Ertugrul of Ulukayin

NeX
Feb 10
3 min read

Quick Intro

Turkish studios are known for making medieval games. The most famous is probably Mount & Blade. Tekden Studio / Tekden Film has created something similar but also very different and unique. Ertugrul is a mixture of The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, and Tomb Raider in a Medieval Turkish setting. And it’s surprisingly good (or can be with a couple of fixes).

Story & Gameplay

Play as Ertugrul, a young chief in the making, and his friends in search of his brother who was kidnapped by Mongols during an invasion of their village. Sounds complicated, and it is especially since they use Turkish extensions like bey and baci (with no translation).

Use your sword & shield to slay enemies or shoot them from a distance with your bow. Craft potions to heal or more arrows to use in combat (you will be able to craft different types of arrows in the complete game).

Use your witcher wolf senses to track enemies or resources/collectibles and follow quests to unravel the secrets and the story in this awesome world.

The bad

Let’s start with the biggest issue: Optimization. The game needs to be better optimized. Even with the lowest settings, no shadows, and smallest FOV @720p, I had barely playable experience at 15fps. Now, my 1050ti is pretty dated but it still has 4 GB of VRAM.

The second issue is the game needs English localization so the masses can enjoy it. Due to the many names and their quick introduction, paired with barely visible subtitles, I could barely understand who is who and what status they have in the village (some might even be wrong, please don’t be mad).

Finally, and this is to be expected of a beta version, some bugs were encountered, like quests not displaying what is next assignment or skipping the cutscene trigger would not spawn enemies. Hopefully, these will be corrected by the time the game is released.

The good

The best part for me personally was the setting. Everyone looks nice, the armors, swords, and bows look historically accurate. Tents have lots of carpets. Everything just works. Mongol invasion did happen in the 13th century so the potential for a great story in the time period is limitless.

Tutorial: Everything was explained in a good and easy-to-understand way. This is especially important in massive games so you can easily adapt to everything these games have to offer.

Audio & Video

Music plays throughout combat. It even switched when going from an exploratory quest to a combat one. A big plus for that! Sounds were top-tier, you could hear metal clanking when hitting a shield, and bowstrings when releasing an arrow. Even explosions sound very good.

The only spoken language available at the time is Turkish. I am not familiar with it, but everything sounded good to me. I think if they keep that level for English localization it’s going to be amazing.

I can’t say much for visuals because like I mentioned I could barely run the game on my 1050ti. It might look good on a more powerful GPU but I don’t wanna make assumptions.