Vereina @Queen of Hell

Iron Blade (Android)

Here's farming, there's grind, grind, grind...

The Good
First of all, I'd like to say that I've had the opportunity to play Iron Blade both on PC and on my Samsung, so this review is for both platforms at once, but it's slightly more PC slanted, because of it being my primary gaming platform.

The visuals in Iron Blade are nothing to write home about, but they are not terrible either. The palette and the art style are fitting the theme chosen for the game, and both the bright, vibrant rural sceneries, changing onto the dark, damp castles and crypts do their job of submerging the user into a Medieval low-fantasy setting. When played on a smartphone, with its small screen, the provided visuals of the picture are good enough to be pleasing to the eye, and a good balance between the render quality and power demands were achieved for the game to perform fast and smooth, what is, in fact, crucial for a hack’n’slash title. I did play a few mobile games that were slanted more toward the graphics quality, and, when the screen was full of action, my phone weren't shy from becoming a hand warming device and sucking its battery dry and empty, no matter if I played a space 4X or a base building simulator. However, from a PC gamer's point of view, the graphics is quite aged for a 2019 release. However, it is not that bad to become appalling, and, considering the PC version is a direct port of the mobile game, it is tolerable.

Sound effects in Iron Blade are sooner a good thing. Every single line of dialogue in the cutscenes is said out loud, and every single enemy the player encounters has a number of taunts, threats and banter lines recorded for them. The sound effects accompanying all the attacks and actions like skill usage are also varied, not becoming repetitive enough to annoy the player out. A spoon of dirt would be the menu sounds, which could get old quite fast. Yet again, comparing this game to quite a few similar releases, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the amount of voice over Iron Blade got. It was not uncommon to see barely a few lines spoken out loud, and the most of the presentation done via plain text inside of a game with a huge advertising and marketing campaign that had a daily number of active players larger than the total player amount Iron Blade had ever attained.

Once again, I'm on the fence about the overall vibe and the setting of the game. I can't even decide for myself, for example, whether this is a high-fantasy or low-fantasy world. There are some serious historical references, but, at the same time, there are supernatural powers in effect, so that reflects on the events playing out in and around the really existent European locations. And the game is set only in the real-world locations, some of which are reconstructed on screen with maximum detail, even if the most served just as a loose base. Let's just mention here that it is not very often when the game designers take our real world, albeit in a different era, and cross-breed it with the fantasy and folklore elements quite subtly. I can hardly remember more than three titles that would do the same off the top of my head. It's usually either a rough foundation upon which a world similar to ours is built, sometimes even without any kind of magic, or it's a heavy modification of our own. Then again, Knights Templar being a real Medieval order, the authors didn't have too many options. And, while we at it, the credit is gotta be given where it is due - they surely did their homework on history. Some temporal discrepancies are present, of course, but the Templar Conspiracy itself was exploited to the maximum, all the obscure, hardly mentioned characters getting at least a honorary mention.

Granted, it wouldn't be neither the very first, nor the very last game ever released to dwell on the theme of Knights Templar and their demise, along with all the surrounding conspiracy. I've seen a lot of movies and series, and played a few games on the topic. Iron Blade isn't the first game either to show that some kind of a demonic conspiracy did truly exist and served as the main driver behind the events unfolding on screen, but I believe it differs from the most in the way where did that conspiracy grew its roots. In this world we learn that the Templars are, indeed, corrupt. That there's a huge demonic influence over them. And that it was one of their leaders that convinced King Philip IV to crash down on the Templar leadership and the knights still loyal to the old ways. Why? It's for the player to find out the answers, piecing together a clue after a clue and to finally understand how the demons, Templars, King and Cathars are all tied off in one dreadful knot. By the way, I believe that involving the Cathars in the plot was an actual novelty when the game released.

And writing behind all that was done sturdy enough. It is not brilliant, some of the plot twists are easily predicted, but it isn't full of gaping holes either. Dialogues are a bit flat, and some are clearly written as fillers to justify the need for yet another stage to be hacked through, though. Oh, and while there are animated cutscenes, about three quarters of the presentation are given through still images with the lines of text on them being spoken by the actors. Once again, if we are to consider the game being a mobile slasher first of all, and only after that a port to PC platform, then it's all explainable.

The Bad
While the sound effects are sooner in the positive bin, the musical score goes straight into the bad one. Iron Blade is plagued with the same disease that hit most of the similar releases - there is just a handful of tracks, like one per situation, maybe two for combat, and they're becoming annoyingly repetitive and looped extremely fast. Especially so because, unlike the sound effects which vary and are not always in your speakers, the musical tracks are always heard. I do realise that there can be only so much tracks written for any game there is, but somehow I usually don't grind my teeth as I navigate into the options menu to completely mute the background music. Most of the time I do enjoy the OST, even if the songs do repeat themselves, because it actually serves to set the mood, to accentuate and to shape the experience, instead of sticking out like a sore thumb and drawing your attention to it instead of subtly underling the action on screen like we have it in the Iron Blade.

And now the time has come to move into the gameplay review, and that's where I'm going to rant, and a lot. My first problem with Iron Blade is that its main genre is defined as an RPG. Okay. It was released in 2019, and it's now the end of 2023 when I'm writing this review, and I've witnessed the gaming genres coming and going before my eyes as I grew up and live, and I'm fully aware of the current situation when it's quite hard to dump a game into a specific category, because nowadays a lot of the classical ones have merged and blended into a mix of sorts. But, please. Iron Blade is not an RPG in its classical sense. Even MobyGames defines the genre with the focus on character development first and foremost, along with amassing wealth, and gradual increase of power through collecting gear or utilities. I can't deny all those elements being present in Iron Blade, but, at least in my mind, a role-playing game assumes that the players have an ability to spec the character however they want, and then gradually explore the world of those characters in whatever way they see fit, instead of being led along the rails, with no wobble to the left or right allowed.

Now take Iron Blade. Here we have strictly predefined order of levels to be completed in the campaign, and the veering to a side could be done only in the form of multiplayer or various bonus activities. As for the RPG staple that some do call "spreadsheet simulator", our protagonist Damien has only two stats - his health and his stamina, which get a flat increase every time there's enough XP to level up. Oh, yes, experience meter is also present, how could I have forgotten about it? Yes, there is also a lot of focus on upgrading your gear. But instead of quietly picking the pockets and removing the boots from the still bodies of your fresh kills, you get a random reward at the end of each stage that depends on the time it took you to complete a level, and on the difficulty rating.

Another RPG staple is character creation process that migrated these days in many other genres, including strategies even. In Iron Blade we can only give ourselves as players a unique name to identify ourselves from the crowd. The character we play would always stay the same. Always. In all aspects, his name included. Okay, once again, it was historically nigh impossible to see a female warrior in the Medieval Europe, but there were some, however a rarity they were. And, being historically accurate, it was really impossible to see a female member of a knightly order. However, even the game itself presents us with a couple of female fighters to accompany us in the campaign. But we can't customise even the beard on our character. Once again, the game was released in 2019 initially, so lack of the proper character creation inside of an RPG is very weird.

Bottom line for this here item on the list would be that I'd sooner call it an Action game, with addition of some RPG elements.

Next, Iron Blade was the very first game I played that had this "energy" concept that I've never encountered before. And I played it mostly on PC, so it was double surprising to see it there. For those as unfamiliar with it as I was, it means that you, as a player, have a certain amount of energy points, and each level completion or activity costs energy to do. For example, completing the very first stage of the campaign costs about two energy units, but trying to do it on highest difficulty for the juiciest rewards would cost already eight, and it goes progressively up as the player goes through the main story. Additional activities that the game has also require the energy to be spent. Ran out of energy? Wait for the 25 hours of real time for it to be restored fully, or check if any of your daily challenges or side missions brought you reward in the form of the energy, locked inside one of the many reward chests. If there was none, than there is always the in-game shop, where you can buy some for the in-game currency. Don't have the war tokens, gold or rubies? Well, there's the special page in the in-game shop that allows you to convert the real world money into them... You get the idea. Okay, I understand that this feature is meant to nudge players to spend the real money so Gameloft could make some profit, but for someone like it me was plain frustrating.

