Ertugrul of Ulukayin is a Turkish action-adventure game with some English audio till the end of the first chapter. The game is in quite early access, so there is a lot of work to be done. I, however, find it fun to just check out different stages of games from time to time.

First out with what needs a lot of work. Everything from combat to movement is not great. I do understand that with my Western ideals of character movement in games, there might be a bit mismatch on that end.

I would also expect a heavy pass of optimization to be needed. Even with my system, of can play most modern-day games on max settings. I turned things down a little as there were some issues with the level of graphics this game has.

The game itself has three chapters out so far. Only the first chapter has full English written and audio. The developer is working on getting English added at some point to the other chapters. For now, it looks like just text has been done for at least chapters 1 and 2. Otherwise, everything is in Turkish.

The game has quite an extensive tutorial system. It’s also woven into the game story itself. So it’s something you must go through and deal with while you are playing.

For those who enjoy storylines, that is going to be the biggest thing this game has to offer. It is also why I stopped after the first chapter when English support for voice was still being worked on.

Cutsense is also a huge part of the gameplay. You also never know when they will have some level of interaction. I can’t tell you how many times I was enjoying the story unfold, and then suddenly I failed for not pressing R to block an attack or something during it. Thankfully, in those instances, the game just lets you make another attempt.

When you do get killed, and it will happen. The game uses a checkpoint system. So, there is no need to save on your end. You just need to make it to the next checkpoint, and they appear quite often.

The game guides the player quite heavily with waypoints. While the tags for the game on Steam include open world, that was not the chase for the first chapter or anything else I have experienced so far. It was quite a guided path.

While I'm all for open-world games. It is also kind of nice when you just have a narrow path to go down. You can go around and look for resources to loot for crafting arrows, healing potions, and loot. Those areas were usually not that far from the main path you needed to go to advance the storyline.

Since you are playing and have sometimes characters working with you who are elite fighters. There were a few combat situations I found myself in that were quite overwhelming.

This is not the kind of game where you just want to go charging into the battlefield. That will just be a swift death, and you will feel like you did something wrong. As you have.

I found that in most situations. I needed to see what the objective was intended for me to do. Like in the situation above, I needed to take out quite a few units. Just running right up to them, however, would be a death wish.

Instead, I needed to use a mix of melee and ranged combat. I was able to pick off or pull units out of the larger cluster with an arrow. Then finish off anything that decided to charge after me with a sword.

There are, however, situations where no level of tactics will be good enough to survive. As it’s not your objective to fully clear out a camp. I learned that the hard way when I was not only outmatched, but once I killed enough enemies, the game would just spawn new ones in. Instead, I needed to run towards the objective point and do what the game wanted me to do.

I found being able to craft healing potions or other needed items. Along with using them during combat, to should be easy enough to do. It was rather nice to be able to get enough distance from those attacking me to both craft a healing potion and apply it before needing to dodge an incoming attack.

As far as the combat goes. The game does give you quite a few indications of what is coming. So you know what you can either block or kick to try and prevent. Replaying the part of the tutorial that teaches you combat is well worth the couple of extra moments in getting the basics of combat down.

While things like animation still need work. There are things like killing blows. They are quite fun to watch when you get one. Nothing like cutting off someone's head or having a sword thrust through where the heart would be. To get your heart pumping during combat with a few enemies.

During early access, I even got to fight a boss. The fight was broken down into different stages. While nothing that complex yet. Once I got the boss down to zero, a rather fun-to-watch cutscene started off the remaining fight.

It seems like the game has a lot of systems and ideas in place. Which is something you would expect in an early access game. It just needs some decent work on them.

There is even an entire attribute, skills, and gear that I hardly had anything to do with. Just the level of detail in the attribute alone. Makes it look like this game is going to have some decent complexity further into the development cycle.

Final Thoughts

For the time being, the current state of the game is in early access. It’s not a recommendation from me on it. I can see that in the many months or even a year that as the game gets polished, it could become quite interesting and fun. For now, it left a lot to be desired.

I have been sitting on this game for about two months. In that time, I've seen the game move from a game that needed so much work, I stopped playing it shortly after trying it. Then, with some weeks having multiple patches, the game started to improve greatly. I can’t wait to see where this one ends up once it’s out of early access.

It was at least fun to play the first chapter in a game not created around the Western market. There was some interesting cultural interaction going on that was interesting to me.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Ertugrul of Ulukayin.

Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.

Disclosure: This content was written during early access.