A little-known RPG similar to Baldur’s Gate 1, 2 and Pillars of Eternity. Very early access. Spoiler-free review.
The game is announced for platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS.
LYRICAL INTRODUCTION
I was pretty into the game, but I caught a critical bug. My hero can’t go any further. Therefore at first glance.
The world has been struck by a curse. War is raging all around. Our hero finds himself in the very epicenter of events.
The gameplay is a classic party RPG with stories and a third-person view. A distinctive feature is that you need to read the dialogues and descriptions very carefully (for example, in scrolls), the player is not led by the hand from point to point, you need to delve into the process.
First we create a hero. There are many races and classes, and not all of them are combined for use. The character parameters, in my opinion, are not enough, but still enough to be called an RPG.
In the segment where we managed to play, we are engaged in participating in the plots and exploring quite beautifully made locations.
The combat is made dynamic (characters continuously attack, following the instructions received from the player), with the ability to pause to give orders. The cuts in the game look very good. Judging by my experience and the screenshots I’ve seen, mass batches are not uncommon. It is possible to use active skills or customize the squad’s fighting style, which gives buffs.
There is a lot of loot in the form of equipment, ingredients and recipes useful for crafting, and there are scrolls with magic. Judging by the large number of character equipment slots and the abundance of dropped items, it will be (and even now) interesting to tinker with gear. There are both items of normal quality and enchanted ones.
There is a system for preparing food and creating potions. Doesn’t work flawlessly yet, but potentially looks good. You need to mix ingredients according to recipes or following the instructions of other characters. Crafting is not instant, you need to wait 8 hours of game time until the product is ready.
Increasing the hero’s level is accompanied by gaining skill points and learning new active skills. There are not many of them, it’s quite easy to figure them out.
EARLY ACCESS DESCRIPTION
Since the game is at a very early stage of development, I will describe the current state of the project and the stated prospects
– At the moment, two chapters out of four are relatively ready.
– The combat system, crafting, skill parameters are declared as complete, minimal modifications will be made to them.
– Release expected in the first quarter https://miamijackpotscasino.uk/bonus/ of 2022.
We’ll talk about the sad state of some elements of the game in the cons section.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of the game and summarize.
+ Nice, modern (for the genre) graphics.
+ Good music and sound.
+ Looks interesting plot. Lots of high-quality English text, some of it well-voiced.
+ Still – rather a good than bad system of races, classes and abilities.
+ A lot of loot: equipment and all sorts of useful things.
+ Simple, but if it works fine it’s a good crafting system.
– Possible presence of critical bugs. Personally, I caught the following – my hero, like a greedy hamster (as always), was vacuuming everything that was not nailed down, there was an overload and he could not move. That is, not at all. It’s impossible to throw things out of your inventory (crying tears of blood from greed). I hope they fix this. (A solution was found, it turns out you need to go to the properties of the item with the right mouse button and there is a Drop button = throw away)
– In my opinion, this is also a bug, although perhaps it was training in crafting. I found a recipe with a clear description of how to make the potion. During training, I added the ingredients and it turned out to be dust. Of course, I was given another task, but I would like the description to correspond to the real possibility of production.
– Got a bugged Item Identification Scroll. Of course it’s good that it is not consumed, but I would like it to work normally (one scroll, one thing)
– There is no Russian localization of the text yet, but they promise to do it at release. English in the game is quite difficult, with my medium-low level of knowledge I can handle it confidently, but at the limit of my capabilities.
It’s always good when there is at least the potential that a new quality RPG will appear. There are problems, but there are also positive aspects. In general, you need to follow the development and see what happens in the end. As for me, the game has the potential to become a light (the smoke is obviously thinner) version of Pillars of Eternity.
PS: I probably didn’t cover all the aspects, I might have missed something. I will be glad to add/correct the review or answer questions along the way in the comments.
PPPS: The game is very spoiler-intensive. I don’t recommend watching videos or streams on it if you plan to play it yourself.
Have a good game everyone!
Best comments
You are reading an LVVrunner review review because the author has nothing better to do.
And so, the first thing I want to say after reading the review is that the author will never mention the name of the game being reviewed in the entire text, and the text will not force you to return to the beginning to find out what the author is talking about, because along the way there will be no desire or interest in playing it. Are you intentionally avoiding saying her name or did you just forget it while writing the review, that’s the question that interests me primarily.
I would also like to note a fairly high tolerance for the game, because if this piece of code lags in such a way that I would not be able to continue playing it, my range of emotions would not allow me to conduct the story so detached from this event. How did you overcome yourself in writing all this to write so detachedly??
In the segment where we managed to play, we are engaged in participating in the plots and exploring quite beautifully made locations.
Conciseness, of course, is also captivating. At some point, you get the impression that you didn’t launch and play through the game while sitting at the computer, but are actually conducting reconnaissance in the deep rear, dressed as the original Toothfish, sending small, but very important messages for others, which must have a limit. True, sometimes it is not clear what this limit is, because messages can be three sentences or a little more than three.
Well, in conclusion, I’d like to say: LVVrunner, short reviews have become your calling card, but what’s the fun in writing them so often, especially for games that few people play??
I have a good idea? Feel free to voice it and if it’s something useful, I’ll take it into service.
Well, I don’t see you at all behind your notes. I see an example of “Collective creativity”, but somehow you got lost in it. Behind a set of facts, behind a short and simple summary of the plot in three sentences and without any personal history. Yes, even at the beginning, if you had said that you have gone through and written about the indisegment soon a hundred reviews here and continue to explore new “depths”, it would have been more interesting for many to read.
Hurry up! The kingdom is in danger.
Thanks for the detailed comment. I’ll try to break the answer into several semantic parts.
1) Why don’t I write the name of the game in the text?? Because my literary taste says that writing “game” or “project” is better than Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness.
2) The piece of code didn’t lag, that’s the point. As it turned out, the item ejection button is located in a rather unobvious place. It took two days to find this solution.
3) Stylistics of presentation. Many copies have been broken on this occasion, but the way the reviews turn out is, in fact, the fruit of collective creativity. For quite a long time I collected feedback, opinions, read comments and came to the conclusion that we need to turn off personal experiences as much as possible and tell more facts that readers will appreciate for themselves. Specifically in this case, there was also the fact that the game is full of spoilers (I had to not tell a significant part of the story) and the fact that it was not possible to get far. But I’m just working on the stylistic component, constructive suggestions are welcome. I have a good idea? Feel free to voice it and if it’s something useful, I’ll take it into service.
4) The funny thing is that I write reviews (and play) only of those games that I liked in some way and that I wanted to play. Most of the games I’m interested in are indie. This is how it turns out. Although in this case the toy is quite serious. If everything ends well, then by release it will be a good isometric RPG, and also done as it should, and not with turn-based combat.
This is exactly what there were mass complaints about. I spoke about what I liked, went into details that were not interesting to readers. If we put egoism aside, then the claims are generally correct – my opinion is this, and another person’s is different. And it just turned out that the facts on which the reader bases his attitude towards the game were drowned in personal emotions. Many people pointed this out both in personal messages and in comments. Well, I obeyed reasonable advice and reduced my emotions, and began to look in more detail at the mechanics and content of the game. Of course, it was not possible to reduce it to zero, but very much. I leave conclusions for my impressions and always emphasize that this is a personal opinion.
And again, if you think logically, if someone has questions or just wants to know personal impressions – there are comments, they are ideally created for such communication.