GB Feature: Blackguards Review
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We've been meaning to get our Blackguards review online for awhile, so I apologize in the delay in publishing this three-page critique of Daedalic Entertainment's Das Schwarze Auge-based RPG. But whether you've already picked up the game or are still on the fence, you'll still find plenty of relevance in here:
The focus of Blackguards is combat -- to the point where you can use bribery or diplomacy to solve some problems if you want, but you only earn adventure points if you duke it out. Nicely though, unlike, say, King's Bounty or Heroes of Might and Magic, the battles don't just put your party on one side of a map and the enemies on the other side, and let you go at it. The battlegrounds are individually constructed, with odd shapes and sizes, and many have tricks to them. For example, in several battles you have to go up against crypt lice, which can spawn at pipe openings. So you have to walk a tightrope of defeating the lice while also rushing out to close the pipes. Battlegrounds also feature a lot of environmental objects (like sinkholes in swamps, where characters can get stuck) and traps (including flamethrowers) that you can use to your advantage if someone in your party has a high enough perception to recognize that they're there.
That the battlegrounds are interesting is good, because the battles themselves are a little bit dull. That's because combat abilities don't have any sort of cost or cooldown, and so you can use them every turn if you want. Why is that a problem? Let me give you an example. The Hammer Blow ability deals 3X damage, and its only penalty is that the warrior who uses it isn't allowed to parry for the rest of the turn, which isn't a big deal. This is by far the best melee ability in the game, so as soon as possible I built all of my warriors so they could access it, and then I had them use it every turn. That means Hammer Blow completely trumps other combat abilities like Feint and Knock Down (which almost never actually knocks anybody down), and so its existence makes the game more boring. Similarly, hunters get a Triple Shot ability that shoots three arrows, and it has the same problem. Only mages have some equally good options, but I found the offensive spells to be so underwhelming (not to mention expensive) that I mostly only used spells to heal and buff/debuff.
