Blackguards

[Mhaedros]

From issue XI of the Gamer's Gazette; go read the rest of it!

Blackguards

Blackguards

Blackguards is a tactical RPG developed and published by German Daedelic Entertainment. The game takes place in the Dark Eye universe, which is..a fantasy universe with a world called Aventuria..It’s got dwarves and elves I think, although I’ve only seen half an elf in the game so I might be wrong. Oh and there are bad people, who you need to defeat..

After having played Blackguards I may be a loremaster of the universe, but going into it I had never heard of the franchise before. What I saw was an XCOM-esque fantasy game with a Northern dwarf and a load of fugitives ending up as the good guys. And though I would certainly say the new XCOM + expansion are much more fleshed out, Blackguards certainly does a good job recreating the type of tactical gameplay.

You play as a character created by yourself, you chose your play style, appearance and even gender at the beginning of the game. Want to be a mage with a fire-fetish? Fine! A masterly marksman? Go ahead. You get the idea. But the issue is, when you first create a character and you have no idea how the rules of the game work, it can be a bit difficult to know what to create and what skills to spend points on. In my own playthrough I created a ranger and for half the game I insisted on having a knife as secondary weapon, not realising I could at any time have put points into, say, a big axe in order to actually have a useful secondary weapon. At the bossfight of the third chapter I spent about 45 minutes hitting a man with my fists because I had ran out of arrows the battle before and never remembered to equip more.

The combat is a combination of satisfying and horribly annoying

Blackguards is split in two different types of game. One is a tactical battlemap on a hex based grid where you turn by turn move and use your characters to tear the limbs off your enemies, and this is where the majority of the game takes place. And this is all very enjoyable, I absolutely adore these turnbased tactical battles, but..the difficulty is ridiculously inconsistent from battle to battle. Some fights you will walk through like a breeze, desolating any opposition even on the hard difficulty, but others will start off by crippling all your characters, push you over and proceed to kick you while singing “get up, I’ll stop when you get up, get up already sucker!”. And I have a creeping suspicion I could have avoided being kicked in the stomach by playing as a spellsword instead of an archer.

So many skills...

I guess my main issue with the battles is that, even when going down to easy difficulty, there are some battles that will drive you insane. I’m all for a challenging game, but when I am on my tenth replay of a single battle and I just get torn apart on easy I’m just not having fun anymore. Easy should be for people who are fed up with a map or just want to get through the story, you can’t make a game so difficult people rage-quit because they can’t get through a map. Or I’m just too stupid to get through those maps, but I like to think it’s the games’ fault.

On the battle map there are a few things to keep in mind. Health bars of course, as well as astral points (mana / magicka). Then there are possible bonuses and nerfs that will help or hinder characters, such as altering the speed at which they move or changing the chance of hitting your target. Here a weird thing comes into play. There is a percentage chance of everything, that is carefully calculated according to the rules of the Dark Eye. Which means that there will be times when two characters keep trying, but failing to hit each other, turn after turn, hour after hour. As your characters progress and become more experienced though, thankfully this issue slowly goes away. But you will still be missing 99% fireballs on occasion and that can be horribly obnoxious.

Oh so many skills

The lesser part of the game consists of travelling through the towns of Aventuria, seeking new quests, shopkeepers that can sell you loot, or physicians to heal your wounds. This is fairly straight forward, when travelling you see a parchment with a map painted on it, and to get to a new location you simply press on the button with the name of said location on it. This moves you to a new screen, a basic camera shot of a city with a few merchants to talk to and possible quest givers. It’s a curious take on merchants, but I appreciate the beautiful graphics these scenes are made out of, often with over the top colours and sunrays. They supply moments of calm and beauty in a world otherwise rotten to the core.

The map is simple, but functional

The visual design in Blackguards is quite exquisite. Every battlemap is carefully designed uniquely for whatever purpose it may have, there is no re-using old maps in this game. Granted, some maps are more interesting than others; a large open space with a lake in the middle isn’t quite as fun to play as a long pathway inside a cave with stalagmites and stalactites, the appropriate of which will fall on your head if you leave a character below it at the wrong moment. The colour palette and sunrays I mentioned earlier aren’t unique to the cities either; every map looks amazing, with different kinds of filters tech savvy people could probably name.

As I mentioned earlier, the city views offer calm beauty every once in a while, when you return to a city after exploring or dungeoncrawling. Every city is unique with its own set of buildings, town squares and people. Some are larger than others, the southern capital of Mengbilla is made of multiple camera shots, each as beautiful as the other.

The cities offer a moment of calm and beauty

I have heard some people say they dislike the way Blackguards has handled this particular part of the game, that the curious colour palette and the over the top sunrays are bad for the game; I could not disagree more. I think it is important companies try to do something other than the 50 shades of brown norm.

The music and voice acting in Blackguards are amazing. The music especially is really good, look it up, but I think the actors are central in the delivery of the story, which can sometimes be a bit.. meeh. Don’t get me wrong, it’s by no means a bad story, it’s quite standard high fantasy with old evils being awakened and unlikely heroes being forced to fight the evil and a plot twist and love and betrayal and all that, but if it hadn’t been for the way Naurim say’s “Let’s kill them all!” or Zurbaran the mage tries to flirt with powerful women way out of his league, I might very well have turned the sound off and started a podcast before the end of the game, even despite the amazing music.

I think I have been quite positive in my review, but unfortunately I don’t think the game came all the way through. It gave me about 30 hours of a comination of fun, despair and anger and the random number generator that just wouldn’t let anyone kill anyone else for 15 minutes. I say 30 hours, I never actually finished the game. I came to the final battle of the second chapter in about 10 hours, but stopped because I was being handed by arse by a giant louse. Later I pushed through and put another 10 hours into it, until I reached a dragon that was handing my arse to me. Then I, to my shame, retreated and just left the dragon and pushed through the story for the benefit of this review, which took another 10 hours.

I still wake up screaming after this battle

I got to the last or second to last battle and realised to my horror, I was having no fun anymore! I had already before turned the difficulty to easy because my arse was by this point a common commodity to be given to me all the time and I just couldn’t get through some battles without it, but here it just stopped. I like to think of myself as a decent tactician, but some battles in this game feels more like there is a single correct way of winning them rather than something you can win if you possess a good tactical mind.

My point is that while I certainly enjoyed myself for most of the game, it does have a tendency to make me hate it because it has a very bad grasp on difficulty. I kind of have to assume a game is wilfully too difficult when I barely get through a level on easy difficulty with a single hero alive.


7/10

[Sir Adrian]

Added