I know we've already had a rather lengthy thread about this game already, but I've been avoiding that thread for fear of spoilers, wanting to avoid general negativity, and out of pure laziness. Nevertheless, many may have missed it so let me take a few moments of your time to go over the finer points of why I'm enjoying myself so much with Reality Pump's little gem of an ARPG here. Stay a while, and listen!
First of all, initial impresions of this game can and probably should be skeptically low. The tutorial is rather misleading and more than a little disappointing since it tends to drag on a bit, and doesn't represent well the sense of freedom and the game's flow of play while you're still in it. The NPC's that you encounter during the tutorial don't provide a great example of what you'll see later on, so at first you're asking yourself why you even bothered to install the thing. But hang on, it does get better!
When first starting off, it takes a while to get used to the graphics, which are excellent and smooth but are amazingly bright. Some tweaks can take care of that and I've modified a few things such as disabling a function called EdgeBlending which is supposed to give foliage a more attractive look but instead makes it look like a blurry mess. I've also disabled fog and applied another tweak to enable texture filtering which has helped a lot. The HDR and bloom are still quite prevalent, but once you transition to the savannah on the main land it doesn't seem so out of place. I actually kind of like it now, especially when contrasted with the darkness of dungeons.
Combat at first is a little fffuuu-inducing. It's grown on me, however. I'm playing almost a pure mage, so this is only from that perspective, but the controls and conventions of fighting are actually pleasantly well balanced and sensible. For example, much ado was made about the inability to back up in combat. You can back up, but you'll wind up turning your back to the enemy. This adds difficulty and forces you to time strategic retreats carefully, lest you take a nice knock on the head for your carelessness. Attacks are of course rather simple, but there are specialty moves, blocks, and "combo-breakers" which are generally stat-driven (as a percentage of occurrence, for example). You can certainly button-mash, and that's generally expected and accepted in ARPG's, but you can combine moves simply, you can sprint away if careful, and the balancing of the timing needed to be successful at it, especially when using a squishy mage, is satisfying.
The game's spell system is fantastic, in my opinion. The rarity of the better cards you need to construct more powerful spells keeps me going. More power! The unique combinations you can come up with are great (I'm still only just past level 13, so I haven't even scratched the surface yet). I love that you can add modifier cards, such as a time-lengthening one, to derive many possible combinations. Doubling, tripling and more of a Fire or Water effect card, for example, will simply add to that spell's damage. Very fun experimenting.
The skill system is, yes, simplistic, but there are enough there, divided into enough sections, to keep you forging ahead to improve. One example of a Mage skill that you don't need but can really use later on is Talented Tongue; putting points into this skill will decrease the casting time of each spell and when you've got a charging rhino coming at you, it can come in handy. You also have to avoid neglecting some of the other skills outside your main set, such as the Assassin's Lockpick skill and other things like Physical Resistance. Since you typically only get anywhere from 2 - 4 skillpoints during each levelup, you wind up spending a few moments deciding.
The quests are surprisingly deep, on occasion. The portion of the story in which you have to gain entry through a particular gate to get closer to the next major city offers several alternate solutions: you can pay someone to forge a pass for you, you can save the village from starvation (which is a multilevelled task in itself) in order to gain entrance, or you can search for a well-guarded pass to go around it. There are a lot of side quests, of course, all of which are very straightforward, but none of them so far seem completely stupid. They offer rewards and satisfaction of their own.
The voice acting isn't that bad. Your own character is a gravelly-voiced chap, but I think it fits. Some of the NPC's voiceacting is rather bad, but nothing we haven't heard before from other Non-English-native developers. The translation/localization to English is actually quite good. I might even hazard to comment that some of the letters and notes and so forth that you find throughout the game are rather well-written. You are certainly not assaulted with brain-rotting stupidity while playing this game.
There are lots of other little touches which add to its charm such as the way horseback riding is handled (it's not nearly as bad as many have said; only the physically and/or mentally handicapped really should be complaining about it), the intentionally simple yet very addictive nature of crafting, and the overall quality and bug-free solidity of the game.
