The First Templar is a bad game. This was not a shock to me, considering its 52% score on Metacritic* and my memory of coverage from its release in 2011. I remember the Giant Bomb quick look of this thing left me intrigued, though, and I bought a cheap copy a few months later with the intent of getting around to it at some point. I later misplaced that copy because, well, it was a cheap copy of The First Templar and it wasn’t exactly a prized possession. It’s probably in my storage unit.

This autumn the game became backwards compatible for some reason or other and there was an Xbox sale on offering it for less than $5 and, well, if curiosity killed the cat then you can call me Garfield. I wanted to know what the game was like so I plopped down my portrait of Abraham Lincoln and downloaded the game file.

I’d say I don’t know what I was expecting except I know exactly what I was expecting and it was what I got. I still managed to be disappointed. If you want to know what kind of game this is, it’s the kind of game where the cover features a big picture of one of the main characters holding a crossbow and then never once gives her a crossbow to use during the game itself. When you meet that character for the first time she is in prison, dressed in a colorful low cut outfit and still carrying her daggers, which she uses to dispatch a jailor who is in her locked cell for some reason. Nobody asks why the bad guys locked up a woman for weeks or even months but didn’t even bother to take away her weapons, let alone give her a change of clothes. She must smell pretty ripe. Nobody mentions that either.

In the Last Templar you play as a pair of Templar Knights in search of the Holy Grail. After a bit of a tutorial mission you set off in pursuit of Marie, the daughter of another member of the order who was killed by Saracens. He had information about the grail and you suspect he might have passed it to Marie, who is herself being held captive. It’s not a spoiler to say that you rescue her and she joins your party, since she’s literally on the front of the game box, and then you control her and one of the knights as they continue the quest for the grail.The structure of the game is very simple. You always have a party of two characters and can either play via online co-op or can play solo and switch between them at will, with the other being controlled by a very rudimentary AI.

I know games age and that this game is over 10 years old at this point so it can’t be judged against the stuff coming out in 2022. Fortunately, I played a bunch of Xbox 360 games from start to finish in October of last year so I can judge this against its peers. I had a genuinely good time with The Darkness II, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and especially Alice: Madness Returns, which came out about a month after The First Templar. Comparing The First Templar to Madness Returns feels almost unfair because of the enormous gulf in quality on almost every level. Even something like Lords of Shadow 2, a game that I didn’t really enjoy, feels of a different generation than the First Templar. This feels like an early PS2 game in almost every respect except the quality of the 3D models, textures, and camera. The story is scattershot, choppy, and extremely stupid. The voice acting borders on amateurish, though the bad script certainly does not help. The animations all look stiff and canned, in the way that 6^th gen games often did. There are also a limited number of animations, which are reused frequently during cut scenes, with body language often failing to match either the script or the voice acting. Controls during combat are stiff and feel bad, and there is little interaction between characters as they hit each other, with sword swings often clearly missing by a foot or two but being counted as a hit. The game’s second boss encounter features a large enemy who goes down to one knee when hit by a knock down attack and just sort of sits there while the players whales on him. Little spurts of blood being the only indication that you’re actually doing damage until a final execution animation. The game features mechanics like parrying, countering, and various combos but has combat so loose and sloppy that you will mostly be hammering the attack button and occasionally rolling to dodge out of the way of attacks, which only works intermittently because the animation canceling is unreliable. Despite this the game is incredibly easy because of easily exploitable enemy AI and a healing ability you get relatively early that can be used to recover in between encounters or even in the middle of them.

There is only one difficult part of the game and it's a level where you have to use stealth because engaging in open combat triggers a timer that automatically fails the mission if you don't kill everyone before it runs out. Because of the horribly inconsistent aggro ranges it's very easy to pull more enemies than you can handle in the allotted time and fail the mission just because you can't possibly output enough damage to take them all down. This is awful and frustrating and I have no idea why it was included in this one part but I suspect it's why only 7% of people got credit for finishing every chapter on medium while 15% did so on easy. It took me a number of tries and I cursed every time I was sent back to a checkpoint, frequently several minutes earlier. It's a bad idea in any game but in one as shoddy and unreliable as this it's downright unforgivable.

Most of the game play is focused on combat, generally involving walking along a path until you come across a clump of about half a dozen enemies to fight. You will generally go after the archers immediately because they are a huge pain in the rear otherwise, and hope that your stupid AI companion doesn’t take too much damage while you hunt them down. You then engage in some very basic melee combat against a handful of different enemy types, such as enemies with shields you have to break or tougher enemies who have unblockable attacks, and search the area afterwards to see if there’s a chest or an alternate route to an optional objective. Combat involves a basic three attack melee strike, blocking and dodging, and special attacks that all require one point of zeal (essentially mana points that fill up during combat). These can range from a whirlwind strike to a strong attack that can break shields or stun larger enemies. You can also block normal attacks and dodge roll (necessary to avoid arrows and unblockable attacks.) You don’t get loot from enemies, only from chests.

