I just finished the game, Blackguards, and really liked it, which is especially surprising since I had just dropped Drakensang: The Dark Eye after I found the latter boring. This is especially timely since Bubbles just completed his excellent review of the new Blackguards sequel:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-codex-review-blackguards-2.97567/
I decided to throw some money at the game and give it a go anyway, after reading felipepe's and Darth Roxor's positive review of it:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9378
Some random thoughts:
+ I was worried that the game would be very difficult to learn, since I remember folks complaining about how difficult it was to figure out character builds. This definitely wasn't the case for me, however. In fact, I thought the learning curve wasn't as steep as it was in Drakensang: The Dark Eye. I had more trouble figuring out Drakensang even while using the manual then I did Blackguards, whose manual I never bothered with.
+ This game granted me a basic understanding of the German Dark Eye tabletop RPG system. It seems to have borrowed some ideas from GURPS when it comes to active and passive defenses, and I think that probably jarred some players familiar only with D&D systems.
+ Daedelic had some cutscenes, but nothing stunning like you would have seen in an RPG from a AAA publisher. Also, the traveling system was quite simplistic, getting rid of having the party actually move in real time from location to location. Instead, we just got a simple point and click interface when it came to traveling from a town or dungeon location. Further, inside the town's we were given the same sort of simple interface where you could click on a person on the screen and initiate conversation. All people important to a village or town were usually found on a single static screen. So visually it sounds boring, but I'm still giving it a plus. This game is purely a turn-based tactical RPG with little exploration, and so it was smart of the company to focus on the combat side and almost completely drop the greater world exploration. This is a game that shows the designers new what they were doing and had the guts to impliment something different from its own peers and predecessors.
+ The story has a dark tone that is consistent throughout the game. I was still able to make decisions that made my little group of rejects fall more on the heroic side, but they were not able to save everyone in the game. And in the end, their heroism saved lives but failed to make their region of the world into a great utopia. It was a gritty world that stayed gritty and edgier than most, while avoiding becoming a parody of itself. This was not a mind blowing tale, but it was at least consistent.
+ The game doesn't hold your hand. I have no idea whether some of the decisions I made in the game were the right ones or not. There seemed to be obvious good/bad choices to make with implications of consequences, but the game didn't bother with anything like a paragon/renegade statistic. I really liked that. I also liked the fact that some 'good' decisions weren't as profitable as the 'evil' decisions. You could profit more in some ways by being an immoral arse, but I still tried to do right just because that's how I roleplay.
+ I never seemed to have enough money, but my archer was expensive with his multi-shot attacks. Maybe if I didn't play an archer this would have been different, but then I probably would have spent my money on more poison for my melee attackers to coat their weapons. The economy holds up throughout.
+ The game also didn't hold my hand when improving my characters. I played an archer and was glad that I did because he was awesome towards the end of the game. However, I think I screwed up my mage characters by spending their skill points on spells that weren't really as awesome as I thought they would be in the last portions of the game. Still, I soldiered on and won, but magic-users will never get enough experience points to max out all spells so you have to be smart in what you spend points on. I don't think I could appreciate this enough unless I decided to play this all over again.
+ I think I played this game for close to 60 hours. My Steam account says 24, but that's only because I logged onto Steam much less than I played offline. This is the first modern CRPG that I've played that I sunk close to 60 hours into and didn't get bored and quit for awhile.
+ I found the combat encounters in Drakensang to be boring with little variation. Blackguards makes the same type of recycled combat encounters interesting with time limits, regenerating enemies, useable traps in the combat environments, environment effects that make movement have a larger tactical importance, civilians needing saving and so on. The game really mixes it up, and I imagine there was much time and effort put here.
- Ok, some encounters are infuriating. Sometimes in the game there were respawning enemies mixed with hidden traps on tiles and time limits. When it came to a mix like that I really wanted to tell the game to go screw itself. It's hard to tell what you are supposed to do in some encounters, such as times that the objective is to wipe out all enemies in a single turn before respawning puts more onto the screen, but the game doesn't bother to tell you that, leaving you to learn through trial and error.
- As much as I enjoyed the grittier world, I never understood the villian's plan even though he spends a lot of exposition explaining it. I don't want to get into spoilers here, but it seems obvious to me and everyone else in the game that the big bad guy's plan amounts to: I don't like the evil in the world', so I am going to replace it the system with more of the same kind of evil I don't like. :derp:
- Same with some of the motivations of the NPCs. I liked the world, and I liked the personalities and quirks of the characters in my party, but I never understood why some of my party members stuck around with me after the end of Chapter 3. In hindsight, you could probably say that about a lot of RPGs when you really think about it, but still it should be addressed.
- Also, at the end game you need to solve some puzzles in order to either support or oppose the ethics of the god's in the game world, but those puzzles take place on a combat screen even if the ethics of the god in question do not translate well into combat. I think the game may have been better served if they had dropped the combat portions of this altogether and just went with a series of dialogue choices with difficult moral quandries.
All in all, this game surprised me. It didn't review well and I was expecting a mediocre slog in the way of Drakensang, but man was I so glad to be wrong. I'm a big fan of turn-based tactical combat, so this hit a lot of the right buttons for me.
Anyway, here are some spoiler-ish pieces of advice since I am posting as a discussion of the game and not really a review:
- I played an archer with maxed points in both bows and crossbows. This was a mistake. Although crossbows do more damage, bows are way more powerful once you find a trainer who teaches triple shot. Archers can be awesome in certain encounters where the melee fighters have a hard time closing with the enemy or with far off spellcasters.
- A great tactic against armored enemies involves knocking down an enemy and having an archer or second melee character do their best attacks against the prone body. Their best attacks suddenly go from having a slim chance of success to a 100% chance. I've wiped out a ton of difficult enemies this way, though the knock down attacks and spells seem to be nearly useless on giant opponents.
- I also spent a lot of points in several damaging spells. Later, magic resistance lowers the effectiveness of such magic. I found it better to focus on spells that buff the party, or that heal and take away status effects. Since you are limited by AP in what spells you can purchase, you really want to map out the spells you will purchase and raise to desired skill levels early on.
- Melee characters really max out by chapter 4. I struggled trying to spend the right AP on mages even towards the end game. For melee characters, I was throwing AP around just to throw it at something. I think weapon mastery was created just so you had an excuse to offload a bunch of AP, even though they were into the skill levels of weapons you would never use. Still, I found a shield to be important for the extra defense points for one fighter who often played the role of meat shield, and that a spear was critical to the other so he could attack over meat shield's head. Spears are awesome, as they have greater range.
- You need to sometimes revisit old locations and talk to everybody. This is important in order to find masters who can teach traits. Sometimes trainers can only be found after completing side quests, and I am glad I am a crazy completionist, because my characters had leaps in effectiveness once they found certain trainers. Case in point, my archer with one elf and the triple shot trait, and my mages with another elf who taught them to regenerate magic points faster.
- I went with two straight melee characters, one straight archer, and two straight magic-users by the end game. In hindsight I don't think I did this right. My second mage was good at healing and had an awesome spell that knocked enemies down, but she never had the opportunity to be built up as well as my first mage who was with me the entire game, and sometimes I wasted a turn with her. In retrospect, I think she might have made a better archer/mage hybrid. If I was to play again, I might have played as a straight mage and turned her into an archer with slight healing spells.