Ever since I beat Tears of the Kingdom, I've been looking for another game that scratches the same itch it and Breath of the Wild did. Towers of Aghasba looked like it would be exactly that, in no small part because it directly lifted its climbing and gliding mechanics directly from BotW.
ToA combines BotW's exploration with survival crafting and city building, which I thought was a cool sounding idea. The island you get shipwrecked on is barren, and slowly comes back to life as you plant gigantic trees and do other things to nurture the environment. Doing that will earn you life points, while killing animals and harvesting some plants (only some of them, and I'm not entirely sure what the difference is) will cost you life points, so it's a balancing act between maintaining the environment and meeting your village's survival needs.
ToA is what people these days are calling a AA game. It has a higher budget than your typical indie game, but doesn't reach the same heights as a AAA game. While it does a good enough job of copying BotW's mechanics for the most part (I'll get to that) it never feels as good as BotW. For one thing, you no longer have a button to jump while climbing. Instead, it will make you instantly let go of the wall. The climbing can also be pretty jittery, and you'll jump between climbing and standing animations and phase through ledges and overhangs a lot.
Speaking of which, this game is rough. It's still in early access, and it's really freaking obvious. I'm usually okay with small developers selling games on early access, since they typically can't afford teams of playtesters like big studios do, and this lets them get feedback directly from their audience to improve the game. So I knew this wasn't going to be a completely finished product, but holy crap, I expected better than this! I can't tell you how many times I've clipped into a corner and fell through the world. Fish swim above the water in ponds and lakes. Both you and the animals wandering around the world will teleport randomly if the game decides it wants you to be somewhere else. Items I needed for crafting just straight up stopped spawning more than once. If a quest needs you to feed the animals, chances are they'll ignore everything you throw at them. I've heard people talking online about how their save files are being corrupted and forcing them to start the game over, or how their villages are either disappearing or being turned into black cubes, but luckily that hasn't happened to me yet. Apparently on release day a couple weeks ago, people who bought the game couldn't even play it because it crashed before getting to the title screen. This level of bugginess isn't acceptable. Like I said, I knew there were going to be issues, but early access should be when the game is 90% complete and the devs just need help finding and ironing out any bugs they might have missed. This feels like they haven't tested the game themselves at all!