The next item on the dislike list would be the fact that I can't control Damien beside choosing what attack would he deliver when I'd press a button. Each level is divided into several fighting sections, where the camera angle is basically set to remain the same, hardly turning left or right unless absolutely necessary, and the player lacks even basic movement controls over the protagonist. You can't even lock on a specific enemy, and keep hitting the one that attacked you the last. The only choice is whether to keep chaining light attacks, or deliver a heavy one, or a nearly useless ranged one. There's also blocking, which becomes quite ineffective after Damien runs out of his stamina, what might happen quite fast on high difficulty levels, and there are active skills, but the pair of them on screen is chosen randomly, and you can't use another until at least one of those was, and the new one will also be chosen randomly. What skills you have available depends on your gear. Speaking of which, at one point in the game it becomes obvious that you can't progress further until you have better, or, in the very least, upgraded one, and it forces you as the player to repeat the stages and challenges you've already done, over and over again, once again spending the energy, praying to the RNG to deliver you something nice finally.

Another weird thing that I disliked a lot was the way multiplayer is organized in the game. First of all, it is not available until you complete at least two campaign chapters. And, you guessed it right, it also needs energy to be played. Good job it's the different kind of energy meter, and that's actually one of the two resources you'd never notice running out, because any multiplayer action, including some activities, costs exactly one multiplayer energy point. But I digress. The MP concept for such kind of a game is very unusual, in my opinion, but I guess it stems from the fact that every player controls exactly the same character. After completing chapter two, you get access to a fort. The troop cards that are among the rewards can be used to garrison it, making in total three waves with a leader in charge, the leader being one of the campaign bosses. Just as with the equipment, these troops can be upgraded to become stronger and provide better defences.

The idea is that you are randomly matched with some other player, and if you choose to attack, then you have to single-handedly defeat the fortress garrison (which would instantly respawn in any case after the fight concludes). If you are successful, then you loot all the gold and rubies the opponent had accumulated in his fortress and had no chance of "harvesting" to be added to his stock before the attack. You also get a boost to your multiplayer rating. If you are defeated by the garrison, then you just wasted your energy, and your rating drops, and opponent's grows. There are ten leagues in the ranking board, with seven of them being time independent, and the last three requiring you climbing the ranks every week, because they provide the fattest rewards. It goes without the saying that higher you are up the ranking, the tougher are the opponents. But, if you have at least some semblance of action and control when attacking another player, you have absolutely no saying about the defences. You just get a message, informing you whether you got a boost to your rankings, or you got knocked down a few pegs. And woe upon you if you attack some overly sensitive player or an alliance, the members of which are full of themselves. Beside the flak you'll get in the chat, you'll also have every member of that alliance trying to attack your fortress the moment they can. It's not uncommon to read the pages of apologies for the newbie players in the main, spilling the words in attempt to prove they were attacking someone just because the campaign demanded them to as to unlock the multiplayer features, and not because they had some malicious intent behind it.

Also while speaking about the equipment it is impossible to avoid tying it up with the difficulty system. I've already mentioned above that the loot you gain upon the completion of a level or activity, or when opening a reward chest is completely random, and that the higher is the difficulty the richer are the rewards. The thing is that these four difficulty levels are very non-linear in their scaling, and, while it is quite easy to complete the game like a breeze on the lowest setting, even the next step up requires a lot of time and resource investments, and there are two more to reach the desired 100% achievement (which alone grants huge rewards). At some point, even the very first level gets populated with the enemies that were supposed to appear much later in the campaign, effectively rendering the characters idiotic when they discuss those much later as first ever encountered vampires, for example, while you were slaughtering them left, right and centre for the previous four chapters already. Especially evil are the last two chapters, which were added as a part of a later update to the game, and as such they are designed for the veterans in the first place, being able to knock the player back on the ass even on the easiest setting if you are not careful. Thus a vicious circle forms: to gain better equipment, you have to complete the stages on tougher settings, but, to do that, you need better equipment. And so the grind begins, when the same level is completed over and over again in hopes that the dreadful god of RNG would yield something desirable at final last. There is an option to skip the actual gameplay and just get the random loot, but it is only available if you've beaten this specific level on the current difficulty setting with the timer not reaching zero and going down a peg. Needless to say that even skipping a level also costs energy and items.

The game is fast to teach you how to upgrade your gear, but soon enough you find out that all the effort and resource you have put into upgrading your basic sword and armour did you good for a while, but it's a complete waste for the tougher settings, because you need to first hunt for the legendary items, quickly turning to discard all the common, rare and even epic ones. Then you are fast to learn that each item can be upgraded nine tiers, and if the first five require just gold and experience (which is gained from fusing the other items with it, or looting and buying special XP cards), evolution between the tier five and the next one, and so forth, requires some godawful amount of truly rare resources, which are extremely hard to come by. And after that you eventually find out that the Divine - Demonic - Heroic system of every item and every creature in the game is not just akin to Rock - Paper - Scissors, but it becomes crucial eventually. Each campaign chapter is themed under an element, and while at first it doesn't matter, then it becomes obvious that you need to have the gear equipped that is comprised of the items with the opposing element, or you just won't be able to complete the stage. So you basically need to spend countless hours grinding to get three different elemental sets in the best possible quality. And of course it still won't be enough, because you need to have sets of the specific items, which worn together give you rare boosts that could be a game changer, and being part of an active alliance gives boosts as well to your attack and defence ratings. In fact, it seems to be impossible to hundred percent the campaign without being a member of a clan and without investing real money, or a few years of your time, making Iron Blade your day job. At least they included auto-play feature for situations like that, so the game could play itself for a while. And some upgrades, like skill boosters for the items, can't be looted, they can only be purchased in shop for completing multiplayer activities with enough tokens to allow that. So, it's grind, grind, grind... Endless grind.

So the game is indeed easy to learn, as the ad blurbs state, but I wouldn't say that it's hard to master, it's time-consuming to climb up to the top. And if a mistake in picking the wrong gear to approach a campaign level would just result in a waste of resource and time, I can see how the MP challenges, where all the enemies are a mix of elements and types, easily can frustrate players enough to invest real money to get some payback. I am proud to say that I've managed to avoid spending a single cent on that.

The final rant section will be about the interface. The very first note that needs to be made is that the game was designed as a mobile one, so it handles way better on a smartphone than on computer in some aspects, but it still is not that good. Yes, it is, on one hand, comfortable enough to control the attacks and skills with two thumbs only, but when the situation calls for a rapid action, sometimes it's very easy to slide the screen in another direction or just mistap. Adaptation of these control schematics to the PC port made the game behave erratically and nigh impossibility of properly applying the directed skills, because it often seems to ignore the desperate mouse movement. As for the attacks themselves, it is easier to use the keyboard controls than clicking the mouse buttons. Also I wonder how many people actually tapped the screen when offered, because there is absolutely no difference in the text between the mobile and PC versions of the game.

Next interface problem is once again connected to the inability to control your character. Damien can't be made to walk or run on your demand, he can either cover distance with another enemy, or run between the preset locations for yet another fight. So, you sometimes might end up stuck, unable even to turn to kill the last enemy that is using ranged or magical attacks to hurt you, and there are only options to either die and restart, or rage quit and restart. The final chapter is also full of graphical bugs, at least prominent on PC, which would either fix camera under some awkward angle, or just black out, preventing you from see any opposition, and this is crucial to employ some skills or to deflect a blow.

I'm pretty sure there were more little things that were annoying, but I'd better wrap it up already.

