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Blackguards-FLT
English | Size: 4.38 GB
The next time you're having a bad day, consider the plight of poor Zurbaran. The lecherous mage might thrive on forbidden trysts and have an unhealthy attraction to prisons, but late in his travels he has an almost 89 percent chance to drown his enemies in pools of fire. And yet he misses. And when his shot at glory comes again, he misses again, but so do all the ruffians on his tail. Never has such a wizard suffered so much at the hands of numbers that should work in his favor.
Blackguards bills itself as a "dark" fantasy, but the shades of gray here match Dragon Age better than Dark Souls. Even its opening prison-break scene channels "lighter" games like Oblivion and Baldur's Gate II, and the two prisoners you bring along (Zurbaran is one of them) resemble flawed poker buddies more than villains. It's a rogue's tale, in short, and the wider narrative of clearing your name of a murder you (probably) didn't commit sometimes gets lost in the business of undertaking predictable side quests doled out by shopkeepers or gambling dwarves. That's not always such a bad thing, however, because the limited cast of voice actors does well enough with the roles despite a few shudder-worthy performances.
The story itself pleases more than it disappoints. I eventually grew to love the dwarf warrior Naurim more than most of his bearded cousins in other games, and I enjoyed the poignant moments bracketing the tedious chapter middles. Blackguards manages to maintain some of its dark pretensions through a visual style that shows its strengths in battle maps and the screens passing for towns (although they look as though some cameraman smeared a touch too much Vaseline on the lens), even if it falters on character models. The town maps themselves may be little more than lovely hand-drawn landscapes with clickable non-player characters for merchandise, healing, and the like, but they do a fair job of capturing the group's trek from familiar European-style settings to the tropical landscapes in the south of Aventuria. Developer Daedalic even squeezes some exploration into this pile of scattered images, although the constraints of Blackguards' design keep it limited to clicks on lighted dots on dungeons and the ever-extending map.
This narrow approach to exploration springs from the turn-based battles at Blackguards' heart. Every battle in Blackguards is a set piece, designed exclusively for key story events or side quests, and this specialized approach gives it an advantage over randomized tactical favorites such as XCOM. You see it most in the heavy focus on interaction with environmental objects scattered throughout the hexagonal grids, and in its best moments, Blackguards uses them to craft more rewarding battles than we recently saw in The Banner Saga. Crypt lice swarm from holes unless you cover their burrows with stones, mini King Kongs rampage unless trapped in special gates, and in one of Blackguard's most taxing early moments, a massive troll must be pulled through gas ignited with Zurbaran's fire. The clincher? Blackguards rarely gives hints on how to pull off these stunts.
Therein lies part of Blackguards' niche appeal. It doesn't flinch at overwhelming odds; indeed, it revels in them out of a belief that today's games suffer from anemic strategies to accommodate wide audiences. A fair point, and true, it delivers Dark Souls-style satisfaction when your little band of antiheroes overcome a swarm of better-armed foes. It's the kind of game that forces you to keep slamming your head into figurative brick walls so you'll think hard enough to find the trap doors that pass under them.
Pity, then, that it stumbles in the execution. Blackguards' challenges would be a lot more palatable if they weren't smothered by the absurd "miss and dodge" galas mentioned above, particularly in the first couple of chapters. Part of the frustration perhaps originates in the game's reliance on the pen-and-paper RPG The Dark Eye--more popular in Daedalic's native Germany than on this side of the pond--in that the dice rolls involved leave Blackguards' otherwise enjoyable tough scrapes far too grounded in luck. Worse yet are the many battles that jump from one to another with no chance to rest, or battles pitting you against multiple waves of enemies with no clue as to how long they'll last.
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