Ash of Gods: Redemption

The complaint that got fixed

Ash of Gods: Redemption's opening years produced an unusually specific kind of negative review. Rather than the vague "combat feels off" complaints typical of a mixed-reception tactical RPG, dozens of reviewers independently described the exact same mechanical problem in their own words: the game's turn order alternated between sides regardless of how many units each side had, so a fight with six of your characters against one enemy gave that single enemy a full turn for every one of your units' turns combined — a structural disadvantage that snowballed as losses mounted rather than a difficulty curve players could learn around. One reviewer called it "idiocy," another called the system "badly broken... to the point," and the consistency of that specific description, across reviews written months and years apart, made it read less like a matter of taste than an acknowledged design flaw.

What makes this game worth revisiting rather than filing under "another Banner Saga clone with bad combat" is that AurumDust actually addressed it. The studio's own Steam news feed shows "NEW COMBAT IS HERE" in August 2024 and a "MAJOR BALANCE UPDATE" the following month — six years after launch, a genuine rebuild rather than a patch note promising future fixes. Reviewers who returned after the update say so directly: one specifically edited their review from negative to positive, writing that the game is "way way better after the post-launch updates." That's a rare, verifiable instance of a developer fixing the exact thing a community spent years complaining about, rather than letting the reputation calcify the way so many other games in this library's coverage have.

What's still Mixed, and why

The honest complication is that Ash of Gods: Redemption's overall reception hasn't meaningfully shifted as a result. Sampling the last year of English reviews specifically shows roughly 63% positive — close to the lifetime 67% average, not a clear rebound. What's changed is which complaints show up. PC-specific frustrations now dominate where combat once did: reviewers report no controller support despite the game having shipped with it on every console version, and at least one detailed 2026 review calls the interface and controls "brutal" enough to sour the first hour regardless of the improved combat underneath. Separately, a consistent thread argues the game leans too heavily on visual-novel-style dialogue between fights, with several current reviewers explicitly wanting more tactical combat and less reading — a pacing complaint distinct from anything about mechanics, but a real one for players who came in expecting a Banner Saga-shaped combat game rather than a story delivered mostly through text.

The translation and dialogue-writing complaint has also proven durable across the entire review corpus, launch to present, in a way the combat complaint didn't. Multiple reviewers separated by years independently describe conversations as stilted, disjointed or simply unconvincing, which matters more here than in a combat-forward RPG given how much of the runtime is spent reading character exchanges between battles.

Living next door to the game it's compared to

It's impossible to read this review corpus without noticing how many reviewers frame their entire opinion in relation to The Banner Saga specifically, rather than judging Ash of Gods on its own terms first. Some mean that as a compliment — "the Russian Banner Saga," one calls it, affectionately — and others mean it as a serious charge, arguing the resemblance in art direction, UI layout and permadeath structure goes well past homage. This review isn't in a position to adjudicate creative-influence disputes between two development teams, but the pattern itself is worth naming plainly: a large share of both the praise and the criticism here exists specifically in comparison to a genre touchstone, which is a harder standard for a smaller studio's debut to be measured against than most games face, and it likely explains some of the corpus's harsher scores independent of Ash of Gods' own specific execution.

Where the comparison holds up best is exactly where AurumDust invested most: character-focused writing built around real, permanent loss. Multiple reviewers describe genuine attachment to specific units they knew could die permanently in a fight, and that tension — distinct from the combat-mechanics complaint above — is consistently identified as the game's clearest success, surviving the years of criticism about everything mechanical around it intact.

Continued life beyond launch

Unlike several smaller, quieter idle and indie titles this session has covered, Ash of Gods: Redemption did not go quiet after a rocky launch. AurumDust released a standalone sequel, Ash of Gods: The Way, in April 2023, continued supporting the original with the 2024 combat rework, and shipped mobile ports through late 2024 and 2025, with a further "Infinite Loading Fix" patch as recently as November 2025. That's a meaningfully longer active-support tail than most games in this genre and price bracket receive, and it's worth crediting independently of whether every individual fix has fully satisfied the community — a studio that keeps returning to address specific, named complaints years later is a different proposition from one that ships once and disappears.

Verdict

Ash of Gods: Redemption is a genuinely unusual case study: a game whose single most common, most specific launch complaint was real, well-documented, and eventually fixed by the developer years after most reviewers had already formed their opinion — and whose overall reputation still landed back close to where it started, because the things that replaced the old complaint (missing PC controller support, rough interface, dialogue-heavy pacing, uneven translation) are just as real. That's not a contradiction; it's what an honest post-rework review has to report. For Banner Saga fans specifically curious whether the once-broken combat is worth revisiting, the answer is a genuine yes. For anyone hoping a beloved tactical RPG was hiding underneath one bad system, the current reviews say the rest of the picture is still a fair, moderate Mixed.