Blackguards Review
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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.
As I mentioned previously, each battle proceeds in rounds, and each character gets one turn per round. Characters are allowed to move and take an action (such as attacking or casting a spell) on their turn, or they can move twice as far at the expense of the action (this is basically the same as dashing in XCOM: Enemy Unknown). Characters can also use potions that are stored in their belt or swap predefined weapon sets, but they're not allowed to otherwise manipulate their inventory. Characters can also wait on their turn, or they can simply end their turn. To make combat easier, characters get their own hotkey bar, so if you find yourself using an ability or a spell all the time -- like, say, Hammer Blow -- then you can add it to the hotkey bar so it's easier to trigger. Otherwise, you have to right click and then select the spell or ability from a ring menu.
Other than the hotkey bar, there isn't a lot to the interface. You left click to move or attack, you press the V key to highlight interactive objects (like levers or doors), you press the spacebar to wait, and you press F5 to quicksave your game. Strangely, you're not given a lot of control over the camera. You can change its angle using the mouse wheel, and you can pan it using the arrow keys (or the edges of the screen), but you're not allowed to rotate it, which sometimes make it difficult to see what's going on behind a large structure or enemy, or in a doorway. But all in all, the interface works just fine, and its simplicity means you can jump right into the game without spending a lot of time reading a manual.
While you're fighting battles and gaining adventure points, you also find some objects to pick up. These include armor, weapons, potions, poisons, and traps -- and even a pig named Frenkel. Almost all of the armor comes in "sets" (such as the leather armor set), with a complete set adding to how much it protects you. About half of the armor is metallic, which means mages can't really use it (it prevents them from regenerating their astral energy, and it reduces their chances of casting spells successfully). Armor also tends to be heavy, and the more encumbrance it adds, the more it hurts your offensive capabilities, which is bad because there isn't really any way to tank or draw aggro, and so you need all of your characters to deal damage. Meanwhile, there is a wide variety of weapons, and most of the good ones are earned at the end of side quests. Armor is typically purchased from vendors.
The Story
The premise for the story works well to get you involved in the game. Your friend Elanor is killed and you're in the area, but what really happened? Was there really a wolf, were you somehow involved, or did Elanor's fiancé Lysander have something to do with it? And what's going on with "the name" that Lysander wants to know? There are lots of questions and no answers -- which is great if you enjoy mysteries like I do -- and you're given about 50 hours of conversations and battles to sort things out.
Unfortunately, after a promising beginning, the story decides to roll over and plays dead. You spend the first chapter trying to reach Lysander, you spend the second chapter captured by slavers, and starting in the third chapter the focus of the game shifts to an evil mage doing what evil mages do, and everything suddenly becomes pretty generic. Worse, Elanor is left in the background, and I never found out what actually happened to her -- at least, not in the game. I asked online about her, and I found out that you're supposed to learn about her final moments in a cut scene, but no such reveal occurred in my game, and I don't know if I just made the "wrong" dialogue choices and missed something, or if something simply broke and didn't show up in my game.
Fortunately, while the main storyline is sort of iffy, the writing for the companions is generally good. Your companions are mostly caricatures -- including the lothario who charms everybody and the dwarf who lets his axe talk for him -- but the writing (which tends towards the humorous side) and the voice acting make up for it. As an example, at one point you have to fight a battle solo, and when you return to your party you learn that the dwarf tried to sell off one of your other companions because the price he was offered was so good. You then have to fight the slavers over the "misunderstanding."
The writing for the quests is also fairly decent. For example, at one point you meet a merchant who tells you that his cousin was supposed to deliver a staff to him, but that both are late in arriving. He then asks you to find the staff -- and, oh yeah, the cousin too if you happen to stumble into him. The problem with the quests is that while you're sometimes given a choice for how to complete them, the choice never leads to anything interesting. With the merchant and his staff, you can return the staff as expected or you can keep it for yourself, and either way you'll never hear anything new from the merchant again, and so your choice doesn't make any difference. In a better game the quest would reveal something about you -- are you honest or not? -- and lead to something in the future.
