Hard to Be a God Preview
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The dialogue branches aren't very good. There was one occasions where I had three options, but most of the times it's limited to one and sometimes to two. And when there are two options, they either don't differ much in consequences or are a simple (fight/convince) choice. When the miller wanted to hand the protagonist 600 coins to reward him, there was no option to refuse this reward (or ask for more). The (Russian) voicing and writing are quite good, barring the sometimes awkward translations in this demo. The unique (taking a role) system the developers have promised basically consist of putting on disguises and walking around unscathed. It was quite good that not only did robbers not bother me when dressed as a thief, but the shepherd and miller would not talk to me, mistaking me for a bandit. Still, this needs to be pretty in depth having more possibilities of being unmasked and opening different paths to be a selling point.
The setting is quite good and knows pretty complex factionalism as well as a fascinating influence of the SU hi-tech world on Arkanar, even if that doesn't show much in the demo. The atmosphere in the demo is nice and the music is pretty good, but it's your basic late feudal fair, beating up wolves and robbers. The interesting stuff doesn't come until later. The fact that earth technology replaces magic is really a unique selling point.
One issue with the setting might be that they're continuing an old story in their game, kind of like a sequel to the original Hard to be a God book. That's pretty gutsy by definition, but the specific problem here is that Hard to be a God is clearly written with the mind and perspective of Marxist historical determinism. The question becomes how honest you can be in continuing that story from a perspective that might lean more towards cultural and historical relativism, more towards the more post-modern capitalist fare? That's no small challenge facing this game's makers.
The graphics are, well, subpar. Think Gothic 1, but less so. They did include weather effects as well as day/night changes. The collision detection was atrocious in the demo. Once I put on a cloak it'd keep moving through my horse. Errors like those kept happening, including said cloak bundling over the protagonist's head in a weird way. What's worse, the inability of the protagonist to jump can make for frustrating going through forests and, here's the kicker, not only can you not swim, you can't touch water. If you're on a bridge, you can't fall off it.
The general AI, the (living, breathing world) we've come to expect from most RPGs these days is really non-existent. Except for a novice fighting with a strawman, all NPCs just wander about aimlessly all of the time, seemingly not doing anything. Day/night circles leave everyone unaffected as no one, including the PC, ever sleeps. Wolves don't fight anyone except the PC and the border patrol guards at the edge of the map. It's a mystery why they would not attack the various robbers in the forest.
I sound very negative, but I'm not. This was quite an endearing game despite its flaws, and I hope the full game will have a lot to show that the demo couldn't. In the end, the game could neither really impress me nor really disappoint me, which makes me conclude it's a decidedly average game. However, the unique setting and dedication to multiple solutions for quests might pull it higher.
In the meantime, I recommend giving the demo a spin.
This preview based on the Hard to be a God Russian demo switched to English text, knowledge of the setting from the book, and interviews and developer diaries involving the game's designers.
If you'd like to play the demo with English text, open the AWE.ini file in the main game folder of the Russian demo and edit the two lines within to this:
//g_language_name Russian
g_language_name English
