Blackguards Special Edition

I have been playing games since 1995 and have seen all kinds of attempts to merge different types of gameplay, most of them failing at different levels and/or with different intensity...This game does NOTHING for me but frustrates me with every battle! Character build is still confusing to me that I just stopped bothering with it. The looting system is pointless. This game tries to be something different so hard that is just painful! Yes, I read the other reviews but I thought: `it can`t be that bad?`...I should have taken Faenrir review seriously! It is a mess! There might be some minority who are into B&D, S&M and other weird stuff that like this game...Good for them! For a player like me, this game should be returned back to developers with a note: TRY AGAIN!...but please, this time stay sober!

RPGs have always been a favorite genre of mine, but I tend to lose interest because they get to be so tedious. While Blackguards follows the basic model, it removes the endless random encounters between the bits of the actual story. Other plusses: the art is nice, the score is really nice, and the voice acting is generally great. On the downside, replayability is pretty much nil. And it obviously isn't cheap.

The problems started with character creation. Despite the impressions you may get from the description you are limited to creating only a human character (and recruit others as the game progresses). The story is Baldur's Gate (2 mostly) redone AGAIN which would be excusable if this were 2001 and/or the rest of the game were good. A shame because the description implies something less 'crusading heroes out to save the world' . There is a tutorial mode but it is next to worthless. You will come to a section early on where monsters will continually respawn while your PC yells "close the holes!" but after trying to figure out how to do this for hours with ZERO help from the tutorial I was done. I like hard RPGs well enough (I am a Nahlakh player since the mid' 90s and you do not get more difficult than that) but this is the wrong kind of difficult. It is not tactically challenging but just hard in terms of UI. Fans of the various incarnations of 'The Dark Eye' RPG might be more impressed but not me. The game does not make you want to destroy your PC, (go play the buggy Blood Bowl game from Cyanide for that!) but it will make you want to give up and go play something fun.

This game just blows. How the hell can I miss 5 times in a row with an 80% chance to hit. Then when I finally hit it does no damage. Stay away. This is nothing but aggravation. What a pile of crap.

Misfortune Simulator: You have 85% to hit the enemy and you fail, 6 times, in a row. Everything is luck or, in this case, bad luck. The enemy archer will miss you 4 out of 5 times, but if he hits you, he drains around 50% of your life. If there are 2 archers and RN Jesus wants you dead, you're dead. It's not the worst game out there, but hell it's not even near a 4 or 5 star rating...