Hard to Be a God Review
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Hack 'n Slash or RPG? This game is billed as a (hack 'n slash/RPG). At first glance, I disagreed with that label. After spending some time with the game, I found myself in agreement. But my final judgment would be that it is as much both as it is neither.
It is a hack 'n slash in that you'll spend a lot of time in combat, it's fairly linear, and it holds your hand quite significantly. But it's really not a hack 'n slash in many other ways. The game is quite unforgiving if you make a mistake and won't think twice about killing you, dialogue is very important and (side-)quests balance dialogue-based and combat-based solutions.
But it's not much of an RPG either. The dialogue is pretty much non-interactive and skills influencing them are limited. Player choice is there, but the game doesn't offer many consequences for them. I think that if I'd have to give this game a genre tag, it'd probably just be (action RPG), which it broadly falls under.
A Difficult Game to Get Into
Hard to be a God sets up some hard entry barriers for you to get past. The most significant ones are the awkward combat mechanics, the annoying camera angle and the shoddy localization. These are bad enough especially combined to make the game simply unplayable for some people, so I would definitely not advise anyone to whom this may sound like a problem to buy the game without trying the demo.
Now what I'd like to says is (but once you get past all that there's a real gem there). But there isn't. If you scratch the surface to get deeper into the game, you won't find a masterpiece hidden under the muck. The RPG hidden under there is solid if a bit too linear for my tastes, with some really good world building, an intricate plot and a wide variety of RPGs. It's solid, hell, it's pretty good, but it's not great.
So that begs the question, is it worth it? Hard to be a God is actually a bit of a difficult game to answer that question for (and as such the rating below is not all that meaningful). I really enjoyed it, but for me the only real issue was the camera, the other flaws didn't really bother me. And I think that's the best conclusion for this game: it's worth a go if its glaring flaws don't bother you too much, but don't grit your teeth and try to bear them hoping the game will get better. It really won't.
Oh, and for Noon fans: you'll probably want to try it, but buckle up and prepare for some wild liberties taken with Hard to be a God's story in this game.
