I enjoyed the hex-based tactical gameplay in the King's Bounty games and bought Blackguards in a Steam sale as I enjoy CRPGs and thought this would be more of the same. It uses the Dark Eye RPG rules in the game, the same as some previous CRPGs like Drakensang and the Arkania series. I've spent around 20 or 30 hours playing the game so far, and this review is based on my impressions while playing the first quarter or so of the game.
Pros:
- Storyline seems quite interesting. After a rather short, strange, surreal intro, you find yourself trying to escape from prison. At that point, you have no idea what is actually going on in the game, but later flashback sequences start to fill in the blanks for you, and this keeps you going (despite the game's other shortcomings) as you strive to find out more about the game's background story.
- Some decent voice acting and funny moments in the game's dialogue. Love the dwarf Naurim!
Cons:
- The game mechanics. This game uses the ridiculously complicated Dark Eye RPG rules, which I'm not going to go into here. Suffice to say that most actions in the game involve a check against the relevant attributes of the character performing the action to determine whether it succeeds or not. Spells, for example, are not cast automatically, but are subject to this check. This system seems unfairly biased towards your enemies, who seem to land melee hits and cast spells in combat successfully way more often than what your characters do. Enemies also seem to land critical hits more often too. A lot of the fights are set up to be played a certain way and the game punishes you if you don't toe the line. It punishes you anyway as the random number rolls are almost never in your favour though.
- Lack of clarity. For example, nowhere does it seem to show you what the chances are of some of your talents (like treating wounds or setting traps) succeeding or not. If you use poison on your equipped weapon before a battle, it doesn't show anywhere that your weapon has actually been poisoned. if you have a high strength score, it doesn't indicate what difference this makes to your weapon damage.
- Clunky and tedious gameplay. You can't use a healing potion, mana potion, trap, or poison in battle unless these have been added to your belt, which, depending on the belt's quality, can only hold 1 to 4 of these items. You can't use anything that still happens to be in your backpack during a battle, so if you forgot to change the contents of your belt slots, tough luck. You have 3 different weapon sets you can change between during a battle, but it takes a whole action to change your weapon set, and if you want to switch to a weapon currently in your backpack instead, too bad.
- The sheer stinginess of the game. It may improve later on, but most of the early part of the game, you find yourself using whatever you salvaged from the prison you escaped from as most other gear is way too expensive. Merchants only sell a handful of different (and expensive) items so it can be difficult to equip your characters with decent gear. Combats reward you usually with a small amount (25 or 50) adventure points which you use to improve your characters' skills and attributes. You get a piss-poor amount of treasure from a typical combat. For example, early in the game, you go off scavenging on some old battlefield for armour and weapons, and promptly get attacked by 4 or 5 bandits in leather armour, 2 of which are using bows. At the end of the fight, you get a bastard sword and a couple of other small items. Yippee. What happened to all the gear the bandits were carrying?
- Exploration sucks. Your main map is an overland map which you use to travel to various towns and villages there. Each town has a single screen which shows the various people (blacksmith, healer, merchant, trainer, quest giver etc) which you can click on to access. That's it. Dungeons consist of a simple line map with a number of different locations which you can click on to go to instantly, and this takes you straight to a battle map where you slog through another (usually tedious) battle.
In concluding, I'm giving this game 5/10 as it has its good moments, but is let down mainly by the utterly frustrating combat mechanics, overall difficulty level, lack of equipment, and general lack of any fun factor. Unless you're a hardcore Dark Eye RPG fan who doesn't mind constantly reloading saved games to get through some of the combats, I'd advise looking elsewhere for a decent CRPG in this price range.…