One ‘fun’ feature of the game is that you can knock enemies down and then finish them off, which is very useful against some enemies, but you can also be knocked down yourself, in which case you just kind of roll around on the ground mashing X to get back up, which takes several seconds. It’s easy enough to avoid taking damage but it looks ridiculous and it’s the opposite of fun. It’s like you’re playing a turtle who is constantly being put down on the back of his shell. You could argue this kind of makes sense when playing as a heavily armored knight (even though actual armor only weighed 20 pounds or so and knights were perfectly mobile) but it also happens when you’re playing the scantily clad dagger wielding Marie. She has nothing weighing her down or preventing her from popping back up, she doesn’t even look injured or dizzy, it just feels like she’s somehow been hit with a very localized effect that subjects her to Jupiter-level gravity for a handful of second and then releases her. Every character has a skill to improve the ability to get up, but this just reduces the delay from ‘absolutely absurd’ to ‘still quite ludicrous and frustrating.’ You spend a lot of this game rolling around on your back and I have no idea why they thought this was a good mechanic given the way it was implemented.

The game is also pretty glitchy. I didn’t encounter any progress breaking bugs but there were lots of funny visual glitches like enemies running full tilt at you only to stop dead in their tracks when they reach their assigned positions, like actors racing into position before the curtain raises on the stage, only you can see them and it looks ridiculous. At one point some enemies clipped to the far side of a grate and then ran menacingly in place because they couldn’t path to me. I left the room to do some stuff and came back and saw them clip through it again and then charge to my position. Stealth mechanics are buggy as heck, with most enemies being completely blind in their periphery, as well as deaf. You can fight right behind their backs without triggering aggro. On the other hand there are lots of pairs of enemies that you’re intended to stealth kill one of while your partner takes the other, and seemingly at random sometimes your partner will instead trigger the other one to attack you, often drawing their allies down on your position. This once caused me to fail an optional objective, which wasn’t a big deal because despite the game featuring dozens of them I never actually learned what they did. Maybe give you XP? Hard to say because the XP rewards seem completely random. You can kill 10 tough enemies and get 90 XP or kill just a couple archers and get 500. The whole game feels like a homework assignment that was filled out on the bus on the way to school. Technically complete but full of glaring errors and sloppy, hasty, work. It’s like someone took a rushed and buggy PS2 launch title and replaced the character models with Xbox 360 assets while not making any additional changes.

Level designs consist of simple paths with a few optional branches where you can find some optional chests and those pointless objectives, which generally involve an optional fight to free a character in peril. The chests usually have either XP or a ‘boon’ that will last until the end of the level, like making one of your abilities more effective or removing the ‘zeal’ cost from an ability. Sometimes a chest will refill your zeal or health, which feels like a lousy reward for the effort many of them take to get to, since the game doesn’t have a mini map and some of the chests are hidden in overgrown areas that are a pain to search. You can also find costume pieces and if you get them all for any given set you can change how a character or weapon looks, though it is, of course, purely cosmetic. XP is spent in a menu to unlock abilities (like new combos or a dagger throw) or bonuses (such as getting more zeal from enemy kills or an extra health bar) from unique multi-pathed skill trees for each character. By the end of the game I was able to unlock almost everything, but for the first part of the game there are some meaningful trade offs and decisions to be made, and this is one area of the game that doesn’t feel particularly phoned in.

The game isn’t all combat and it does try to switch up encounters by adding in story beats or special events like an optional objective where you have to rescue people trapped in a burning building or an area where there are archers across a river, and you have to block or avoid their arrows as you make your way down the road. It also has a hodge-podge of half-baked mechanics like the ability to examine certain glowing objects for clues to a nearby chest, or following footprints to find an optional objective, or very annoying bear traps you can avoid or disarm. I already mentioned the very basic stealth mechanics where you press a sneak button and avoid the guards’ vision cones or sneak up behind them for an execution, but it’s incredibly rudimentary and doesn’t add much to the experience. Fortunately the stealth sections maintain the game’s rock bottom difficulty level, at least on normal, so they’re not frustrating for the most part, even when they bug out and you get swarmed. You can’t even smash the crates and barrels lying around and having these scattershot things to have rudimentary interactions with just makes the environments feel barren and non-interactive. Even the original Ratchet & Clank on the PS2 had more to see and do in its environments.

