An unusual mixture of party-based ARPG and free-roaming first-person perspective. Domestic development. Very early access.
The game is announced for the Windows platform.
LYRICAL INTRODUCTION
I’ve been following the games in the Elmarion universe for a long time now and every time they delight me with some fresh concepts or an interesting take on old ideas.
A group of adventurers arrive at an ancient temple. The gates of the architectural monument are closed by order of the king. Is there a way to get inside?
The gameplay is a mixture of party-based ARPG and first-person view.
We choose the composition of the group and hit the road. I highly recommend taking a short but informative training.
The adventure begins at the local base – in a small village. Here we get our first quests.
The combat system is quite interesting. We have four characters, each of them is a set of stats, skills and equipment that form attacks on enemies.
The system seems complicated, but is actually simple. Each blow is a turn of one of the fighters. The player can customize the skills or attacks that each hero will do, choose the order of moves.
For increasing the level, each fighter receives five stat points and one skill point. Each class has quite a lot of skills to learn.
During your adventures you can get a large amount of equipment. There are also enough slots for placing things on characters.
A special feature is that each hero can be equipped with melee and ranged weapons, while the character can also use skills at the same time.
I liked the fact that there were secrets and quite interesting hidden activities. I won’t spoil which ones.
Enemies are represented by various kinds of https://slots7casino.co.uk/login/ animals, skeletons or demons. Several bosses available.
AND NOW ABOUT THE SAD THINGS
The weak point of the game is the technical implementation. The bugs seem to be small, but there are a lot of them and perhaps they even affect the passage (I found one strange place that did not work at all, but it seems there is a secret there).
I will list what catches your eye:
– Sudden, illogical appearance of enemies. For example, I shot a spider egg and it exploded. And a spider crawls out of a broken egg. Some spiders are invulnerable when descending from the ceiling, some disappear without a trace when you shoot at them and it is not clear whether he is still alive or not.
– Can’t figure out where to go at the moment. I had a quest hanging for about forty minutes and I didn’t understand how to do it. T.To. I couldn’t find where to re-read the text of the assignment.
– Quest signs hang above NPCs and do not disappear when the quests are completed. Not very critical, but it hurts the eyes.
– The village minimap is extremely uninformative. There is no hot button for displaying the map, although it is on the screen and if you try, you can press it.
– Some skills from the skill hotkey panel do not work. You can’t upgrade some skills. You cannot remove a skill from the panel without replacing it with another skill.
– Cannot place potions on the hotkey bar.
– Most monsters are quite small, but 99.99% of our attacks are ranged. Often the battle turns into calling enemies barely visible on the horizon.
– Lack of information in the descriptions of some skills and stats. For example, an archer has two types of shots, one says the amount of mana consumed and the effect, the other has a vague description like “adds a cold attack”. There is confusion regarding stats. For example, does strength affect damage when shooting from a bow?? What does luck give? Does any magic damage add intelligence?? Does strength affect the damage of a magic attack??
Another sad thing is that the melee fighter in this game is practically useless, because.To. the best thing you can do is to arm everyone with bows and constantly shoot from afar; if enemies approach, run back and repeat shooting.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of the game and summarize.
+ Pleasant music and sound accompaniment.
+ Although uninformative and still crooked in places, but still overall a good system of stats and skills.
+ Many types of equipment.
+ Sudden secret locations. Sometimes you need to think about it to find the secret and that it is there at all.
+ There is Russian localization of the text.
THINGS THAT CAN BE BOTH A PLUS AND A MINUS:
+- Game for once. If you go through it once, you probably won’t want to go through it again. For some it’s a plus, for others it’s a minus.
+- Rustic graphics. Personally, it didn’t hurt my eyes, but it’s unlikely to cause admiration either. Whichever one will come in.
– The entire set of technical shortcomings, partially indicated in the review above. Lots of small bugs.
– The melee fighter has not shown his usefulness yet. Everyone shoots or throws skills.
So far, in my opinion, the game is ambiguous. There are good moments in it, and there are also upsetting circumstances. I hope that most of the bugs will be fixed in early access.
A small thematic positive:
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.
PPS: Particularly warm is the fact that this game is domestically produced. We need this kind of gamedev. Even if not everything turns out well at once, only those who do nothing make no mistakes.