Blackguards Review
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Introduction
Blackguards is a new turn-based tactical strategy game -- with RPG elements, of course -- from German developer Daedalic Entertainment, which is probably best known for its adventures, including Memoria and the Deponia trilogy. Blackguards takes place in the universe of the Dark Eye, which is essentially Germany's version of Dungeons & Dragons, but the environment is so familiar (with similar enemies, classes, and gods) that the game should be accessible to anyone.
As Blackguards opens up, you witness your friend Elanor being mauled to death by a wolf. You manage to kill the wolf, but when the guards show up at the scene they only see you standing over the body, with no wolf in sight, and you're arrested for the murder. Then in jail things get stranger. Lysander, Elanor's paramour, takes over the investigation, and he keeps asking you for "the name" -- while his pet torturer encourages you to talk. Shortly thereafter, you manage to escape from your cell, and with a few other "blackguards" you set out to learn what happened to Elanor and why. This eventually leads to you learning that darker events are afoot, with Elanor's death being just the start.
Characters
At the start of the game you have to create your character, and you can make this as easy or as complicated as you want. If you choose to use "basic mode," then all you have to do is choose your class -- warrior (with a focus on melee weapons), hunter (ranged weapons), or mage (spells) -- and the game sets you up with appropriate attributes and skills. But you can also choose "expert mode," where you're given 10,000 adventure points, and you can spend them on whatever attributes and skills you want. So if you want to play a hybrid class, or if you're very particular about how your character is built, then expert mode is the way to go. You also get to choose a name and gender for your character, although this doesn't make any difference in the game.
Once you start playing Blackguards, though, character advancement proceeds in the same way. As you complete battles and quests, you earn adventure points, which you can spend in various ways. Each character has five pages of information: base stats (attributes, including strength and cleverness), weapons talents (proficiencies for 11 types of weapons, including swords and crossbows), talents (passive skills, including body control, which lessens your chance of being knocked down), spells (24 spells, including healing balm and thunderbolt), and special abilities (active and passive combat skills, including knockdown and astral regeneration). All of a character's attributes, skills and spells can be incremented up to 18, with higher ranks being more expensive than lower ranks.
By my count there are 94 places where you can spend adventure points, which gives you a lot of ways to build characters, and nicely you don't earn so many points that you can max out everything. You have to make choices, sometimes tough ones, and you have to decide which things you need and which you can live without. Unfortunately, there isn't any way to respec characters, so you if start heading down one route and discover that it's a bad idea (which is pretty easy to do), there isn't any way to correct the problem other than to start over.
As you play through the campaign, you also meet some companions. These are the "blackguards" but they're hardly evil. One was caught in bed with a baron's wife, another burned down a pub that he found offensive, and a third is a freed slave. So if you were hoping for a game where you play the bad guys and do evil things, Blackguards isn't it. You recruit five companions in all, and you get to spend adventure points on them just like you do with your main character, and so you can tune your party to fit your playing style.
Gameplay
Blackguards is played on a large map where you move from node to node. Each node can either be a town, where you talk to people and go shopping, or a battleground, where you fight somebody. Most of the towns consist of a single static screen where all of the shopkeepers and NPCs are visible at once (making them easy to "navigate"), while the battlegrounds use a hexagonal grid, and the battles proceed in turns. The battles are usually small in scale, with your band going up against a similarly-sized band, and they typically take 10-15 minutes to complete. Enemies you face include bandits, crocodiles, zombies, and of course monkeys.
The focus of Blackguards is combat -- to the point where you can use bribery or diplomacy to solve some problems if you want, but you only earn adventure points if you duke it out. Nicely though, unlike, say, King's Bounty or Heroes of Might and Magic, the battles don't just put your party on one side of a map and the enemies on the other side, and let you go at it. The battlegrounds are individually constructed, with odd shapes and sizes, and many have tricks to them. For example, in several battles you have to go up against crypt lice, which can spawn at pipe openings. So you have to walk a tightrope of defeating the lice while also rushing out to close the pipes. Battlegrounds also feature a lot of environmental objects (like sinkholes in swamps, where characters can get stuck) and traps (including flamethrowers) that you can use to your advantage if someone in your party has a high enough perception to recognize that they're there.