The Bottom Line
All in all, unless I'm just an old millennial that got stuck back in her Fallout 2, Morrowind, or Baldur's Gate, and my ideas about what is an RPG are obsolete already, I'd recommend giving Iron Blade a wide berth. Of course, if you do happen to like the games like this one, or just are a hardcore Templar fan, who wants to see yet another story about them, then sure, give it a go. Just keep in mind that Gameloft seems to have discontinued all but legacy support of this game. There was no fresh patch for a few years, and I believe it has been removed from Steam catalogue as well, at least there was a huge warning notice about it nearly a year and half ago when starting the client, but I'm actually unsure about it.

By Vereina on December 1, 2023

Iron Blade (Windows)

Here's farming, there's grind, grind, grind...

The Good
First of all, I'd like to say that I've had the opportunity to play Iron Blade both on PC and on my Samsung, so this review is for both platforms at once, but it's slightly more PC slanted, because of it being my primary gaming platform.

The visuals in Iron Blade are nothing to write home about, but they are not terrible either. The palette and the art style are fitting the theme chosen for the game, and both the bright, vibrant rural sceneries, changing onto the dark, damp castles and crypts do their job of submerging the user into a Medieval low-fantasy setting. When played on a smartphone, with its small screen, the provided visuals of the picture are good enough to be pleasing to the eye, and a good balance between the render quality and power demands were achieved for the game to perform fast and smooth, what is, in fact, crucial for a hack’n’slash title. I did play a few mobile games that were slanted more toward the graphics quality, and, when the screen was full of action, my phone weren't shy from becoming a hand warming device and sucking its battery dry and empty, no matter if I played a space 4X or a base building simulator. However, from a PC gamer's point of view, the graphics is quite aged for a 2019 release. However, it is not that bad to become appalling, and, considering the PC version is a direct port of the mobile game, it is tolerable.

Sound effects in Iron Blade are sooner a good thing. Every single line of dialogue in the cutscenes is said out loud, and every single enemy the player encounters has a number of taunts, threats and banter lines recorded for them. The sound effects accompanying all the attacks and actions like skill usage are also varied, not becoming repetitive enough to annoy the player out. A spoon of dirt would be the menu sounds, which could get old quite fast. Yet again, comparing this game to quite a few similar releases, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the amount of voice over Iron Blade got. It was not uncommon to see barely a few lines spoken out loud, and the most of the presentation done via plain text inside of a game with a huge advertising and marketing campaign that had a daily number of active players larger than the total player amount Iron Blade had ever attained.

Once again, I'm on the fence about the overall vibe and the setting of the game. I can't even decide for myself, for example, whether this is a high-fantasy or low-fantasy world. There are some serious historical references, but, at the same time, there are supernatural powers in effect, so that reflects on the events playing out in and around the really existent European locations. And the game is set only in the real-world locations, some of which are reconstructed on screen with maximum detail, even if the most served just as a loose base. Let's just mention here that it is not very often when the game designers take our real world, albeit in a different era, and cross-breed it with the fantasy and folklore elements quite subtly. I can hardly remember more than three titles that would do the same off the top of my head. It's usually either a rough foundation upon which a world similar to ours is built, sometimes even without any kind of magic, or it's a heavy modification of our own. Then again, Knights Templar being a real Medieval order, the authors didn't have too many options. And, while we at it, the credit is gotta be given where it is due - they surely did their homework on history. Some temporal discrepancies are present, of course, but the Templar Conspiracy itself was exploited to the maximum, all the obscure, hardly mentioned characters getting at least a honorary mention.

Granted, it wouldn't be neither the very first, nor the very last game ever released to dwell on the theme of Knights Templar and their demise, along with all the surrounding conspiracy. I've seen a lot of movies and series, and played a few games on the topic. Iron Blade isn't the first game either to show that some kind of a demonic conspiracy did truly exist and served as the main driver behind the events unfolding on screen, but I believe it differs from the most in the way where did that conspiracy grew its roots. In this world we learn that the Templars are, indeed, corrupt. That there's a huge demonic influence over them. And that it was one of their leaders that convinced King Philip IV to crash down on the Templar leadership and the knights still loyal to the old ways. Why? It's for the player to find out the answers, piecing together a clue after a clue and to finally understand how the demons, Templars, King and Cathars are all tied off in one dreadful knot. By the way, I believe that involving the Cathars in the plot was an actual novelty when the game released.

And writing behind all that was done sturdy enough. It is not brilliant, some of the plot twists are easily predicted, but it isn't full of gaping holes either. Dialogues are a bit flat, and some are clearly written as fillers to justify the need for yet another stage to be hacked through, though. Oh, and while there are animated cutscenes, about three quarters of the presentation are given through still images with the lines of text on them being spoken by the actors. Once again, if we are to consider the game being a mobile slasher first of all, and only after that a port to PC platform, then it's all explainable.

The Bad
While the sound effects are sooner in the positive bin, the musical score goes straight into the bad one. Iron Blade is plagued with the same disease that hit most of the similar releases - there is just a handful of tracks, like one per situation, maybe two for combat, and they're becoming annoyingly repetitive and looped extremely fast. Especially so because, unlike the sound effects which vary and are not always in your speakers, the musical tracks are always heard. I do realise that there can be only so much tracks written for any game there is, but somehow I usually don't grind my teeth as I navigate into the options menu to completely mute the background music. Most of the time I do enjoy the OST, even if the songs do repeat themselves, because it actually serves to set the mood, to accentuate and to shape the experience, instead of sticking out like a sore thumb and drawing your attention to it instead of subtly underling the action on screen like we have it in the Iron Blade.

And now the time has come to move into the gameplay review, and that's where I'm going to rant, and a lot. My first problem with Iron Blade is that its main genre is defined as an RPG. Okay. It was released in 2019, and it's now the end of 2023 when I'm writing this review, and I've witnessed the gaming genres coming and going before my eyes as I grew up and live, and I'm fully aware of the current situation when it's quite hard to dump a game into a specific category, because nowadays a lot of the classical ones have merged and blended into a mix of sorts. But, please. Iron Blade is not an RPG in its classical sense. Even MobyGames defines the genre with the focus on character development first and foremost, along with amassing wealth, and gradual increase of power through collecting gear or utilities. I can't deny all those elements being present in Iron Blade, but, at least in my mind, a role-playing game assumes that the players have an ability to spec the character however they want, and then gradually explore the world of those characters in whatever way they see fit, instead of being led along the rails, with no wobble to the left or right allowed.

Now take Iron Blade. Here we have strictly predefined order of levels to be completed in the campaign, and the veering to a side could be done only in the form of multiplayer or various bonus activities. As for the RPG staple that some do call "spreadsheet simulator", our protagonist Damien has only two stats - his health and his stamina, which get a flat increase every time there's enough XP to level up. Oh, yes, experience meter is also present, how could I have forgotten about it? Yes, there is also a lot of focus on upgrading your gear. But instead of quietly picking the pockets and removing the boots from the still bodies of your fresh kills, you get a random reward at the end of each stage that depends on the time it took you to complete a level, and on the difficulty rating.

Another RPG staple is character creation process that migrated these days in many other genres, including strategies even. In Iron Blade we can only give ourselves as players a unique name to identify ourselves from the crowd. The character we play would always stay the same. Always. In all aspects, his name included. Okay, once again, it was historically nigh impossible to see a female warrior in the Medieval Europe, but there were some, however a rarity they were. And, being historically accurate, it was really impossible to see a female member of a knightly order. However, even the game itself presents us with a couple of female fighters to accompany us in the campaign. But we can't customise even the beard on our character. Once again, the game was released in 2019 initially, so lack of the proper character creation inside of an RPG is very weird.

Bottom line for this here item on the list would be that I'd sooner call it an Action game, with addition of some RPG elements.

