Posted by : Unknown
Rabu, 19 Februari 2014
Official review by Stuart Thomas on Feb 19, 2014 at 2:00pm
Villainy is a pretty subjective topic. Despite what some games would have you believe, good and evil are hardly concepts that fit neatly into a linear scale. So much of it is in the eye of the beholder, as well – I might be dead against littering but okay with mass murder. Okay, that’s a bad example. But you get my point.
So Daedalic’s latest turn-based RPG Blackguards, with its central idea that you play as scoundrels rather than holy knights, priests and general do-gooders is already open to some interpretation. But when plotlines appear where you’re helping rescue kidnapped children simply because some old lady’s crying in the street, the whole ‘villain’ thing starts to look a little forced...
Fact is, you’re not really any more of a hero or villain than you are in most RPGs, really. Sure, you start off jailed for a murder which you may or may not have been involved in, but Oblivion starts in the exact same way. Your companions are arsonists, witches and druggies, but when all’s said and done they’re all portrayed in a very sympathetic way, their failings only really there to justify the idea that they’re the ‘bad guys’, while they go round reuniting lovers, selflessly delivering gifts and defending beleaguered towns from attack. So your usual RPG stuff, really.
The game’s split into three main areas: There’s a map screen where you can move from town to town (or, occasionally, to an adventure site), then there are the town screens where you can buy equipment and get healed. Then there are battles.
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| Have some of THIS! |
That’s what you get. A map screen where nothing new can be discovered by just wandering (and no random encounters ever occur, for better or for worse), followed by a town screen (where you’ll do most of your party management stuff, like buying bigger swords, training new skills and chatting to the odd townsperson to try to pick up the usual slew of quests). Other than that, it’s all set-piece combats. One after the other. There’s not really anything that looks like dungeon exploration, aside from infrequent mini-maps where you can choose between a handful of combat encounters, all of which you’re going to want to do in the end anyway.
Now this might not really sound all that different from many other RPGs, but the sheer simplicity of the interface makes the whole game feel slightly empty. There’s a whole world out there, and you’re limited not only to a couple of set points on the world map, but even these are nothing more than single-screen town-views, offering no more depth than a few clickable shops, healers and questgivers.
Character development and combat work very well. The rules work smoothly and, for the most part, intuitively. Maps are hex-based, with each character capable of either acting or moving then acting in a given combat round. Missile combat, spells and melee are all pretty easy to get the grasp of, and the experience system allows you to spend your experience points on skills at any time rather than waiting for a defined levelling point. Do you take a couple of extra hit points right now, or save up for a new spell or special ability?
As there are no random encounters, and fights are drip-fed in a mostly linear order, Every player will have the same amount of experience at any given point in the story. That way, it’s fairly simple to keep progression in line with encounter difficulty, and this allows the designers to hand out the occasional easy encounter (to make you feel like a medieval John Rambo) and the occasional tough encounter (to get you acquainted with the ‘try again’ button). Combat encounters are pretty well thought-out and varied. The hex system works adequately, although mousing over the exact space you want to target can sometimes be tricky and pathfinding, particularly through a maze of traps, is horrible. Even if you know those traps are there, it’s all too easy to lumber through them, getting poisoned and messing up your whole game plan.
The voices and music are certainly one of the high points in Blackguards. Particularly your two constant travelling companions, the Casanova wizard Zurbaran and the Yorkshire-accented dwarf Naurim, are voiced excellently, and while their personalities are pretty much just plucked from the big box of RPG stereotypes, they’re acted so well as to be quite endearing. There is enough music so that you’re never really tired of what’s going on, although it does loop fairly quickly and not really change much during any given encounter, so if one particular battle is giving you a run for your money, expect to hear the music get quite familiar.
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| If someone hadn't kindly painted these hexes all over the forest, I'd have no idea where to stand. |
And what is up with the graphics? From a distance, during combat, things clip along adequately, and the static town screens and the world map screen look okay for a while, but during the occasional cutscenes where the camera swings in closer on the in-game engine, things start to look incredibly ropey. Graphics are a bit of a let-down here.
Seeing as how the game is based in the world of the German tabletop RPG ‘The Dark Eye’, there’s not a lot of magic items and fancy armour kicking around. In fact, aside from the usual healing and mana potions, there’s really not a lot of magical loot to play with. Which is fine, because there are plenty of weapons and piecemeal armour to play with – armour in particular can be an overly complex affair, with each and every piece of armour affecting your different defence values (such as bashing, slashing, piercing, ‘ordinary’ and ‘infantry’, with no real clue as to what constitutes some of these – giant crocodiles, for example, deal infantry damage), and a bonus being awarded if you wear every piece of a full set of armour – although I never could find out just what that bonus actually did. Trying to compare weapons and armour is a pain in the greaves as well. It is beyond me why clear and concise inventory management has to be such a touch nut for RPG designers to crack, time and time again.
Overall, Blackguards is a fun, tactical time waster with a throwaway fantasy RPG plot that does nothing new. Character advancement is deep and engrossing, if perhaps a little impenetrable particularly at first, and challenge levels can swing dramatically. At 25 quid or 40 US dollars, it’s maybe fractionally over what I’d call good value, but as a straight up-and-down fantasy tactical RPG with everything unnecessary (such as the feeling of immersion in a living fantasy world) stripped away in favour of axe-chopping, fireball-luzzing mayhem, Blackguards earns a stay of execution.
