Blackguards Review
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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.
