Author: Prague
So realizing that I’m ten months late getting around to this little gem, I recently picked it up and decided I would give it a go. I’ll come out of the gate saying that I don’t feel like a single moment was wasted on it, and here’s why.
Blackguards is, by my approximation, a lower budget hybrid of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dragon Age: Origins with hex-based tiles, not square ones. Where XCOM: Enemy Unknown comes in is the tile mapped, turn based combat and medium lengthed campaign. Where Origin’s contribution would be the dark fantasy setting, weapon selections, dialogue style (sans animated characters for most) and the hub-based world map, which you use to travel from place to place as well as the random encounters that can occur while moving from place to place.
Overall, it works together fairly well. The only real bugs I encountered where achievement related, but if you aren’t an achievement hunter that shouldn’t matter too much to you. Still, for something so simple I think it’s an unacceptable failure so for me personally, I think it puts some points against the game. The combat is fairly challenging, requiring a level of strategy very like the XCOM games, though with an added flourish. A lot of the environment can be used as a weapon, or as an obstacle to slow down oncoming enemies, allowing you to heavily damage or even kill them from a safe distance with various weapons. Examples of this are crates, pitfalls, exploding or poison filled barrels, and various other environmental hazards that can be leveraged against enemies (or even against you). Thankfully, each character can carry up to three sets of weapons to be switched between during battle, as well as various items including traps, allowing your warriors to attack enemies from behind barricades with your archers and mages, or snare enemies to keep your them safe. As not all enemies will simply throw themselves at the nearest allied character with no regard for their safety and with no particular strategy.
One of the things I really liked about the combat was the puzzles. There are some instances where the object ISN’T to kill everything that moves. Frequently enough the object of an encounter to unlock a door, set a series of switches, obtain or destroy an item, or assassinate a particular enemy in order to win. It adds just enough variety to keep the combat interesting for most of them game, though near the end the battle system does feel stale as I feel is the case for this particular genre. That being said, though, I didn’t really care for the boss fights, as most ‘bosses’ in the game aren’t much harder to manipulate and overpower than anything else in the game. It keeps the difficulty consistent, which is usually a good thing but I kind of expect bosses to have a significant power spike over regular enemies, which I didn’t really see present here.
The story is straightforward and isn’t REALLY that unusual or deep, but was engaging enough to keep me interested throughout. You are able to create your own character, male or female and with the choice of three basic classes to give you a boost in whatever direction you want to go with it. However the extensive free form skill and spell trees allows you to build your character into anything you want, be it a specialist in a particular field or a very general jack of all trades, master of none.
You are the friend of the count’s daughter, accused of her brutal murder and taken into custody after you are found with her body, while afflicted by a temporary madness. After you are interrogated by the Lady’s lover, and alchemist, asking for a ‘name’ that you are not sure you ever knew, you escape with the help of a similarly incarcerated dwarf and human mage. Thus begins a journey across the land to track down your friend’s lover, find her actual killer, and discover the cause of a string of disappearances, some of whom return afflicted with an illness.
The voice acting in Blackguards is far from top notch, but it’s definitely not the worst I have heard and it gets the job done with minimal eye rolling. Though the music is BEAUTIFUL, and the battle music is especially well done. The text is grammatical and spelling error free, and the writing is reasonably good. A lot of the moral dilemmas don’t have an obvious choice, and depending on your character’s stats more options can be opened up for different solutions, though some of them do have a very obvious reasonable choice.
The last thing to look at, is the price point. Daedalic is asking $39.99 for Blackguards. Is it worth it? Let’s look. The game took me around 25 hours to complete at my usual lazy pace, wandering around and sightseeing. I try not to measure a game by it’s replay value, because in my opinion you shouldn’t pay for potential play value. You should be paying for the actual contents of the game. That said, I believe that most, if not all of the game’s content can be seen in 1-2 playthroughs, totaling between 45 and 50 hours of playtime. That’s $0.80-$0.90 per hour of playtime. Worth it? I’d say yes.
Final verdict, Blackguards is a game I would recommend to any turn based strategy fan, for it’s world, content and solid gameplay and at it’s listed price point. This is Prague from DecryptedGaming, signing out.
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