Heretic Kingdoms is one of those little games that surprises the gamer with a fresh approach to an old idea.
User Rating: 8 | Kult: Heretic Kingdoms PC
Heretic Kingdoms reminds me a lot of the role playing games being served up during the Baldur's Gate period. The graphics are similar to those of the time, the gameplay is story based, and the gamer develops a fondness for his character. Unlike Balder's Gate, it is not a party based game and it does not rely on D&D rules. So why is it fun to play. There are essentually three reasons: 1) STORY 2) GAME PLAY 3) CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT STORY: You are an Inquisitor with the responsibility of stamping out all religion and religious symbols. One of those symbols is a sword of incredible power that you must destroy. Unfortunately, someone has stolen it from its resting place. Thus begins a journey of violence and political intrigue, one where things are not as simple as the inquisition would lead you to believe, and one where you will eventually be forced to make some uncomfortable choices. GAME PLAY: You play between the real world and a dreamworld. The real world is populated with monsters of the living kind and the dreamworld is populated with those of the dead kind. You can move between the two worlds at anytime. In fact you can leave one world in the middle of a battle gone bad and go into the next to escape the fight. Of course something worse could be waiting on the other side. Armor, weapons and magic are extensive and fun. You can change from one to another anytime you want, even in the middle of a fight. Unfortunately, the only time you can change your attunements is when you rest, which brings us to the most innovative part of the game. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Character is developed through experience points. These points allow you to improve one of four traits, melee, magic, ranged, and speed. (Hint:consider developing only three and make one of them speed). This is all pretty standard stuff except for the attunements. When the character uses of an item she can become attuned to it. The item might be a piece of armor, a weapon, ring, necklace, or a cape. These attunements are effectively skills and once attained cannot be lost even if you no longer have the weapon, armor, or jewelry in your possession. When you rest you can select a group of attunements to be used when you venture forth from a good nights sleep. For maximum benefit the selected attunments must refect the element in the weapon or wand you carry. For example if you want to use a variety of fire attunments your weapons element must be that of fire or those attunements will provide no benefit in combat. The variety of combinations is infinite and their effect on battle is dramatic. FINAL THOUGHTS. Heretic Kingoms was developed outside of the United States and has a different point of view. Budgets were clearly limited but the creativity was not. I for one want to support such companies in the hope that they will be encouraged to produce more games. I can only imagine what this game would look like if it had a larger budget. It's worth a play. There is a patch out and it helps a lot.
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