Next, Iron Blade was the very first game I played that had this "energy" concept that I've never encountered before. And I played it mostly on PC, so it was double surprising to see it there. For those as unfamiliar with it as I was, it means that you, as a player, have a certain amount of energy points, and each level completion or activity costs energy to do. For example, completing the very first stage of the campaign costs about two energy units, but trying to do it on highest difficulty for the juiciest rewards would cost already eight, and it goes progressively up as the player goes through the main story. Additional activities that the game has also require the energy to be spent. Ran out of energy? Wait for the 25 hours of real time for it to be restored fully, or check if any of your daily challenges or side missions brought you reward in the form of the energy, locked inside one of the many reward chests. If there was none, than there is always the in-game shop, where you can buy some for the in-game currency. Don't have the war tokens, gold or rubies? Well, there's the special page in the in-game shop that allows you to convert the real world money into them... You get the idea. Okay, I understand that this feature is meant to nudge players to spend the real money so Gameloft could make some profit, but for someone like it me was plain frustrating.

The next item on the dislike list would be the fact that I can't control Damien beside choosing what attack would he deliver when I'd press a button. Each level is divided into several fighting sections, where the camera angle is basically set to remain the same, hardly turning left or right unless absolutely necessary, and the player lacks even basic movement controls over the protagonist. You can't even lock on a specific enemy, and keep hitting the one that attacked you the last. The only choice is whether to keep chaining light attacks, or deliver a heavy one, or a nearly useless ranged one. There's also blocking, which becomes quite ineffective after Damien runs out of his stamina, what might happen quite fast on high difficulty levels, and there are active skills, but the pair of them on screen is chosen randomly, and you can't use another until at least one of those was, and the new one will also be chosen randomly. What skills you have available depends on your gear. Speaking of which, at one point in the game it becomes obvious that you can't progress further until you have better, or, in the very least, upgraded one, and it forces you as the player to repeat the stages and challenges you've already done, over and over again, once again spending the energy, praying to the RNG to deliver you something nice finally.

Another weird thing that I disliked a lot was the way multiplayer is organized in the game. First of all, it is not available until you complete at least two campaign chapters. And, you guessed it right, it also needs energy to be played. Good job it's the different kind of energy meter, and that's actually one of the two resources you'd never notice running out, because any multiplayer action, including some activities, costs exactly one multiplayer energy point. But I digress. The MP concept for such kind of a game is very unusual, in my opinion, but I guess it stems from the fact that every player controls exactly the same character. After completing chapter two, you get access to a fort. The troop cards that are among the rewards can be used to garrison it, making in total three waves with a leader in charge, the leader being one of the campaign bosses. Just as with the equipment, these troops can be upgraded to become stronger and provide better defences.

The idea is that you are randomly matched with some other player, and if you choose to attack, then you have to single-handedly defeat the fortress garrison (which would instantly respawn in any case after the fight concludes). If you are successful, then you loot all the gold and rubies the opponent had accumulated in his fortress and had no chance of "harvesting" to be added to his stock before the attack. You also get a boost to your multiplayer rating. If you are defeated by the garrison, then you just wasted your energy, and your rating drops, and opponent's grows. There are ten leagues in the ranking board, with seven of them being time independent, and the last three requiring you climbing the ranks every week, because they provide the fattest rewards. It goes without the saying that higher you are up the ranking, the tougher are the opponents. But, if you have at least some semblance of action and control when attacking another player, you have absolutely no saying about the defences. You just get a message, informing you whether you got a boost to your rankings, or you got knocked down a few pegs. And woe upon you if you attack some overly sensitive player or an alliance, the members of which are full of themselves. Beside the flak you'll get in the chat, you'll also have every member of that alliance trying to attack your fortress the moment they can. It's not uncommon to read the pages of apologies for the newbie players in the main, spilling the words in attempt to prove they were attacking someone just because the campaign demanded them to as to unlock the multiplayer features, and not because they had some malicious intent behind it.

Also while speaking about the equipment it is impossible to avoid tying it up with the difficulty system. I've already mentioned above that the loot you gain upon the completion of a level or activity, or when opening a reward chest is completely random, and that the higher is the difficulty the richer are the rewards. The thing is that these four difficulty levels are very non-linear in their scaling, and, while it is quite easy to complete the game like a breeze on the lowest setting, even the next step up requires a lot of time and resource investments, and there are two more to reach the desired 100% achievement (which alone grants huge rewards). At some point, even the very first level gets populated with the enemies that were supposed to appear much later in the campaign, effectively rendering the characters idiotic when they discuss those much later as first ever encountered vampires, for example, while you were slaughtering them left, right and centre for the previous four chapters already. Especially evil are the last two chapters, which were added as a part of a later update to the game, and as such they are designed for the veterans in the first place, being able to knock the player back on the ass even on the easiest setting if you are not careful. Thus a vicious circle forms: to gain better equipment, you have to complete the stages on tougher settings, but, to do that, you need better equipment. And so the grind begins, when the same level is completed over and over again in hopes that the dreadful god of RNG would yield something desirable at final last. There is an option to skip the actual gameplay and just get the random loot, but it is only available if you've beaten this specific level on the current difficulty setting with the timer not reaching zero and going down a peg. Needless to say that even skipping a level also costs energy and items.

The game is fast to teach you how to upgrade your gear, but soon enough you find out that all the effort and resource you have put into upgrading your basic sword and armour did you good for a while, but it's a complete waste for the tougher settings, because you need to first hunt for the legendary items, quickly turning to discard all the common, rare and even epic ones. Then you are fast to learn that each item can be upgraded nine tiers, and if the first five require just gold and experience (which is gained from fusing the other items with it, or looting and buying special XP cards), evolution between the tier five and the next one, and so forth, requires some godawful amount of truly rare resources, which are extremely hard to come by. And after that you eventually find out that the Divine - Demonic - Heroic system of every item and every creature in the game is not just akin to Rock - Paper - Scissors, but it becomes crucial eventually. Each campaign chapter is themed under an element, and while at first it doesn't matter, then it becomes obvious that you need to have the gear equipped that is comprised of the items with the opposing element, or you just won't be able to complete the stage. So you basically need to spend countless hours grinding to get three different elemental sets in the best possible quality. And of course it still won't be enough, because you need to have sets of the specific items, which worn together give you rare boosts that could be a game changer, and being part of an active alliance gives boosts as well to your attack and defence ratings. In fact, it seems to be impossible to hundred percent the campaign without being a member of a clan and without investing real money, or a few years of your time, making Iron Blade your day job. At least they included auto-play feature for situations like that, so the game could play itself for a while. And some upgrades, like skill boosters for the items, can't be looted, they can only be purchased in shop for completing multiplayer activities with enough tokens to allow that. So, it's grind, grind, grind... Endless grind.

So the game is indeed easy to learn, as the ad blurbs state, but I wouldn't say that it's hard to master, it's time-consuming to climb up to the top. And if a mistake in picking the wrong gear to approach a campaign level would just result in a waste of resource and time, I can see how the MP challenges, where all the enemies are a mix of elements and types, easily can frustrate players enough to invest real money to get some payback. I am proud to say that I've managed to avoid spending a single cent on that.

The final rant section will be about the interface. The very first note that needs to be made is that the game was designed as a mobile one, so it handles way better on a smartphone than on computer in some aspects, but it still is not that good. Yes, it is, on one hand, comfortable enough to control the attacks and skills with two thumbs only, but when the situation calls for a rapid action, sometimes it's very easy to slide the screen in another direction or just mistap. Adaptation of these control schematics to the PC port made the game behave erratically and nigh impossibility of properly applying the directed skills, because it often seems to ignore the desperate mouse movement. As for the attacks themselves, it is easier to use the keyboard controls than clicking the mouse buttons. Also I wonder how many people actually tapped the screen when offered, because there is absolutely no difference in the text between the mobile and PC versions of the game.

Next interface problem is once again connected to the inability to control your character. Damien can't be made to walk or run on your demand, he can either cover distance with another enemy, or run between the preset locations for yet another fight. So, you sometimes might end up stuck, unable even to turn to kill the last enemy that is using ranged or magical attacks to hurt you, and there are only options to either die and restart, or rage quit and restart. The final chapter is also full of graphical bugs, at least prominent on PC, which would either fix camera under some awkward angle, or just black out, preventing you from see any opposition, and this is crucial to employ some skills or to deflect a blow.

