Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms Preview
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Introduction
Developed and published by Gamera Interactive, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is an action-RPG that's said to offer fast-paced action in conjunction with a deep narrative, which doesn't happen all that often.
It's also said to be inspired by Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, and feature some world-building by the one and only Chris Avellone. As such, when the game entered early access, we decided to check it out and see what it had to offer.
Baldur's Souls
First things first. While the game claims to be inspired by Baldur's Gate, it has absolutely nothing in common with the venerable CRPG. Whether you look at the game's narrative, systems, or combat, it's very hard to see any Infinity Engine influences there.
Instead, Alaloth's combat system is pretty much a carbon copy of Dark Souls, only isometric. You have your light and heavy attacks, a stamina bar, blocks, parries and dodges, poise, block-breaking kicks, and even the Bloodborne-style "regain" mechanic. The latter provides you with a grace period after taking damage, during which you can hit your enemies back and restore your missing health.
What sets Alaloth apart is the prevalence of fairly standard action-RPG status effects like stun, bleed and poison, infinite throwing daggers that allow you to snipe distant enemies, and the fact that you regain all your stamina upon breaking an enemy's poise.
To the game's credit, it has the smoothest, most responsive Dark Souls-style combat in an indie game I've seen to date. But due to the isometric perspective, it can be hard to see what's happening and react appropriately, and the tilted camera makes it challenging to properly position yourself.
Then, there are a couple of fundamental issues with the combat system that will hopefully get addressed during early access.
First, there's targeting. If you think Elden Ring was guilty of locking you on to irrelevant things, you'll be pulling your hair out trying to target the correct enemies in Alaloth. On top of it, the game's lock-on keeps turning you around as your enemies move, leaving you open to attacks from all directions. It also has the tendency to ignore certain enemies in a pack, and cycling between targets feels almost random.
Then, we have the issue of enemy attack patterns. You see, in Dark Souls-style games, enemies need to have clear attack patterns with equally clear openings for you to learn and exploit. Alaloth doesn't really have those. Instead, enemies mostly just attack you whenever they feel like it.
You pair that with the game's isometric perspective, and you get a combat system where if you want to win, your best bet is to ignore most of it, forget every move other than the heavy attack, never lock on, and just try to overwhelm your enemies by breaking their poise over and over again. And if they manage to hit you during that, it doesn't really matter since you can regain your lost health if you just keep attacking.
Thankfully, this being an early access release, the developers still have plenty of time to address these issues. The basic fundamentals of a good combat system are there. But it has a long way to go before it can become really fun.
Where's THAC0 When You Need It?
Alaloth's character progression could also use some work. In its current iteration, you can pick between four races - humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs. This is the biggest choice you make, as your race determines your starting kingdom. And that determines the kinds of quests you'll be getting and enemies you'll be fighting in the early game when you are at your weakest.
Races also provide minor percentage-based bonuses to various stats like bleed resistance. And these minor bonuses are pretty much a staple of the game's roleplaying system.
Each level you gain (up to 10), you get an attribute point that lets you improve your Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, and Luck. A point of Strength, for example, raises your melee damage by a whopping 3% and slightly increases your carry weight. Believe it or not, the other attributes are even less impactful.
All the gear you find also tends to provide similar increases for your stats. But at least there you can find artifacts that give you something like 14% extra crit chance. It's still pretty boring, but at least it's noticeable.
Now, every two levels, you also get a Trait and an active skill. Traits once again provide percentage-based bonuses, but at least they're more inventive and improve stuff like the amount of gold you find.
The game's active skills (limited by cooldowns and a stamina cost) come in three distinct trees - physical skills, elemental skills, and holy skills. These skills range from game-breaking to borderline useless. Thankfully, you can freely mix and match them. But you only get a total of four skills, so choose wisely. The same goes for Traits.
But here's the thing. You gain a level every time you clear a dungeon. And with the way the game is set up, you'll pretty much reach your level cap by the time you leave the starting area. This being an early access game, such limited progression is forgivable, but it really needs to be expanded for the full release.
What Can Change the Nature of a Game?
With that in mind, let's talk about the game's general premise and setup. The world map is separated into four large kingdoms, each with its own cities, dungeons and points of interest. Your race determines your starting location, and from there, you will need to collect four divine shards, one per kingdom, in order to unlock the final dungeon and defeat the evil god chained within.
There are currently two main game modes - solo and competitive. If you choose the competitive mode, the other three kingdoms will have their own AI champions working towards the same goal as you. In theory, this may result in them "stealing" dungeons from under you or ambushing you on the world map. But right now, your rivals are not very good at what they do, and even if you take your time, they'll struggle to deal with even the easiest of dungeons.
Once you beat the game, you also get an option to start a Legacy for subsequent playthroughs, though at this point, it merely offers some cosmetic changes. But eventually, the developers intend to add some gameplay consequences for having a Legacy.
Upon starting the game, you get a quick tutorial and then go visit your king who entrusts you with your mission. From there, you get to explore your capital, trade, craft, and pick up some quests and bounties.
Bounties task you with defeating some enemies of a certain type, while quests usually range between "pick up this item here and go there," and "go somewhere, do something, then go somewhere else." And the game's journal in its current state does little to help you figure out what half of the quests even want you to do.
