Believe me when I say, there is nothing of worth in 'Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom'. In 1992, this may have passed as a somewhat decent game. At best, it's a waste of time. Most of the time, it's what one may find at the bottom of the garbage tin. Why did I waste 30+ hours on this? 'Cause I'm a fool for expecting the tiniest of relieving quality out of this bag of boredom, grind and ~~~ You know what? I'll stop it right there. I shouldn't have spend any time or money on this, and neither should you. 2 stars since it's at least mostly free of bugs.
Bad: The combat is some kind of rock-paper-sciccors card game, and it's utter garbage. But, you can skip every fight, so there's nothing holding you from experiencing the story. Also, it's more like a first chapter than a whole book, so to speak. Good for one evening, though. Good: The Setting is fresh, the characters quite beliveable and the story is decent, at least. The music and ambient is quite nice, too. If the setting intriegues you, give it a go.
I had my first five or so runs now, so this is more of a first impression. Bit that impression is pretty good so far. It's a single player deck building game. Think a little 'Hearthstone' meets 'Slay the Spire' with a hint of 'Darkest Dungeon' mixed in. The Balancing doesn't feel ideal, yet. Or it's just a little more unforgiving then expected, which isn't a bad thing. What I don't liked at first were the unlock mechanics. It plays like a dungeon crawler where you, if you escape with your loot, get some gold. Getting enough gold for card or character unlocks seemed like a godforsaken grindfest at first. But after five or so deaths I got the hang of it and played through to the end, with enough loot to unlock one of the expensive characters and a card or two. That's promising. It still feels like I merely scathed the surface, though. The characters seem to be quite different, too. For 10 bucks, the game seems like a mighty fine purchase.
Uneingeschrenkte Kaufempfehlung: Eine Gameplay-Fest erster Güte mit tollem Art-Style und bezaubernden Charakteren. Für 26 Stunden wurde ich hier wunderbar und abwechslungsreich unterhalten, bis ich den Abspann sah. Und da hatte ich noch nicht alles an Skills freigeschaltet, wohl aber alles gesehen. Gerne mehr davon.
Well, it has a nice feel, for the first 18 or so hours. And that's it, 18 hours of mediocre gameplay, with a quite nice art style, fine characters and an unfolding story, which is cut off before it even starts. Maybe some of you remember Wild Arms, where the credits rolled out a few hours into the game and you asked yourself "What, that was it?", just to be relieved it's only been the beginning of the game. Here it's quite the same, except for..well..credits, The End. It's a enormous disappointment. If you can live with a story, that ends just before it really starts, you may give it a shot, though. The art style has something and at least it was fun to play, as long as it lasted. Prepare for a little grinding at the end to push your damage output, the last Boss tends to heal like 2200HP every once in a while.
Well, I bet it's a nice game and all. Except for me, that is. If you're visually impaired, chances are high you won't be able to read any ingame text at all. And for all I found about this game, you'll read a lot. Which wouldn't be so much of a deal, if the windowed mode would work properly. Which it does not. And I'm done spending more than 5 hours to make these small font stuff work out for me by finding ways around, testing a bunch of magnifying softwares again and again. Not even custom resolutions work here. Boy, how I hate those engine choices. So, I can't play it. Therefore, bad rating. Shit happens. Goodbye, money.
I love the world, the characters, the choices you have to make and their consequences, the artwork, the soundtrack and the first part of the story. Why only the first part of the story, you may ask?. Because The Banner Saga ist, as it seems, only the first game of a trilogy and that's not mentioned once here. I nearly feel robbed, because I normaly don't buy unfinished stories - I even wait with Game of Thrones until it's done, so I don't have to wait a year or two for the next book/episode. Shame on you, stoic studio and/or gog.com, for not making that clear.
