Ankora: Lost Days

by Aethyna Sep 19, 2023 | 1 Votes | 95 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

RPG , Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Adventure , Survival , Exploration , Sci-Fi , Crafting

Platforms:

Publishers:

Chibig Play as Mun, an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol, who crash-landed on a remote planet of Ankora where the local banks live. While looking for parts of your ship in hopes of getting the tools you need to send out a signal for a rescue, you realize that the planet itself, along with its inhabitants, is under the threat of malicious forces. Only with your help will they be able to prevail! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Ankora: Lost Days is a fun and cozy, albeit grindy, adventure game where you play as Mun, an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol, who crash-landed on a remote planet of Ankora where the local species, the anks, live. While looking for parts of your ship in hopes of getting the tools you need to send out a signal for a rescue, you realize that the planet itself, along with its inhabitants, is under the threat of malicious forces. Only with your help will they be able to prevail!

Plotline

Mun, an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol, was out exploring space with her team until her spaceship malfunctioned, forcing her to crash land onto a remote planet called Ankora where the local species, the anks, live.

She needed to communicate her crash to her team and obtain a rescue, but unfortunately, the crucial pieces of the ship that she needed to do so are scattered all over the planet. She will need to first find them and reassemble them.

During her trek across the planet, she also encountered various local anks, whom she had formed a friendship with. One such ank, Chief Koda, warned her of dangers that had descended upon the typically peaceful planet… prior to his untimely demise. Determined to help the locals as an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol and generally being a good person, Mun sets off on a journey to seek out all the powerful archons of the temples on the planet for help.

Gameplay

If you’re familiar with any of Chibig’s titles, you should have a rough idea of what you’ll be getting in Ankora: Lost Days. The gameplay here is fairly chill and cozy, offering plenty of tasks to do, most of which require some amount of “resource grinding” and backtracking that may be annoying, or in some cases, downright infuriating for some. However, as someone who has spent countless of hours griding away in MMOs, the grind in this game is definitely within my patience range.

In this game, you’ve got two primary goals – one, you need to find all the components you need to signal for a rescue so you can go home, and two, you’ll need fulfill your duty as an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol and help the local anks with their troubles, mainly by getting rid of the various hostiles creatures once and for all. Each of these primary quests come with many secondary ones, all of which are helpfully tracked in the game’s quest log, which is accessible via the Inventory.

Although you’ll need to complete the quests in order to advance the storyline, there’s nothing stopping you from simply exploring the planet once you’ve received the recipe and crafted all the basic tools you’ll need for your exploring, namely a hammer for building bridges and stairs, saw for chopping trees, a shovel for digging or elevating tiles, and a pickaxe for breaking rocks. In fact, exploring the planet is a key aspect of the game which accounts for the game’s pretty massive gridded map.

Instead of having an open world like most of other Chibig’s titles, the world in Ankora: Lost Days is segmented into various grids, each with its own set of coordinates. Each segment is a self-contained dungeon of sorts made from many tiles. The tiles can be anything from normal grass tiles or a forest tile, or even a water tile. Due to the game’s 3D structure, the tiles can come in any different elevations too, making it necessary to build ladders to reach a tile of a higher elevation… or you could just use the shovel to dig the tile one elevation level down so you can reach it, you do you!

All this also makes exploring quite a tricky affair. Why’s that, you may wonder? Well, some of the exits, be it in the East, West, South or North, might be placed in a spot that can be harder to reach. For instance, there might be a West exit that you want to get to, but it’s across a wide river that you can’t just building a bridge across. Paths to some exits may also be blocked by indestructible obstacles like barriers. This is especially evident in war-scarred areas where remnants of the battle are strewn across the tiles, making navigation very difficult and limited.

