Blackguards Special Edition

This one was an unexpected delight. I fully awaited a run-of-the-mill tactical RPG campaign with a mere excuse for a story as backdrop for all the fighting, and got 40+ hours of an entertaining and surprisingly deep plot. The combat is great, though it gets plodding when there are too many critters on the map, especially of the slooooow undead kind, and has enough options and variations to keep you on your toes and reward the distinct strategies you adapt - even with the random elements other reviewers complain about - which makes some victories very satisfying. The music is great, and so is the voice acting (the German version, at least), with an absolutely fantastic delivery by your party's resident surly dwarf that genuinely made me laugh at times. Everybody else also performs to a high standard, except maybe some NPCs who sound like they had to bring in the company's janitor for some impromptu bit of voice acting. In typical Dark Eye fashion, the fantasy world this game portrays seems generic and cookie cutter, yet surprises you at a number of turns, with some shocks and interesting takes on fantasy tropes. Sadly, the ending doesn't live up to the build-up. It feels rushed, erring on the bad side of understatement, and is scant reward for the fairly developed (for a game of this kind) party relations. All in all, though, it was a game I really enjoyed.

The graphics aren't great, the acting is mediocre, the sound is fine. There is no real game here in terms of a world to explore, which makes the install size of 18gb rather perplexing as you can have entire MMOs in that footprint. You simply go from one battle arena to the next, rather linear. You go rest in town between fights (usually) and go in and fight another arena. Again, no world to speak of, and I've seen games that follow this formula for decades that are tiny because there is nothing to them. This one apparently blows a ton of space on semi shiny skins. Also the first game I've seen where half the equipment is useless. Boots? No need, they do nothing. The equipment mechanics are confusing at best. The interface is not clear. Skill ranking is half wasted time for no apparent reason. The biggest problem is you die in under an hour and discover that trying to play a mage is futile. Once you find the right tomb in the crypt, you are near death, but this time you can't go back to town, you're ambushed and killed. There is no way to prevent this outside of playing a fighter, and equiping specifically for this fight. That's just terrible design to offer a ton of options but none of them are viable to get anywhere. Combat also suffers from HORRID RNG failures, which again means fighter is the only way to survive by soaking just enough damage to live. Sorry I wasted the $2.50 on it on super sale, do NOT waste full price!

One of those games that looks well above average, has introduction into the story that draws you in enough to see where this story will lead. The mechanics and controls scheme and menus of the game is slowly introduced step by step in a logical, easy to follow manner. The first couple of fights play fine - as you are partly led through via the excellent tutorial. You then find yourself with scant gear and a few coins as your party stand in some town you have decided all to go to find details related to the plot. You see the merchants to buy more gear and better weapons, however none of this is really possible apart from maybe a couple od daggers. So you think, ok I'll do what the game prompts and enter the next area. Now you find yourself in a fight which although doable you can quite easily get one of your team killed, all due to RNG. The character who never missed suddenly cannot hit anything even someone stood directly infront of him, positioning to the side or behind enemies is pointless because they instantly turn to face you, AND as a kicker sometimes they bob and weave like the lovechild of Muhammed Ali and Neo then snot you for a chunk of health. Replay that to discover it instantly puts you to the travel map again without chance to heal or rest (maybe you can ? but I didn't see option ) only to find the next area has enemies immune to the piercing damage your daggers can do. Tragic, as SO much of this game is right apart from the balancing whoever came up with the rng for this game needs to be suspended over a pit of crocodiles and use the same RNG chance system to close the lid over the pit verses the drop.

The game is fun and amazing, I enjoyed it immensely, and all they said below. However, BEWARE, if you download Untold Legends, around Chapter 3, in Theniran, an optional "Suspicious Figure" fight will appear, DO NOT FIGHT it, any saved game after it will be corrupted and you won't be able to get back into the saved game. You can experiment if this breaks your game or not, but always keep different saves, don't save on top of your latest save after this, in general just better keep different saves. GOG support can't fix this and Daedalic are not responding over this bug, is unlikely they'll do anything for you either. I hope this avoid future frustration, the rest of the game is well worth it.

This is one of those games, where ample amounts of care, thought, talent and even bravery to issue an alternative to mainstream, are obscured by a screen of a probably malfunctioning main component and some bad dev choices. The bases of a captivating experience are all there: a multi-threaded and interesting story, characters that are full of character despite being a bit too stereotypical, voice acting done well, well written dialogs with good humor in appropriate spots, art and graphics that I find fascinating, good RPG elements including char development, nice sense of exploration, battles are for brain-users and can be reversed by on wrong move or failed spell. The frustration roots deep into the very foundations of the above. First, the random numbers generator appears to be broken, which means very frequent series of failed attempts to hit/spell/special ability, despite 90-95% to succeed in said attempts. Combine it with fragility of winning any single battle from the pros section above + only being able to save the game outside of battle + battles can last as long as an hour, and you find yourself wasting a lot of hours due to retry. Second, that good character development is affectively limited because 1. you really should develop your protagonist to be a magic user since redirecting the pre-set development direction of the rest of the party is a complete waste of scares skill points, 2. There are only enough skill points to go one narrow and unfulfilled way and there is no redistribution option. Third, the cheap difficulty spike: the party consist of 5 char for the most of the game – one is killed mid-way but is replaced by another, yet after you spend the second half of the game developing the other to its unique role in a tight 5 members party, it ends up gone before the last series of battles… mind-controlled by the main villain so you are now left with a huge hole in party strength with no alternative. Wait for a greatness-liberating surgical patch…