I'm pretty sure there were more little things that were annoying, but I'd better wrap it up already.

The Bottom Line
All in all, unless I'm just an old millennial that got stuck back in her Fallout 2, Morrowind, or Baldur's Gate, and my ideas about what is an RPG are obsolete already, I'd recommend giving Iron Blade a wide berth. Of course, if you do happen to like the games like this one, or just are a hardcore Templar fan, who wants to see yet another story about them, then sure, give it a go. Just keep in mind that Gameloft seems to have discontinued all but legacy support of this game. There was no fresh patch for a few years, and I believe it has been removed from Steam catalogue as well, at least there was a huge warning notice about it nearly a year and half ago when starting the client, but I'm actually unsure about it.

By Vereina on December 1, 2023

Photographs (Android)

A very strong narrative concealed for a puzzle solving game.

The Good
Okay, let's get going with the first thing that comes on my mind - this is not an adventure game as the game's rap sheet states. Well, not an adventure game in the sense that one would expect from it, with moving from location to location, gathering an inventory of items, solving obscure puzzles to advance the plot. No, it's a narrative instead, but I can't recall seeing one so small and so strong at the same time. Advert does not lie a jot - Photographs is indeed a very short game, roughly around these promised three hours. Its length will depend solely on how well you will be with solving its puzzles, so it might be a bit less, or a bit over three hours instead. Now let's discuss how everything is presented and in this section we'll stop over the good things, of course.

As it gets usual with my reviews, I'll start with the visuals, because it's the first thing that is thrown at you as a player. Let's make something clear here - I am well aware that 2019 is about to end. I am well aware that graphics in the game is now sometimes near photo realistic. And I am also able to remember quite clear how glad I was to see that art evolve from a bunch of pixels to the modern state of things. Photographs is a hark back to that former epoch being drawn up fully in pixel art. Yet it is done most beautiful. I'll reiterate - I grew up on the games like these, so I am not the one to cringe and close the game when I can't see veins in the tree leaves, I just happen to like the modern graphics more, and I believe that it's just natural. But the way these arts in the game were drawn, they were not just making me recall those old games, they were very likeable, very good.

So, everything from the main menu to the end credits is done up in great pixel art. And how does the story unfold? Well, there are five different narratives tied together only with the fact that they are all happening within the same world, even if the latter is a bit obscure thing to notice. When you play the game for the very first time, these five stories are presented to you in a specific order. The first one is the Alchemist, the second one is the Athlete, the third one is the story of the Jailer, the fourth one is the Journalist and the final set of puzzles tells the story of the Preventer. So when you load the game, the alchemist's story starts. It opens up with a very simple puzzle to solve, in our case - to lead the alchemist and his ward, Cleo, to the specific point on the playing field. That serves the purpose of introducing the player to the puzzle set that would accompany current narrative. Then after you're done with it, a big still picture styled like a Polaroid photograph appears with some text and voice over, starting to introduce the player into the story proper. You get rid of it and a beautiful big diorama is presented to you with the first things starting to fill it up with details. Then it's the time for the only thing that connects the title of the game with its gameplay to come in. You're prompted with a name of something or somebody, and you're to find it on the diorama, zoom in and wait until a photo is taken, and then next puzzle unlocks so you could solve it and advance the story in the similar fashion. Sooner or later something happens that serves as the watershed, an interface between what was before and what is now. Character's life is no longer going to be the same it was, and they tell us about their deepest regret, something they wish they had never done. The story ends either here or soon after showing the consequences of their actions, and the next one unlocks.

And literally every little bit of that all is served using that pixel art mentioned up above, the kind of art that looks simple as Hell, but takes ages to actually create. The artists did their job more than properly. They've managed to make these pixels to convey things from simple emotion display on the characters to complex effects that set the vibe for the whole scene. Every effect happening while you're doing a puzzle has been also lovingly fine-tuned to a sort of perfect fit. This has to be seen at least once, no amount of words will do their work proper justice.

While we're still at the presenting things page, let's also touch on the audio. I sincerely can't say a single bad word about it. The musical themes, written by Ben Prunty, were very nice, pleasing and fitting every scene. He had composed a different song for every story, and I dare to say that no single time the music got annoying. I do not know who is responsible for the sound effects, but they were also well-done. Again, not annoying, fitting and sometimes even charming. End credits song by Hartley, whoever that is, because Google could not help me here, is a cute one too. All in all, audio part of the game is very solid as well.

Among the other things that I liked is variety of the game. Normally you'd expect from a puzzle game a bunch of levels, a big one, which get more and more difficult as you progress. Here we have none of the case. Puzzles do get more difficult within every story, but every narrative has its own problem to solve. Alchemist one has the goal of leading him and Cleo to the specific spots like I've said. Trouble is, they move together, and the field slowly gets filled up with gates, mud piles, deadly bushes, wild growth and so on. In the second story about a diver, the puzzles are about physics. Your goal is to make the ball hit the portrait of a girl that is performing a jump, and then land into the water. Simple at first, but then more bouncing pads, angular platforms, viscous fields appear. Third set of puzzles in the jailer's story is about the simplest - make the figures fit the shape up on the playing field, eventually having to rotate them. Fourth set represents the journalist writing his papers from the header to the conclusion, and you need to connect the starting and the finishing point, wrapping around obstacles on your way. Some of them get aggressive later one, actively preventing you from doing that. Final set in the preventer is a classic match three or more kind of puzzle, but with a few quirks like combining items to make another one appear (for example, water and flame makes steam), or teleporting spots. All of this does not let the game to turn stale, or some mechanics to get old. What you've used in one set of puzzles, won't work in another.

Maybe the biggest thing I did like was the lack of black and white division in the game's narrations. Life is gray, so even the best probable outcome would suck one way or another more likely than not. The game has literally no happy ending for anyone, and how it ends depends only on you. Only the player can decide which one of the five endings will be displayed. Finally, I'd like to note that the user interface is well thought out, it's intuitive and easy to use. There's also a dynamic hint mode that can be switched on and off, allowing you to either help you with a puzzle or completely skip one, and the director's commentary, giving interesting insights.

The Bad
There's not much to say about what is bad in the game. Perhaps, it'd have been better if it was not as obscure that every story is happening within the same world, because right now it is clearly visible only if you choose the ending concerning the journalist. Two or three puzzles out of the whole game were way too difficult compared to the rest of the set, and it'd be nice to balance it, tone it down a little. There are also a few bugs here and there, but they're not critical or able to ruin the gameplay. Oh, and the last bad thing is that the game title has the only connection with the gameplay when you hunt for the objects on the dioramas to unlock the next puzzle. Other than that, I can't recall anything to complain about.

The Bottom Line
All-in-all, I did enjoy this game. It's a rare thing to see a good narrative that raises uncomfortable questions like is killing someone to save the one you deeply love justified, or does everyone cheat in sports for the personal gain? It's also a rare thing to see a narrative that does not end in a happy end one way or another. It's not an adventure, but it's not just a puzzle either. Pick this game up if you're looking for a strong story to make you think about something for a change instead of a cerebral chewing gum. And truly, in our rushing world, three hours is a great length for such a game. As a fun fact on the side - in Russian Steam it actually costs less than in Google Play, marginally, but still. A mobile version is more dear than desktop version. When did you see something like that for the last time?

By Vereina on November 24, 2019

Photographs (Windows)

A very strong narrative concealed for a puzzle solving game.

The Good
Okay, let's get going with the first thing that comes on my mind - this is not an adventure game as the game's rap sheet states. Well, not an adventure game in the sense that one would expect from it, with moving from location to location, gathering an inventory of items, solving obscure puzzles to advance the plot. No, it's a narrative instead, but I can't recall seeing one so small and so strong at the same time. Advert does not lie a jot - Photographs is indeed a very short game, roughly around these promised three hours. Its length will depend solely on how well you will be with solving its puzzles, so it might be a bit less, or a bit over three hours instead. Now let's discuss how everything is presented and in this section we'll stop over the good things, of course.