That the battlegrounds are interesting is good, because the battles themselves are a little bit dull. That's because combat abilities don't have any sort of cost or cooldown, and so you can use them every turn if you want. Why is that a problem? Let me give you an example. The Hammer Blow ability deals 3X damage, and its only penalty is that the warrior who uses it isn't allowed to parry for the rest of the turn, which isn't a big deal. This is by far the best melee ability in the game, so as soon as possible I built all of my warriors so they could access it, and then I had them use it every turn. That means Hammer Blow completely trumps other combat abilities like Feint and Knock Down (which almost never actually knocks anybody down), and so its existence makes the game more boring. Similarly, hunters get a Triple Shot ability that shoots three arrows, and it has the same problem. Only mages have some equally good options, but I found the offensive spells to be so underwhelming (not to mention expensive) that I mostly only used spells to heal and buff/debuff.
As I mentioned previously, each battle proceeds in rounds, and each character gets one turn per round. Characters are allowed to move and take an action (such as attacking or casting a spell) on their turn, or they can move twice as far at the expense of the action (this is basically the same as dashing in XCOM: Enemy Unknown). Characters can also use potions that are stored in their belt or swap predefined weapon sets, but they're not allowed to otherwise manipulate their inventory. Characters can also wait on their turn, or they can simply end their turn. To make combat easier, characters get their own hotkey bar, so if you find yourself using an ability or a spell all the time -- like, say, Hammer Blow -- then you can add it to the hotkey bar so it's easier to trigger. Otherwise, you have to right click and then select the spell or ability from a ring menu.
Other than the hotkey bar, there isn't a lot to the interface. You left click to move or attack, you press the V key to highlight interactive objects (like levers or doors), you press the spacebar to wait, and you press F5 to quicksave your game. Strangely, you're not given a lot of control over the camera. You can change its angle using the mouse wheel, and you can pan it using the arrow keys (or the edges of the screen), but you're not allowed to rotate it, which sometimes make it difficult to see what's going on behind a large structure or enemy, or in a doorway. But all in all, the interface works just fine, and its simplicity means you can jump right into the game without spending a lot of time reading a manual.
While you're fighting battles and gaining adventure points, you also find some objects to pick up. These include armor, weapons, potions, poisons, and traps -- and even a pig named Frenkel. Almost all of the armor comes in "sets" (such as the leather armor set), with a complete set adding to how much it protects you. About half of the armor is metallic, which means mages can't really use it (it prevents them from regenerating their astral energy, and it reduces their chances of casting spells successfully). Armor also tends to be heavy, and the more encumbrance it adds, the more it hurts your offensive capabilities, which is bad because there isn't really any way to tank or draw aggro, and so you need all of your characters to deal damage. Meanwhile, there is a wide variety of weapons, and most of the good ones are earned at the end of side quests. Armor is typically purchased from vendors.
The Story
The premise for the story works well to get you involved in the game. Your friend Elanor is killed and you're in the area, but what really happened? Was there really a wolf, were you somehow involved, or did Elanor's fiancé Lysander have something to do with it? And what's going on with "the name" that Lysander wants to know? There are lots of questions and no answers -- which is great if you enjoy mysteries like I do -- and you're given about 50 hours of conversations and battles to sort things out.
Unfortunately, after a promising beginning, the story decides to roll over and plays dead. You spend the first chapter trying to reach Lysander, you spend the second chapter captured by slavers, and starting in the third chapter the focus of the game shifts to an evil mage doing what evil mages do, and everything suddenly becomes pretty generic. Worse, Elanor is left in the background, and I never found out what actually happened to her -- at least, not in the game. I asked online about her, and I found out that you're supposed to learn about her final moments in a cut scene, but no such reveal occurred in my game, and I don't know if I just made the "wrong" dialogue choices and missed something, or if something simply broke and didn't show up in my game.
Fortunately, while the main storyline is sort of iffy, the writing for the companions is generally good. Your companions are mostly caricatures -- including the lothario who charms everybody and the dwarf who lets his axe talk for him -- but the writing (which tends towards the humorous side) and the voice acting make up for it. As an example, at one point you have to fight a battle solo, and when you return to your party you learn that the dwarf tried to sell off one of your other companions because the price he was offered was so good. You then have to fight the slavers over the "misunderstanding."