By the way, a quick tip, if you will: there’s a neat way to find out if the grid you’re on can access which grids around it. By bringing up the map and squinting at the grid you’re on, you should be able to see tiny lines at the edges of the grid. If the line is there, that means you can access the next grid adjacent to it. If not, you won’t be able to. You could also simply swivel the camera around to try to spot all the available exits on your current grid, but that can be quite inaccurate since some exits may be blocked from view.

To help navigate the massive map, you’ll also get to activate and use various teleporting points that are scattered across the planet. There is no limit as to how many times you can use these, though getting to them in the first place can be quite tedious in the sense that it may require some amount of backtracking (no shortcuts). Thankfully, you can get Mun to sprint by simply pressing down Shift while moving. You can peruse the entire list of controls via the game’s settings. There are some that aren’t covered in the tutorial so it’s a good idea to take a quick look.

Of course, as Ankora is being invaded by various hostile creatures, it’s natural you’ll eventually encounter some of them in your travels. Combat is quite the straightforward affair here – the what us MMO-nerds call “tank and spank” approach. There’s no dodge roll, block, or dash for you to avoid getting hit in return, and the trick here is to simply outlast your opponent.

Each enemy is also marked by their level, which will be made known to you once they are attacked… though, I’ve noticed that I was able to pretty easily take on enemies despite being a few levels lower. I guess dying from combat just isn’t something that the developers wanted players to experience… the game is supposed to be cozy and chillax to play, after all!

From time to time, mostly when retrieving a component of your ruined spaceship, you’ll encounter a boss fight. Boss fights aren’t very different from fighting normal enemies except that they tend to be bigger in size and have more health (and hence, more “tanky”).

Ankora: Lost Days also have elements of an RPG, allowing your character to level up the more experience she gains. Leveling up will grant you a perk point to invest into one of two randomly-given perks. The perks can range from Intelligence, which makes Mun gather experience faster, to Agility which gives Mun improved movement, tool, and attack speed, to even Strength, which increases Mun’s attacks.

Aside from the temples and spaceship components that are part of the main quests in the game, you will stumble upon treasure chests that you can open if you have the corresponding key. There are also ancient ank shrines that you can revive to bring back the ank population for that area by fulfilling their requirements. In fact, the exploration and adventuring part of the game strongly reminds me of another game I adored, Portal Knights. It may not be as content-packed as the latter, but Ankora: Lost Days did a pretty good job here.

From time to time, you may even encounter little birds perched on a bird stand. When interacted, you’ll get some random message. It seems like these might be messages from their Kickstarter backers or something? That said, interacting with the birds will grant you a freebie, so make sure you do that!

As fun as the game is, there are some elements of its gameplay that can understandably be quite frustrating, aside from the constant backtracking and detours despite the destination being just adjacent to your current grid on the map, and resource grind. Water tiles can’t be manipulated as well. Building a ladder sometimes work and sometimes, it doesn’t. It’s possible that it depends on what it present on both the starting and destination tiles. If there is a dense forest or a pile of stone, you can’t build a ladder there.

Graphics/ Sound

Ankora: Lost Days features 3D voxel tiles that make up the entire planet. The visuals are all very well-done, offering a nice variety of different “biomes” and settings. The sound here matches great with each location. If you’re a fan of Chibig’s titles, you may even hear the similar soundtrack that spans their games, albeit with some slight changes.

Conclusion

All in all, Ankora: Lost Days is a fun and cozy 3D adventure game that’s set in a rather unique world filled with manipulatable, voxel-like tiles. There are lots of stuff to do here, and despite some of the game’s more frustrating aspects, the game experience has generally been quite enjoyable. Help Mun find all the components she needs to return home while helping the local anks with their fight against various hostile monsters!

New Game Added: Ankora: Lost Days

by Aethyna Sep 19, 2023

Play as Mun, an explorer of the Interstellar Patrol, who crash-landed on a remote planet of Ankora where the local banks live. While looking for parts of your ship in hopes of getting the tools you need to send out a signal for a rescue, you realize that the planet itself, along with its inhabitants, is under the threat of malicious forces. Only with your help will they be able to prevail!