Pick it up or download it. Get through the tutorial. I think if you spend some time with it you'll like it as well.
First of all, initial impresions of this game can and probably should be skeptically low. The tutorial is rather misleading and more than a little disappointing since it tends to drag on a bit, and doesn't represent well the sense of freedom and the game's flow of play while you're still in it. The NPC's that you encounter during the tutorial don't provide a great example of what you'll see later on, so at first you're asking yourself why you even bothered to install the thing. But hang on, it does get better!
When first starting off, it takes a while to get used to the graphics, which are excellent and smooth but are amazingly bright. Some tweaks can take care of that and I've modified a few things such as disabling a function called EdgeBlending which is supposed to give foliage a more attractive look but instead makes it look like a blurry mess. I've also disabled fog and applied another tweak to enable texture filtering which has helped a lot. The HDR and bloom are still quite prevalent, but once you transition to the savannah on the main land it doesn't seem so out of place. I actually kind of like it now, especially when contrasted with the darkness of dungeons.
Combat at first is a little fffuuu-inducing. It's grown on me, however. I'm playing almost a pure mage, so this is only from that perspective, but the controls and conventions of fighting are actually pleasantly well balanced and sensible. For example, much ado was made about the inability to back up in combat. You can back up, but you'll wind up turning your back to the enemy. This adds difficulty and forces you to time strategic retreats carefully, lest you take a nice knock on the head for your carelessness. Attacks are of course rather simple, but there are specialty moves, blocks, and "combo-breakers" which are generally stat-driven (as a percentage of occurrence, for example). You can certainly button-mash, and that's generally expected and accepted in ARPG's, but you can combine moves simply, you can sprint away if careful, and the balancing of the timing needed to be successful at it, especially when using a squishy mage, is satisfying.
The game's spell system is fantastic, in my opinion. The rarity of the better cards you need to construct more powerful spells keeps me going. More power! The unique combinations you can come up with are great (I'm still only just past level 13, so I haven't even scratched the surface yet). I love that you can add modifier cards, such as a time-lengthening one, to derive many possible combinations. Doubling, tripling and more of a Fire or Water effect card, for example, will simply add to that spell's damage. Very fun experimenting.
The skill system is, yes, simplistic, but there are enough there, divided into enough sections, to keep you forging ahead to improve. One example of a Mage skill that you don't need but can really use later on is Talented Tongue; putting points into this skill will decrease the casting time of each spell and when you've got a charging rhino coming at you, it can come in handy. You also have to avoid neglecting some of the other skills outside your main set, such as the Assassin's Lockpick skill and other things like Physical Resistance. Since you typically only get anywhere from 2 - 4 skillpoints during each levelup, you wind up spending a few moments deciding.
The quests are surprisingly deep, on occasion. The portion of the story in which you have to gain entry through a particular gate to get closer to the next major city offers several alternate solutions: you can pay someone to forge a pass for you, you can save the village from starvation (which is a multilevelled task in itself) in order to gain entrance, or you can search for a well-guarded pass to go around it. There are a lot of side quests, of course, all of which are very straightforward, but none of them so far seem completely stupid. They offer rewards and satisfaction of their own.
The voice acting isn't that bad. Your own character is a gravelly-voiced chap, but I think it fits. Some of the NPC's voiceacting is rather bad, but nothing we haven't heard before from other Non-English-native developers. The translation/localization to English is actually quite good. I might even hazard to comment that some of the letters and notes and so forth that you find throughout the game are rather well-written. You are certainly not assaulted with brain-rotting stupidity while playing this game.
There are lots of other little touches which add to its charm such as the way horseback riding is handled (it's not nearly as bad as many have said; only the physically and/or mentally handicapped really should be complaining about it), the intentionally simple yet very addictive nature of crafting, and the overall quality and bug-free solidity of the game.
Pick it up or download it. Get through the tutorial. I think if you spend some time with it you'll like it as well.
