Birth of Shadows Review
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The same feeling of (well, that's an odd design decision) applies to combat. Combat is fairly novel, intuitive and interesting, but there are several problems with it that make it end up as (just not a lot of fun). I already mentioned how repetitive it can become after a while (though in honesty I should note that this problem is lessened by the system's increasing complexity as you gain more skills and face more varied opponents), but it also has a few flaws in its mechanics. For one, it's based on the idea of steady, tactical progression, perhaps showing the designer's strategy gaming roots. You take your time setting up the NPCs like you want them, getting your own abilities lined up and then progressively going for the kill. And that's great, it makes for deeper combat than any other hack-and-slash offers, but it also means that even fights that are (easy) take a really long time. That wouldn't be a problem, except that you have to sit there and click every 2 seconds to get your character to do something due to the fact that there is no attack queuing system. In my opinion, that's just a really weird design decision. Because combat is repetitive against weaker opponents or opponents that have no important buffs to fight me with, I can predict pretty much how the fight will go from the start. So why can't I just map out the character's actions and leave him to do the work?
I've mentioned how the combat is pretty tactical and (thinky) and that, also, is a bit odd because it doesn't really fit into the hack-and-slash framework that this game does otherwise posses. Your character's progression is secondary to your own ability to click the right icons at the right time. Now, considering how that makes the need for grinding against opponents more of an annoyance than a bonus, two design decisions become odd: the high frequency of fights and the decision to make combat real-time. This might be my personal tastes speaking, but with such a high tactical nature it would seem more natural to me to build a game with infrequent, challenging fights in tactical, turn-based combat. Now I ended up loathing combat in a game that is after all built around combat, as it started feeling more like a system in which I had to click the buttons in the right order to me.
There are some smaller gripes: the fact that some hotkeys are assigned weirdly and you can't seem to remap them (pause is assigned to the pause button, which is on a pretty awkward place on most keyboards). Or the fact that at the end of the fight you have to wait for 5 seconds for spell effects to go away and for the player to start regenerating which seems like a needless waste of time, basically just forcing the player to wait for 5-10 seconds at the end of a fight when he could just be healed instantly without it making any gameplay difference. Or the fact that dying is consequence-free, but you are thrown back to your last portal point which means you have to walk all the way back, often being forced to fight NPCs that you no longer get any XP from.
Conclusion
This is a decidedly odd game. It can't really be called an RPG in any meaningful sense of the term. And while it appears to be a hack-and-slash, a lot of its design doesn't really point to that, either. If you'll allow me to be grandiloquent for a moment, I might say that what we're seeing here is the birth of a new genre, a variation on the tactical hack-and-slash. This is clearly such a game with strong influences from real-time strategy games.
But like any new genre being born, there are a lot of quirks and flaws in its initial design. I applaud the original approach to several of the genre's more tired clichés in this game. But, at least for me, what we end up with here is a game that doesn't really (work). The ideas behind it are indubitably attractive, but the execution falls short on several key areas.
I think that a number of the design gripes I named above are really just (bad decisions) that could do with improvement, but on the other hand a number of other gripes I have are very personal and just a matter of preference. So while Birth of Shadows did not fit my personal tastes and I can't recommend it blindly due to its genre-blending, the game's tactical elements are an improvement over normal mindless RPG combat and could very really please you if you're a fan of real-time strategy titles.