As it gets usual with my reviews, I'll start with the visuals, because it's the first thing that is thrown at you as a player. Let's make something clear here - I am well aware that 2019 is about to end. I am well aware that graphics in the game is now sometimes near photo realistic. And I am also able to remember quite clear how glad I was to see that art evolve from a bunch of pixels to the modern state of things. Photographs is a hark back to that former epoch being drawn up fully in pixel art. Yet it is done most beautiful. I'll reiterate - I grew up on the games like these, so I am not the one to cringe and close the game when I can't see veins in the tree leaves, I just happen to like the modern graphics more, and I believe that it's just natural. But the way these arts in the game were drawn, they were not just making me recall those old games, they were very likeable, very good.

So, everything from the main menu to the end credits is done up in great pixel art. And how does the story unfold? Well, there are five different narratives tied together only with the fact that they are all happening within the same world, even if the latter is a bit obscure thing to notice. When you play the game for the very first time, these five stories are presented to you in a specific order. The first one is the Alchemist, the second one is the Athlete, the third one is the story of the Jailer, the fourth one is the Journalist and the final set of puzzles tells the story of the Preventer. So when you click on the new game button, the alchemist's story starts. It opens up with a very simple puzzle to solve, in our case - to lead the alchemist and his ward, Cleo, to the specific point on the playing field. That serves the purpose of introducing the player to the puzzle set that would accompany current narrative. Then after you're done with it, a big still picture styled like a Polaroid photograph appears with some text and voice over, starting to introduce the player into the story proper. You get rid of it and a beautiful big diorama is presented to you with the first things starting to fill it up with details. Then it's the time for the only thing that connects the title of the game with its gameplay to come in. You're prompted with a name of something or somebody, and you're to find it on the diorama, zoom in and wait until a photo is taken, and then next puzzle unlocks so you could solve it and advance the story in the similar fashion. Sooner or later something happens that serves as the watershed, an interface between what was before and what is now. Character's life is no longer going to be the same it was, and they tell us about their deepest regret, something they wish they had never done. The story ends either here or soon after showing the consequences of their actions, and the next one unlocks.

And literally every little bit of that all is served using that pixel art mentioned up above, the kind of art that looks simple as Hell, but takes ages to actually create. The artists did their job more than properly. They've managed to make these pixels to convey things from simple emotion display on the characters to complex effects that set the vibe for the whole scene. Every effect happening while you're doing a puzzle has been also lovingly fine-tuned to a sort of perfect fit. This has to be seen at least once, no amount of words will do their work proper justice.

While we're still at the presenting things page, let's also touch on the audio. I sincerely can't say a single bad word about it. The musical themes, written by Ben Prunty, were very nice, pleasing and fitting every scene. He had composed a different song for every story, and I dare to say that no single time the music got annoying. I do not know who is responsible for the sound effects, but they were also well-done. Again, not annoying, fitting and sometimes even charming. End credits song by Hartley, whoever that is, because Google could not help me here, is a cute one too. All in all, audio part of the game is very solid as well.

Among the other things that I liked is variety of the game. Normally you'd expect from a puzzle game a bunch of levels, a big one, which get more and more difficult as you progress. Here we have none of the case. Puzzles do get more difficult within every story, but every narrative has its own problem to solve. Alchemist one has the goal of leading him and Cleo to the specific spots like I've said. Trouble is, they move together, and the field slowly gets filled up with gates, mud piles, deadly bushes, wild growth and so on. In the second story about a diver, the puzzles are about physics. Your goal is to make the ball hit the portrait of a girl that is performing a jump, and then land into the water. Simple at first, but then more bouncing pads, angular platforms, viscous fields appear. Third set of puzzles in the jailer's story is about the simplest - make the figures fit the shape up on the playing field, eventually having to rotate them. Fourth set represents the journalist writing his papers from the header to the conclusion, and you need to connect the starting and the finishing point, wrapping around obstacles on your way. Some of them get aggressive later one, actively preventing you from doing that. Final set in the preventer is a classic match three or more kind of puzzle, but with a few quirks like combining items to make another one appear (for example, water and flame makes steam), or teleporting spots. All of this does not let the game to turn stale, or some mechanics to get old. What you've used in one set of puzzles, won't work in another.

Maybe the biggest thing I did like was the lack of black and white division in the game's narrations. Life is gray, so even the best probable outcome would suck one way or another more likely than not. The game has literally no happy ending for anyone, and how it ends depends only on you. Only the player can decide which one of the five endings will be displayed. Finally, I'd like to note that the user interface is well thought out, it's intuitive and easy to use. There's also a dynamic hint mode that can be switched on and off, allowing you to either help you with a puzzle or completely skip one, and the director's commentary, giving interesting insights.

The Bad
There's not much to say about what is bad in the game. Perhaps, it'd have been better if it was not as obscure that every story is happening within the same world, because right now it is clearly visible only if you choose the ending concerning the journalist. Two or three puzzles out of the whole game were way too difficult compared to the rest of the set, and it'd be nice to balance it, tone it down a little. There are also a few bugs here and there, but they're not critical or able to ruin the gameplay. The worst, probably, is the controls part. I can't complain that the control scheme is completely alien, but it's clearly was first written for the mobile platform. You can control the game only with your mouse, and I think the only key on the keyboard it understands is the escape one. Everything else is done in taps (cursor clicks) and swipes (click, hold and drag). And sometimes there's just not enough free space on my table to move the mouse all the way I need to. Oh, and the last bad thing is that the game title has the only connection with the gameplay when you hunt for the objects on the dioramas to unlock the next puzzle, and even if you zoom in, the data in the bottom has absolutely nothing to do with the actual photography and is pure static. Other than that, I can't recall anything to complain about.

The Bottom Line
All-in-all, I did enjoy this game. It's a rare thing to see a good narrative that raises uncomfortable questions like is killing someone to save the one you deeply love justified, or does everyone cheat in sports for the personal gain? It's also a rare thing to see a narrative that does not end in a happy end one way or another. It's not an adventure, but it's not just a puzzle either. Pick this game up if you're looking for a strong story to make you think about something for a change instead of a cerebral chewing gum. And truly, in our rushing world, three hours is a great length for such a game. As a fun fact on the side - in Russian Steam it actually costs less than in Google Play, marginally, but still. A mobile version is more dear than desktop version. When did you see something like that for the last time?

By Vereina on November 24, 2019

Warhammer Quest II: The End Times (Windows)

It should have stayed on mobile platforms.

The Good
What did I find good about this game? That's an interesting question to answer. Let's go over the departments, starting with the one that is thrown at you from the start - visuals. The art on the panels advancing the story was nice. The dungeon art was not terrific, but it was pleasing to look at, and doing its job to set the proper atmosphere of a cave, a classical dungeon or some sewer. And the Game of Thrones styled global map was a very cool touch as well, with the models of the major settlements often taken from the official maps.

I've also liked the fact that it is set in a universe that was not very popular in the day of its glory, shadowed by the younger sibling - WarHammer 40K. In 2019 the WarHammer Fantasy Battles world was closed entirely for a few years already, so making a game that explores these places was a really good touch. Especially since it had me introduced to it, and made me read up a lot of lore to get a better understanding of what's going on at all.

Oh, and the learning curve was more of a learning straight line - it is indeed very easy to learn how to play the game properly after just a few hours in, plus the variety of items and skills to equip does make it possible to suit every player's style.

I'm afraid those are about the only redeeming qualities this game has for me.