The writing for the quests is also fairly decent. For example, at one point you meet a merchant who tells you that his cousin was supposed to deliver a staff to him, but that both are late in arriving. He then asks you to find the staff -- and, oh yeah, the cousin too if you happen to stumble into him. The problem with the quests is that while you're sometimes given a choice for how to complete them, the choice never leads to anything interesting. With the merchant and his staff, you can return the staff as expected or you can keep it for yourself, and either way you'll never hear anything new from the merchant again, and so your choice doesn't make any difference. In a better game the quest would reveal something about you -- are you honest or not? -- and lead to something in the future.
Problems, Problems, and More Problems
At this point Blackguards might sound like a perfectly acceptable tactical strategy game, one you might use to while away the free hours over a long weekend. But the game is so sloppy and has so many problems that a great deal of the fun is drained out of it. Let me list just a few of the things that need to be fixed.
Every time you enter a town or start a battle you have to wait through a 30-second loading screen (this might make sense for the battles but not the towns, which have almost nothing to them). You frequently have to fight two or three battles in a row, but you're not allowed to rest or save or adjust your inventory in between them (which is lame, especially if you can't devote an hour to the game each time you sit down to it). There are typos and missing text and other oddities, like the spell names overlapping each other on the spells page, and the inventory icons being all scrambled up on the inventory page (the helmet slot has a picture of boots, the boots slot has a picture of a helmet, and so on). Half of the game's achievements also seem to be broken.
Want more? This paragraph includes some spoilers, so skip ahead if you don't want to see them. Anyway, you meet five companions during your travels: two warriors, two mages, and one hunter. Well, guess which companion dies. That's right, the hunter. And then with the remaining companions, one of the mages is forced to wear metal for a chapter, severely gimping her, and then later she disappears for a while and possibly turns on you (which is annoyingly revealed in the achievements if you look at them). I picked a warrior as my main character, and so I ended up playing the latter half of the game with essentially three warriors and a mage, which is hardly the ideal party composition.
But the worst problem with the game is the wildly erratic battle difficulty. Some battles are so difficult that you have to keep starting them over until the random number gods favor you (this includes all of the "flashback" battles, which are in general terrible), while others are such a cakewalk that any one of my characters could have beaten them solo. I have no idea if Daedalic intended for this sort of variance in the difficulty, or if this is just more sloppiness. Some of the battles are difficult because you have to learn the trick to them, and I enjoyed those battles, but a lot of the others are frustrating and headache-inducing, and I could have done without them.
As an example, in the second-to-last battle in the game, you have to defeat five creatures in a single turn, but the room drains your health and your astral energy (aka mana), and so there's a time limit. This doesn't sound terribly difficult, but I only had four characters for the battle, and I didn't build any of them to deal area damage. So I was able to kill four creatures in a turn with no problem, but I had trouble with the fifth. For a while I thought I wasn't going to be able to finish the battle at all, but after about three hours of trying, my mage was able to kill two creatures with his really crappy fireball spell, and my warriors were able to mop up the remaining three. As stupid as this battle might sound, it's even worse because there's no hint about what your objective is. Creatures just keep spawning, and magically you're supposed to figure out that you need to kill five of them in a turn. This is another place where I had to check online about what was going on, which isn't something I normally have to do when playing a game.
Conclusion
From my experience, turn-based games have always been pretty good, and I always figured it was because developers knew they were going to have an uphill battle convincing publishers to take their product seriously, and so they worked extra hard to make the game impressive. But these days, with online retailers and Kickstarter campaigns, publishers aren't as necessary, and developers don't have to deal with as much interference -- which is good, usually, but not in the case of Blackguards, which is about as sloppy and frustrating a game as you're ever likely to encounter.
The premise behind Blackguards works pretty well. You're presented with an intriguing murder mystery, and you're put in command of a disreputable band of outlaws to figure out what happened, which is different and fun. Blackguards also has everything you'd like to see in a strategy-RPG hybrid, including well-written dialogue, lots of character options, and a big battle at the end, but there are just so many problems in so many areas (including stuff that never should have made it through QA testing) that the game is more irritating than fun. I always came away from my sessions with Blackguards in a foul mood, and so it's not a game I can recommend, no matter how it's priced, but certainly not at the $40 mark where it is now. Maybe in about a year when the price drops in half and the patches have come out it will be a better idea.
