Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms Preview - Page 4
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Article Index
There's also another big trap you should watch out for. At some point, chances are you'll run into these so-called Grandmasters who offer to teach you new skills. Now, granted, when you talk to one of these shifty guys, they do warn you that after you agree to their offer, you will no longer be able to respec your character.
Still, I wasn't playing the game just to beat it. I was looking to experience its content for this preview. So, I accepted the offer. And had all my active skills changed to the four skills of the Warlord tree. And among those, only one skill was any good, which was mighty annoying.
You'd expect a Grandmaster to teach you some unique new skills, or at least some improved versions of the existing ones. But nope, all you get for talking to Grandmasters is a botched character and a new weapon that, chances are, is worse than whatever you're already using.
So basically, until you read some patch notes announcing a complete rework of the Grandmaster system, you should keep your distance from these guys. Still, even after suffering such a severe blow to my character's effectiveness, I was able to beat the game with little trouble, which goes to show that it could really use some balance adjustments prior to the full release.
Technical Information
The current build of Alaloth has anywhere between 10 to 50 hours' worth of content, depending on how much of the side stuff you want to do. More importantly, even though a lot of the game's systems currently have a very much work-in-progress feel to them, you can already get the full campaign experience, beat the final boss, and even get a cliffhanger ending.
The game runs pretty well and the only bugs I've encountered were limited to your summons occasionally getting stuck on the geometry, and some rare visual glitches.
In general, the game looks quite nice. Both screenshots and promotional videos for the game had me worried a bit before I started my playthrough, as they looked somewhat cheap and choppy. But once you actually get to play the game, you realize that its visuals are quite charming.
Being a Dark Souls-inspired game, Alaloth only offers frequent autosaves as a way to save your progress. Which was especially annoying when dealing with the aforementioned Grandmasters.
The options menu is rather barren at the moment. You can pretty much only change the volume and choose your screen resolution.
You can also rebind controls. But only some of them. When you start the game, you get a message informing you that a controller is preferable for the game. Which again doesn't bode well for those of you expecting a Baldur's Gate-style experience. And while you can use a keyboard and mouse setup here, it's incredibly clunky. Thankfully, the developers fully intend to add proper mouse support to the game in the nearest future.
Conclusion
In its early access version, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms doesn't really succeed as an example of a narrative-driven action-RPG. And namedropping Baldur's Gate is merely a trick to sneak another Dark Souls under your radar.
However, judging the game on its own merits, while not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it has a certain honest quality to it that makes you want to keep playing it despite whatever shortcomings it may have.
And seeing how these are merely the first stages of Alaloth's early access journey, there's still plenty of time for it to change for the better.