The Bad
What did I find bad about this game? Oh, boy, this is going to be a really long text, so brace yourselves. We're starting with the graphics department again. Remember I've mentioned the nice art on the story panels and in the dungeons? Well, that's about it, because the actual art used for the character and mob models is familiar to me from around the early 2000s. I'm pretty sure I saw similar, and even better done ones back in the day almost twenty years ago. It looks awfully contrasting and not in a good way with the background art. A bunch of repeating animations everyone has didn't help out much either. Different enemies within one faction soon enough turn into colour-coded entities, being basically a same model just in another colouring scheme, depending on their abilities and hit points. There was even one point in the game when a new type of mob was created by stripping animation from a regular one, and making it tougher. And no, it was not a bug.

Now, for music and sound. It's 2019 and it's a game released early this year. Naturally, one would expect a nice musical score, capable of filling a studio album on its own; a lot of sophisticated sound effects and a lot of acting people giving voice wherever possible in game. Right? Wrong. There's a track for the main menu, for the strategical map and settlements, for exploring a dungeon and for combat. Four musical tracks in total. There was an attempt to make them pathetic or emotional, but it failed, and when you hear the same tune over and over again it gets annoying and irritating. Sound effects were all stock, taken from some audio data bank apparently, and I can't say that any of them had significant impact on me. But what killed me the most here is that the creators were not bothered at all to get someone to at least narrate the text on the screen, it was like a release from the early nineties at best. Beside a few dying screams, there was absolutely no acting at all. No single line of dialogue was voiced either. You know, I remember a game out of 1994 that had employed several dozen actors to give it depth. I think that when a modern release is compared to something that is a quarter of a century old and the recent game loses the comparison, beaten fair and square... Well, I'd say it's quite a situation.

Let's talk gameplay now. I had grown up on the games from late eighties and early nineties, so okay, I can rant about graphics and sound, but I still can enjoy a game to its fullest if the most important part of it, the gameplay, is fulfilling enough. And what do we have here? From the very start you get some weird design decision that made sure that you can't access the options menu until you are actually in game. You need to start a new game, read an intro that you can't skip, read the tutorial, and only after that you might have a chance to spot a tiny cog button to configure the graphics, sound and UI. And while we're on the user interface topic - the game detected that I'm in Russia and set the language to Russian respectively. A few minutes into the game and you'll see that the localisation was done so badly that the text (which could easily be longer in Russian) is piling over the information boxes, covering and concealing completely quite important, especially at the start, things like the pierce damage resistance of an enemy. I'm unsure about the other languages it comes in, but it's obvious that only the English version was polished to make sure that the text fits every box designed for it. Good thing I'm fluent in it, and switched to the original the moment I could.

Suppose we got past that and finally reached the point where we read the information that is crucial for the game, and that info is the description of the four attributes that form the basis of the RPG system. Speed determines the chance of chained up attacks (Death Strike); Dexterity - chance to hit; Strength and Intelligence are self explanatory, but none of them is as valuable as Speed. The funniest part is that while your characters and the mobs have the same four stats employed, the value of each point in the stat... Maybe the enemies start handicapped, but each point they get into one of their stats is nearly thrice as effective as it is for your party members.

Each time you end your turn, the camera pans to the spot where most of your characters are, no matter how you've set it up before, or instead it for some reason hovers over to the enemies and you can't even see if their ranged attacks hit your warriors or not, and aren't able to see if someone has moved on them in melee either. Only sounds of somebody being slapped with a wet rag, which accompany a successful hit, could give you some suggestions then. And if that is not enough, a huge YOUR TURN inscription will hang up for several seconds, not allowing you to do anything but panning the screen, or rotating it.

Area of effect attacks are powerful if they hit, but you first need to make them hit. When you make one of your characters choose, say, a bomb, or a freezing spell, the cursor switches to several red squares highlighting where it would land, centred on your warrior, but it's a pain to make the damn thing move and fit to where you want it to go! You just move your cursors and the camera pans. You then click your cursors and it pans again, only jumping rapidly back to your characters. You growl and click again and finally make the red targeting squares move to where you want them to go only to get stuck behind some column. You accidentally click again because your finger gets tired, and it's released back into your crowd for some filthy reason. And if the surrounding area is of the reddish hue, good luck trying to see which of the enemy characters could be hit, and which could not. Oh, come on!

Have you had enough, cause we're just getting to the juiciest bits? No? Good. The game is a way to switch off your brain and let it melt a little after a long day, because it won't make you think more than once or twice every two hours in a session. Each and every dungeon is cleared in the same pattern. Your party slowly, steadily advances, keeping together all the time. Whenever a new area is triggered (by simply stepping on a square adjacent to a door), you put a tank or two in front of your ranged attackers, who pick from afar as many enemies as they can before the tanks sort out those who got close enough. AI is dumb here. The mobs won't try to sit you out and force you to move in so you could get your party into the line of fire of their ranged units in a favourable position. If they see that the only narrow passage toward your characters is one hell of a conflagration, or it is an area of snap freeze, they'll gladly rush through it, catching fire or turning into an ice statue. The variance comes in the form of regular ambushes happening both in combat and while you're crawling from room to room, the main problem being that an enemy can drop between your two weakest characters in that case. But if you have your party sticking close to each other, there won't be any problem. The game advert does not lie - it is indeed very easy to learn how to play the game, but mastering it is a combination of experiment and luck. You can't tell what an item can do unless you've gained it or at least managed to read its description in the barter window, and you can't tell how useful it will be for your character build unless you try it out. The luck factor is entirely in the domain of RNG...

Random Numbers Generator is the main deity in this game, it rules everything. It determines chances to hit, what are going to be your rewards for completing a dungeon, what characters are available to you, what happens next. It even controls your level up. You've absolutely no choice in what you're getting improved as you develop your characters, and it's just a random pick out of four main stats, HP, inventory space and action points. So expect stunted builds or melee characters who have suddenly been developed for intelligence based playthrough. And everything in the game costs money, even level ups, but the rewards you get and the prices you get for your loot are barely able to keep you from being broke, not speaking of allowing you to obtain nice new gear, so there's a lot of grinding to be expected. There are even achievements that clearly require countless hours sunk in the game. Like obtain one million gold, when after the moment I no longer had to spend any money, I ran through at least thirty dungeons and obtained around twenty five thousand gold pieces. Seriously? Or traveller - journey one hundred thousand miles. How am I even supposed to know how far or close I am to that amount?

But we're not done discussing the gameplay yet. What logic was used when making the random travel events is still beyond me, because at one point I can choose and equip a character that is going to deal with it. At another - I can't, and have to send in those that the game chose for me. And bugs... Bugs range from achievements not working (Floor is Lava is clearly broken, for example, I made sure that at least 25 squares are burning, and did not get it; Tank is broken - my characters have deflected ten thousand damage in total, I wager, but it still did not trigger) to the dungeons being completed randomly. I mean, you have opened up a room, quickly killed five Skaven inside and the dungeon is complete. Obviously, the QA department was not paid at all. The best explanation I had was that for some reason the victory trigger was tied to the specific room art and layout, not to the specific creatures, and the rooms do tend to repeat themselves inside the dungeons...

And after you've completed a main quest level, you can redo it again, and again, and again, knowing what to expect and grinding experience. But the wish to take care of your party members is severely hindered by the fact that they simply can't die. Even the most grievous injury just knocks them out, and they come back to their senses after the fighting is over. I think I better stop ranting about the gameplay aspect and finish this section with a few words on the story.

While it's nice that the game tries to explore the events not mentioned in the books and lore of this universe, I found most of the transits lacking any logic. An attempt to connect the levels to each other was done only in the third chapter. In the first two, you are presented with two or three levels that follow each other up at best, the rest being opened up with no apparent reason. I mean, why do we decide that our next stop should be there? Did we throw a damn dice and said that-a-way?? This lack of any logical connection and aimless hopping over the world put me off a lot.

The Bottom Line
Warhammer Quest II: The End Times is a port of a game released for smartphones and tablets, and its mobile roots are not just showing, they're all over the place. The creators did a really lousy job in my opinion, in the sole attempt to earn some more money on the hardcore WarHammer fans without even bothering to bring the game to what is a PC game minimal standard.