I can give some respect to the designers for a few levels based around puzzles that require you to either coordinate in co-op or switch between characters to complete them. They’re mostly pretty simple affairs, like throw switch A with character X to open a door and leave him there to hold it open while you move character Y to throw switch B that keeps the door open or creates another path to navigate with character X, who can let go of their switch now that Y is through. None of it is groundbreaking but it’s at least some variety and I appreciated them trying to at least do something with the dual protagonist set up. Your AI controlled companion is also decently hardy and can mostly keep herself alive and is, thankfully, very good (but not perfect) at avoiding traps. She isn’t great offensively but she will get at least some kills so she doesn’t feel totally worthless. The game could have felt like one long escort quest, but it doesn’t, and that’s to its credit**.

Those puzzles and the non-burdensome AI companion might do more to elevate the game if the levels themselves are so bland. These are the same dusty Mediterranean roads and zero underbrush forests we’ve all been through in just so many games. Alice: Madness Returns offered up unique fantasy landscapes I’d never seen before, and even Castlevania: Lords of Shadow made its more conventional areas interesting with lots of verticality and oversized ruins that conveyed scale and grandeur. First Templar has you walk along a path in the woods until you come to one or two run down buildings and who could possibly care about that even in 2011? This was the same year as Assassin’s Creed: Revelations offered up a colorful and fully explorable version of Constantinople along with a host of mini-games and optional things to do. Obviously Assassin’s Creed’s budget dwarfs that of The First Templar, but the games were out at the same time on the same hardware and even though the First Templar came out at a lower price point there’s not so much a gulf in quality between the games as there is an ocean. And I didn’t even really like Revelations that much!

It seems a little cruel to ask of a game “why does this exist?” Even bad games take thousands upon thousands of man hours to produce. I’m sure some digital artist stayed at the office until 3 AM to get the glint on the chain mail texture just right, and even crappy linear levels require a ton of work to build and playtest and refine to the point where they’re better than embarrassingly amateurish. Other than the animation in the cut scenes nothing about First Templar is embarrassingly amateurish. It’s all professional quality, it’s just very poor considering the time and platform it was released for. Did the 360 need another sword-based action game with RPG elements? No. Was this a story that ached to be told and was worth suffering through the boring “game” parts to experience? No. This is the American Cheese of video games. It’s definitely a food stuff and it’s not horribly unpleasant to ingest, but even at the lower price you can find something better to gnaw on. There’s just nothing that makes it worthwhile.

A few months ago I played Blood Knights and declared it the rare game that’s so bad it’s good, with an absolutely bonkers plot and numerous inexplicable choices, like a side quest that has you search out torches that are so far from town that only a great archer can light them but that are in fact located by the side of the road and can just be walked up to and lit. The First Templar is not quite as stupid and weird, which makes it better, and thus less entertaining. It has moronic moments that make it impossible to take seriously, like when a character who you presume dead shows up and admits to having betrayed the Templar order and helped in the murder of hundred of your brothers, only for you to immediately trust him implicitly and do everything he says. Eventually there's a several minute cut scene where he explains himself and talks about the evil woman who seduced him into the betrayal and is manipulating everyone with her sinister schemes. She's mentioned one more time in passing but otherwise completely dropped from the game, and you never meet her or even discuss her again. The First Templar nonetheless presents its plot in a completely serious manner, expecting the player to care about its one note characters and cliché objectives.

The First Templar is not the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s comparable to something like Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood, which I played last year and really did not like. At the time I said that the game was so bad it made a case for backwards compatibility and then I used that feature to play something almost as bad. The irony is not lost on me. Templar has some advantages over Werewolf, chiefly that I cut it a break for being over a decade old and because as cliché as “island, forest, abbey, city, catacombs” is for level progression it’s still better than “wilderness, office, office, office, office, desert, office, office.” Having a companion character with you also allows for slightly better dialog and I prefer bad melee combat to bad stealth, which Werewolf had a lot of. On the other hand First Templar drags horribly for the back 40% or so of the game. It shows all its cards by the time you hit the big plot twist, which seems like it could easily be the end, but then it spends almost as much time tying up the loose plot threads to no meaningful advantage. The back part of the game is plodding and boring and repetitive. Even the banter between the characters dries up as they just glumly go through the motions because the game has to have a 12 hour campaign for the back of the box. I was longing for some stupid sexist comment about what being a girl is all about from my companion who wore a miniskirt and push up bra through all the dungeons I clanked through in my full suit of armor, but she was silent most of the time. Probably thinking about all the better games she could be playing, just like me. In the end I think this was worse than Werewolf. Maybe the first half was a bit better but the back part was so utterly pointless that I finished it only because I wanted to write about it and as some kind of self-punishment for even starting the stupid thing when I could have been playing literally hundreds of better games. Last year I finished Bioshock and said I wanted to play the sequel, which I own. I still haven’t. I have the last DLC for Alan Wake downloaded on my Series X and I’ve always wanted to check out Mini-Ninjas, which I also own. I played the Conan 360 game in 2010 but I could have run through that one again. I was messing around with Pop ‘n Twinbee on Nintendo Switch Online the other day and that was kind of fun. I have literally hundreds of better choices available. Why did I pick this game that I already knew was going to be bad? Just to confirm that it was, in fact, bad? It is! I need to make better decisions.

