As you follow Achilles: Legends Untold main path, you’ll want to make detours to snap up precious loot. Keep an eye out for staircases or small pathways jutting out from main roads, as these tend to house items, weapons, health potions, and others vital resources to help your progress. A small pack of mobs guards these treasures more often than not, so be prepared for a fight.

Spend Your Souls

Downing enemies grants souls. These come pretty readily as you progress but can be just as easily lost. Die, and you’ll be divested of your carefully amassed stockpile. Though you can fight your way back to your place of death to retrieve them, it’s a gamble. Die again, and they’re lost forever.

Spend the souls if you have enough for an attribute or weapon upgrade. Knowing they’ve been put to good use affords peace of mind, especially in the early game, where you’ll die quite a bit as you get to grips with the combat.

You’ll also pick up soul-containing vessels, such as the Deserter’s Soul and Hoplite’s Soul. They don’t disappear when you die, acting as a piggy bank. However, when you do use them, the souls are added to your active purse of souls for you to spend (and lose).

Take Out Archers First

Enemies come in all shapes and sizes in Achilles: Legends Untold, but archers are by far the most lethal if left unchecked, especially when fighting them alongside melee mobs. They’ll fire from afar, forcing you to avoid melee attacks, land your own hits, and dodge straight arrows, all at the same time. To ease this, try and take out archers first. They are slow, and their attack animations are well-telegraphed, so they shouldn’t pose much of a challenge up close.

Unlock The Shield Throw Ability as Soon as Possible

Achilles: Legends Untold’s melee weapons pack in enough combat pep to down most early enemies. You’ll eventually want to expand your arsenal to have more options as you move forward.

One of the best early skill tree investments you can make is the Control shield throw ability. The ability adds a ranged attack to your toolkit, which can help pick off enemies from a distance. Further into the game, you can also unlock more devastating shield attacks that are well worth the costs for their crowd control abilities.