Bound By Flame

I'll start this with the most important piece of information: Do not buy this game. It looks ok in screenshots, it sounds ok in descriptions, the quicklook makes it seem pretty ok, it even starts out as a reasonably good game; but HO-LEE-SHIT it takes one of the hardest swings into the toilet I have ever witnessed.

Ok, important preface over, the anatomy of the game is this: It's a third person action RPG and from playing it I can tell it's built on the engine and game scaffold that CD Projekt RED developed for the Witcher 2 and which Spiders (the Dev's on this game) must have licensed for this (or at least I hope they did) and maybe Mars: War Logs (another real fucking winner) too. Appart from a new stealth mechanic it plays exactly like the Witcher 2 in terms of combat and movement, those core systems seem to have just been left in the game totally unchanged from the original to the point where it actually feels like playing a terrible mod for The Witcher 2. That seems kind of cheap, but I didn't mind the combat in The Witcher 2 as much as some people did and though copied the games core systems function, so whatever.

Onto the game proper: It opens pretty reasonably, with a more or less well made 30 minute opening chapter that sets the story up for what gives all impression of being a sprawling fantasy epic. It genuinely seems kind of interesting too, which is what makes the impending cliff the entire game is about to fall off even more dissapointing. When the story moves into it's first real act some cracks begin to show but nothing horrendous happens, not yet. Mostly nothing happens, the story only inches foward in the first act which again teases at a long and complex tale ahead and almost seems to be IN SERVICE of the horrible switcheroo that comes next. The first act abruptly ends, The Baffler swoops in and he strikes HARD and FAST.

Without spoiling anything, what is supposed to be the gathered armies of Humans and Elves turn out to be 7 NPC's in a bland cave, many many MANY times smaller than the backwater swamp village the first act takes part in. The sidequests all but dissapear, NPC dialogue stops making sense, things seem to start happening out of order and the story takes a turn or two that genuinely had me crack up laughing at the absurdity of it all. And then the third act begins and astonishingly (and I truly mean astonishingly) it is even worse. The world geometry turns into boxes connected by endless corridors, all of which look like they are from an up-ressed PS2 game. The 7 NPC's turn into about 4, who repetedly refer to major story beats that never actually happened in the game because that content was either cut or just missing altogether. The gameplay goes to hell around now too, the enemies become vast damage sinks that can take actual minutes of beating on to kill, and your character starts going down in a near instagib fashion (the frustration is multiplied by an increasing frequency of knockdown attacks). In the (what do you know, weirdly abbrupt) end this astonishing mess of a game is crowned with the hardest, cheapest end boss I have ever encountered in a game. Ever.

Now, it's pretty clear to me what is going on here. They obviously ran out of time or money or both on this project and tried to bodge a terminally unfinished product together, but the bare faced fucking brutality of this chainsaw job is just godamn incredible, and the way they've hidden it in the second half is just some incredibly dirty shit. To the point where if someone tried to get a refund from Steam for this I'll be they probably could. But hey, save yourself the trouble and just don't by this. Unless your a sadistic bastard like me who has the curiosity to experience the true depths of ruination.