Blackguards Special Edition

Blackguards is a turn-based, strategy rpg. As such, it focuses heavily on combat. The towns and world map is just screens with intractable objects like doors or npcs, so don't expect to roam around town. They do look good though! The combat system is great! It allows for some complex strategies that can fall apart at any second. This is due to the xx% to successfully cast a spell or hit your opponent. Some times you miss three 95% attacks in a row, and it's infuriating! I even missed on a 100% chance once during my play-through. The combat is very reminiscent of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, if you need a point of reference. Blackguards also has a solid character development system. The game is totally class-less and allow you to build exactly the kind of character you want. Throughout your adventure you gain AP (Adventure Points) that you use to level-up your characters stats, skills and spells. The Level-Up mechanics can be a bit confusing sometimes, especially if you're not familiar with The Dark Eye tabletop rpg, but you do have the option to simplify character creation, and make sure you have a balanced starting character. The story is nothing special, but the characters are great, and the game is full of witty dialog. One character in particular had me laughing out loud time and again through my 30-40 hours with this game. My favorite part of the game is it's soundtrack. It's very well made. In combat the music changes depending on how you're doing. If the battle turns in your favor the music becomes more uplifting, if your characters are almost dead, the music becomes darker. The game is not without faults though. These include clunky UI, Slow combat animations, and other minor annoyances. It looks like the developer is done patching the game, so unless someone makes a unofficial patch don't expect them to be solved anytime soon. All in all Blackguards is a great RPG if you like tactical combat and in-depth character customization. If not - Look elsewhere.

If you are extremely well-versed in The Dark Eye role playing system, Blackguards may be quite playable, but for me -- a novice to The Dark Eye -- the first act seemed difficult but fair... but the second act suddenly spiked to an impossible difficulty. With no way to respec skills and attributes, I found myself in battles that I could not win. Period. And that was after starting the game a 2nd time to pay close attention to my skill point allocations! When I figured out I was in a dead end, I dropped the difficulty from "normal" to "easy" (something I never do in games). After that, I enjoyed the game quite a bit -- even with some bugged quests and unclear battle map goals). The voice acting is fine and the characters are fun. With the coming of act 3, the story becomes genuinely involving (althouigh don't expect to care deeply about anything here). Overall, Blackguards as a good game hampered by a lack of clarity in the skill system and terrible balance issues / difficulty spikes that feel very close to "game breaking." I'd suggest getting the game cheap and playing on "easy"... unless you love torure.

I really like this game. It has a good story, combat is satisfying and the turn-based strategical combat system feels rewarding to me. Things that set this game apart is that it doesn't feel like a slog half-game through as most other rpgs and the length is appropriate. There are some nice twists in the story and it's fairly faithful to the dark eye system so the people who like it, i think it's a no brainer. Graphics are nice and sounds as well. About the only thing i disliked is randomness in some combat actions where even if the game shows you that you have 90% percent of success, it's not completely true as there are some other rolls which make the probability lower, therefore those success chances are misleading.

Story/conversations are kiddish. UI is clunky and not convenient. Overall seems like this game was created by people who are not professionals in gameindustry. However battles sometimes not bad. Oh, yeah i remembered, there is no speedup battle function - so you will see all animations every time in theirs original speed, it is very annoying for me. Is this game bad? no! It is not polished. So, now we have mediocre game.

Pretty solid tactical RPG. The story was interesting enough to keep me entertained through the whole game, and the battles didn't feel repetitive.