I'd say that if you're such a hardcore WarHammer FB fan that you can't pass a single release set in the universe, then sure, give it a go, and have your band of misfits wander the lands of the Empire. Or if you are a hardcore tactical RPG fan and are desperately looking for a game in the genre to play while you're waiting for the next AAA release. It would also serve nicely for those who had never played tactical RPGs before and want something easy to dip in the genre and learn the ropes, bells and whistles. Otherwise - give it a pass, you won't regret this, because I think the game is worth no more than a quarter of its price.

It fits the mobile world where it came from much better to kill some time on a long trip, but mind you - these versions are very monetized. Each new region and new character class are ought to be unlocked with a microtransaction.

By Vereina on July 24, 2019

Hexuma: Das Auge des Kal (Amiga)

This game made me finally learn German.

The Good
Hexuma is a type of game I have not played before, to be honest. It occupies middle ground between the text-only adventures and the graphic adventures. In this game the entire interaction is provided by the means of a command prompt, and tons of information are presented to you through the walls of text flowing on the screen when you do something, just like in the classic text adventures, yet at the same time there is always a still picture of your surroundings or important characters to support that wall of text. That was truly unique experience for me, because while I had beaten a lot of adventure games in my day, perhaps ninety nine per cent of them were graphic.

And that's exactly what I liked about it - I belong to that group of people, who believes that words are way more powerful than the images, but I am in no means opposed to an occasional illustration or two that would support the authors' vision of the world they have created, allowing me to visualise in my head what's going on while I read, turning the words into a movie, but with the most important aspects based off of the crucial ideas the creators saw as the cornerstones of their worlds, characters and so on. Of course that would only work if the authors had anything to deal with the art supporting their texts, and while in the books it is usually never the case, in Hexuma it was done fairly well, with so few differences between the text and the images that I can barely remember them. So for me, the pictures while being just mere still images were just the right amount of the illustration. If they would have added animations to them, I would have wanted the entire game to be a graphic adventure, maybe still with a command prompt like early King’s Quest games, but still a fully animated one. If they would have put the pictures just here and there, occasionally displaying them, I would have wanted them gone completely in favour of a pure text adventure, allowing my fantasy to draw it all out the way I see fit.

Now for the other things that I had found likeable about Hexuma. If we have started with the visuals, let’s move to the audio next. The game lacks any sound effects, but it has several tunes of music, playing on eternal repeat. There’s one for the loading screen, and one for each of the six levels, making it seven in total. I can’t really say that they were superb, but some of them were surely catchy enough and matched the general theme of the level. I, personally, think that the music for the Oceania and Ice Age levels was the best in the entire game, and it would have been great if the tunes were a bit longer.

Next would be the parser. German is nowhere my native language, so it was really nice that the parser was designed to understand even very broken grammar and trigger the actions the player wants from it. German language has four cases, three genders and two numbers for every noun, and every combination of that demands a specific article, not mentioning other very strict grammar rules, so if the parser would have been made to accept only properly formulated speech, it would have been a special form of nightmare for someone who’s just learning the language. Eventually I’ve started using the proper forms as my command of the language improved, but I was really glad that the game was able to tolerate someone talking like an idiot.

Handling wise, the game was also very nice and tolerant. Just like the description says, you can summon a window that will have all the most used commands presented as the icons; you can click on any word on the screen to bring it down to the command prompt; you can click on the picture if there’s something that can be triggered on it; you can just do plain old typing that I abused the most, because for me it was the fastest way. The built-in screen keyboard would be an exercise in diligence – imagine beating the game while summoning it all the time to click single letter with your mouse every time to make words! But it came very useful for the first few hours until I had memorized where is which letter and symbol on the German keyboard layout and found corresponding ones on the English one.

Of course, there’s also the plot. The story was quite well-written and it did follow the classic prologue – main story chapters – epilogue scheme. Harald Evers put a lot of effort into writing it, and it shows, because I have noticed a lot of work on the lore of that world, and there were cross-references within different levels sometimes, and as the game progressed and you were getting closer and closer to solving the mystery, you could start to suspect that the point of view on things that you had been presented with may be not entirely accurate after all...

Oh, one more thing - the game is not holding your hand at all, so it will let you do stupid things, get stuck or die in the result, and make you pay for it with the time since your last save or from the start of the level you would have to spend to get back to the point of no return. Often it won't even warn you that you have to run like the wind, for example. That's a rare thing these days, modern games usually prevent you from something like that.

The Bad
Naturally, there were things that I did not like, but compared to the long list of what I did enjoy, there’s just a few of those. First of all, I’d like to mention several bugs that I’ve run into. I don’t know whether they had always been there, or it’s a result of the game being converted from DOS apparently, but there’s a certain chain of commands that leads to one of your items no longer being usable on the island level, and that is quite crucial item, so the game breaks. Good job I am an old-school gamer and I’m used to make a million of saves, not reliant on quick saves and auto saves (which are entirely absent in Hexuma, by way). Perhaps I was just more thorough in sniffing every rock I could than the creators, so the bug was never reproduced by the testers, and won’t be by the most players, so it could be just my bad luck. Among other bugs I consider obtaining things that you would never find a use for later, and believe me – I have tried my damndest, even giving out idiotic commands non-stop, like “attach the scarf to the water”. I was also able to take along a compartment (!) once, but it did not break the game, just cluttering my inventory instead. On the very first level you can read a certain sheet of paper before actually obtaining it, allowing yourself to bypass half of the level, but it seems to break the game and you’ll have to replay it from start.

Music. It sounds weird after I had put it into the likes section, but two tunes were too much for me - too tense or boring, namely the song that plays during the first level in the haunted mansion, and the one on the final level, where you do spend a lot of time. I sometimes even switched the music off there.

A minor thing would be typos made in the words and commands. For someone who was just learning German, those were quite hard to hunt down. One of the commands on that pull-up window gets put into the command prompt with a typo, so I spent a few hours trying to figure out why it won’t work until I saw the difference between what’s written on the screen when I hover the mouse over the icon, and what actually gets prompted.

Another thing would be a personal opinion – I often find in any kind of adventure or RPG games that the character’s logic or actions are forced to be not what I would have done in the same situation, but I do understand that when you create a game or a book, you can’t cater to the taste of every human on the planet, so it’s a minor thing, and I just enjoyed the story after all. What was more annoying that some of the puzzles required knowing things about life in German-speaking world, or usage of deeply dialect words to advance, but again, the game was marketed for German speaking audiences, so it is not really for me to complain about that. I wonder what should I have done to get the final twelve points?

Finally, and deeply personal, I found the ending quite weak. I wager it turned out to be what it is because Harald Evers wanted the game to better tie in with the sequel that was already planned, and I would have asked him about that, but, alas, he’s already dead. I can’t really say what happens without going into spoilers, but let’s call it “any lack of choice on your part”. If you want to see the endgame screen, you just have to do what you are told, whether you like it or not. Shame, really.

The Bottom Line
All-in-all, I believe that Hexuma is a quite solid adventure. It is nowhere as difficult as it is written in other reviews, and I’ve managed to score ten points more than in the most complete solution. When I’ve run into it, I had some basic understanding of German, so I was able to understand what was written on the screenshots, and saw that there are jokes and the language is not stale. So I’ve decided to give it a try, maybe use it like I’ve used Morrowind once to improve my language skills, and it ended up with helping me raise my German level to a solid B2, and I had some quality fun on those rare evenings when I had some free time to run it.

If you are not afraid of the text walls, if you are not a person who believes that without photo-realistic graphics a game is not a game, and if you have a reasonable command of German or just try to find a new way to improve your skills, then do not hesitate and find this game. I also would recommend Amiga version over the DOS one, because somehow the music in Amiga turned out to be way better – I was considering running the DOS version first, but the very first level music had my ears bleed, so the question was closed now and then.

By Vereina on March 6, 2019