The First Templar - Special Edition

There's real passion in this game. You can tell from the dynamic finishers to the highly detailed and atmospheric environments! The budget here was lower than, say, a gigantic open world game but things don't feel slipshod. Fighting is fun, there's some exploration and discoveries off the beaten path, outfits to collect, lore to find. It's not as complex as an RPG or as nuanced as a fighting game but sits squarely in the middle. The voice acting is decent, the translation a bit wonky but nothing deal breaking. It's all very user friendly. Tons of healing items nearby each encounter. Button prompts and a mini map to guide you. But it doesn't feel like this was a cash grab or a weekend job. The environments are pretty and varied and the sound design very solid. There's a lot of historical attention to detail here and the story isn't afraid to delve into the ambiguities of the time period instead of lecturing people from a modern position. You want someone rescued and they're surrounded by soldiers from a different region? Knights do what knights do: fight and kill if necessary. Templars are neither super heroes nor villains in this: more like samurai who live and die by the sword and oath as well as their faith. It's surprisingly immersive and I for one wish this team had more resources for a deeper RPG experience. Still what is here functions perfectly well. Switch between companions at the touch of a button. Learn new skills by spending experience. Go on side quests for additional information and rewards. Just a nice tight solid little slice of action with RPG elements.

This is a nice, fun, middle of the road type of game. I had a ton of fun when I played it years ago on Steam, even knowing it had some flaws in balance and pacing. I like the two characters' interactions and differences in gameplay, and the final act was actually a really cool surprise. I would probably rate this a solid 3-star game. Not perfect, but fun enough and decently long for an action-adventure game ~17 hours. However, I am bumping this up to 4 stars for this release. Why? Because the Steam version has Kalypso's horrendous DRM on top of requiring Steam, which has literally kept me from being able to play it again. Whenever a rather obscure game that I enjoy and can recommend divests itself from a double-DRM scheme, it makes me quite happy. I fully intend to purchase this version to play through the game again and show my support for this practice.

I'm liking the writing and story telling aspects of the game. Voice acting is good. The combat with a controller works well enough. The camera panning with the right thumb stick isn't smooth but that doesn't detract from the game. The game rewards exploration and has light RPG elements like combat abilities, weapons, and outfit upgrades. You can switch to control your companion any time and it even has a split screen feature, which I have not tried but it seems like a nice co-op experience. All in all, it's fun hack and slash game. Only thing missing is the lack of controller button layout in the options. It only shows keyboard settings.

This is really a very solid linear 3rd person action hack & slash game with some light RPG elements and a simple story. One can play with gamepad or with a combination of mouse and keyboard (I did the later). The switching between characters is simple, just by pressing the TAB key. The game features a splitscreen, I did try it just for testing purpose. The splitscreen image shows about 2/3 of the upper side of the screen, the GUI is on bottom 1/3. The graphics are still decent and works really well on Intel UHD 770 integrated graphics and 2560 x 1440 px resolution. I have disabled VSync, and did set the water/shadow option to medium and it works around 40-50 FPS. Windows 11 22H2, build 22621.963 (Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22638.1000.0).

Had this back then in the Xbox 360 days. Only complaint with the PC version is you cant map some stuff to the mouse interace interms of button bindings, also considering the mouse has better view of camera than a analog controller has. Outside that its a very engaging interesting game worth trying out!