Listening to the quest-giving NPCs isn't overly helpful either. Especially when you consider that the game doesn't really have dialogues. It has monologues. A lot of them. Every conversation in the game has you pressing continue while an NPC shovels heaps of text onto you. In fact, Alaloth has two different types of NPCs that exist solely to provide you with lore tidbits.
This to me is a great example of working hard instead of smart. The developers here have clearly come up with a lot of rich and deep lore for their game. And they obviously care a lot about it. But they've seemingly forgotten to figure out a way to make their players care about that stuff.
You can't just throw walls of text at people and expect them to care. You need interesting characters, intriguing scenarios, and stimulating conversations where the player is an active participant. You need events that leave the player with new questions and the desire to figure out how everything connects. All of that is lacking in Alaloth at this point. And if you remember that the game is supposed to be inspired by Baldur's Gate, it's hard not to wonder what exactly Alaloth's developers liked there. The camera angle, I guess?
The game does have companions. Four for each of the three available alignments. And they come with their own personal quests that, while more elaborate than the rest, are still way too linear. I'm not sure if it would be possible to add more choices and consequences to the game throughout early access, but it sure would be welcome.
Dungeon Crawling
A curious thing about Alaloth is how its campaign is structured. The four shards you need to find are scattered all over the place. When you start the game, you don't know which of the dungeons hold them, so you'll need to clear out a whole bunch of them before you find the shards.
Unfortunately, the dungeons here tend to be fairly linear and limited in size. You usually have a straight line to your goal, with occasional side passages and closed doors that require you to find a key before advancing.
On the plus side, once you enter a dungeon, you can't adjust your inventory, meaning you have to consider which gear to equip and which consumables to prepare beforehand.
And, at the very least, while not particularly inspired in their level design, all the dungeons look nice and manage to evoke a feeling of a fantasy adventure.
Another thing you have to keep in mind is that you don't regenerate health between encounters. If you want to restore health, you'll need to either use a healing skill, drink a potion, or rest at a tavern.
Considering the game's Dark Souls-inspired combat, you would think this would make it quite difficult. However, once you figure out how things work, find some gear that's not complete garbage, and learn to stop worrying and love the heavy attack, you shouldn't have any issues getting through the currently available content.
In fact, the durability of your gear is a much bigger concern than your health. The better your gear, the more expensive it is to repair it. And early on, it felt to me like I was in one big downward spiral since my gear kept deteriorating faster than I earned gold.
But once I actually figured out how durability worked, things became bearable. You see, each encounter, be it a major dungeon or the two random skeletons that waylay you on your way to the dungeon, reduces the durability of all your items by a single point. So, as long as you avoid random encounters and the bounties that incentivize you to seek them out, you should be good, durability-wise.
There's also another big trap you should watch out for. At some point, chances are you'll run into these so-called Grandmasters who offer to teach you new skills. Now, granted, when you talk to one of these shifty guys, they do warn you that after you agree to their offer, you will no longer be able to respec your character.
Still, I wasn't playing the game just to beat it. I was looking to experience its content for this preview. So, I accepted the offer. And had all my active skills changed to the four skills of the Warlord tree. And among those, only one skill was any good, which was mighty annoying.
You'd expect a Grandmaster to teach you some unique new skills, or at least some improved versions of the existing ones. But nope, all you get for talking to Grandmasters is a botched character and a new weapon that, chances are, is worse than whatever you're already using.
So basically, until you read some patch notes announcing a complete rework of the Grandmaster system, you should keep your distance from these guys. Still, even after suffering such a severe blow to my character's effectiveness, I was able to beat the game with little trouble, which goes to show that it could really use some balance adjustments prior to the full release.
Technical Information
The current build of Alaloth has anywhere between 10 to 50 hours' worth of content, depending on how much of the side stuff you want to do. More importantly, even though a lot of the game's systems currently have a very much work-in-progress feel to them, you can already get the full campaign experience, beat the final boss, and even get a cliffhanger ending.
The game runs pretty well and the only bugs I've encountered were limited to your summons occasionally getting stuck on the geometry, and some rare visual glitches.
In general, the game looks quite nice. Both screenshots and promotional videos for the game had me worried a bit before I started my playthrough, as they looked somewhat cheap and choppy. But once you actually get to play the game, you realize that its visuals are quite charming.
Being a Dark Souls-inspired game, Alaloth only offers frequent autosaves as a way to save your progress. Which was especially annoying when dealing with the aforementioned Grandmasters.
The options menu is rather barren at the moment. You can pretty much only change the volume and choose your screen resolution.
You can also rebind controls. But only some of them. When you start the game, you get a message informing you that a controller is preferable for the game. Which again doesn't bode well for those of you expecting a Baldur's Gate-style experience. And while you can use a keyboard and mouse setup here, it's incredibly clunky. Thankfully, the developers fully intend to add proper mouse support to the game in the nearest future.
Conclusion
In its early access version, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms doesn't really succeed as an example of a narrative-driven action-RPG. And namedropping Baldur's Gate is merely a trick to sneak another Dark Souls under your radar.
However, judging the game on its own merits, while not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it has a certain honest quality to it that makes you want to keep playing it despite whatever shortcomings it may have.
And seeing how these are merely the first stages of Alaloth's early access journey, there's still plenty of time for it to change for the better.