At least I liked the soundtrack. There’s not a lot of music; most of the game just has ambient sound, which is fine, but when music kicks in it tends to be some pretty enjoyable orchestral stuff and it was better than I expected. The environmental/character models and textures are all decent as well, though the environments themselves feel sparse when compared to its contemporaries.

Still, this just isn’t the kind of game I should be bothering with at this point in my life. I like the idea of continuing to play games from previous generations and I don’t want to stick strictly to the big megahits that everyone loves because there’s a lot of value in cult classics and flawed but interesting games. I keep mentioning Alice: Madness Returns because I really liked that game, but Shadows of the Damned was certainly a ride worth taking and The Darkness II has a solid, briskly paced, campaign that lets you chop people in half with air conditioner fans.

But I don’t need to play through the trash of the past. There are plenty of bad games being made today and most of them are better than the bad games of yesteryear just by virtue of having more modern art and controls. With game pass and backlogs and deep sales I have access to more games than I will ever have time to play and there’s just no need for me to confirm that the games that everyone says are bad are, in fact, bad. If you ever find yourself stuck in a cabin at night with no Internet but a TV and a 360 and no better games then the First Templar is probably better than staring at the ceiling and counting the knots in the wood. But in 2022 there’s just no reason to play this. There wasn’t really in 2011 either. If a video game can’t be good it should at least be interesting. First Templar is neither. In gaming, just as in life, there are venal and mortal sins, and being boring is perhaps the worst of all of them. First Templar belongs in digital purgatory with all the other bad games that we’re better off forgetting.

The final boss of The First Templar is an enemy you’ve already fought and he’s so slow that you have time to run away and heal during the fight. Because he’s also cheap, easily able to block your attacks and fire back unblockable strikes that are faster than your animation canceling, it makes the battle a long, boring, battle of attrition that you know you will win but can’t bring yourself to care about. That’s a good summation of the game as a whole. There’s nothing worthwhile here, just a bunch of rolling around on the ground mashing X to get back up. You’re better off getting up from the couch, closing the program and ejecting the disc, and going outside or at least putting something better on. Time is far too precious a resource to squander on something like The First Templar. I just hope I can remember that.

*I feel like that score is still way too high for this game.

**Don’t worry, though, the game does have actual escort missions, with the typical braindead AI where your escorted NPCs just stand around taking hits. Fortunately they have enough life and the enemies don’t all beeline straight to them so it’s only mildly annoying instead of game breaking.

What's this? I see someone is stealing my brand over here.

I sure did buy my own copy of The First Templar a couple steam sales ago for *Season 3* purposes, and it sounds like from your write up that I've come across a banger. The 360/PS3 era is, in some ways, kind of a golden age of questionable-to-bad eurojank action RPGs. Anything traditional or turn-based was still considered too risky pre-Wasteland 2, so you have a lot of devs who are clearly trying, with limited budget and scale, to make the kinds of games that the market simply wasn't allowing for at the time. Shoutouts to my boi Arcania: Gothic IV.

There are still noble champions out there (probably at Spiders or Cyanide) making mid-budget clunk, but it's not nearly as ubiquitous as it used to be. I mean, shit, Larian went from making Divinity II: Ego Draconis in 2009 to being the studio behind motherfucking Baldur's Gate III. CD Projekt Red went from The Witcher 1 running on a duct-taped version of the Neverwinter Nights 1 engine to The Witcher 3 being of the biggest games of the previous console generation. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, we need to ensure Eurojank is preserved for future generations.

Doing a little bit of digging, it seems this game was from the same Bulgarian studio responsible for Victor Vran, Surviving Mars, and several of the modern Tropico games (but not the most recent Tropico 6) so it's not like they haven't put out decent video games before. This is going to make for a quality stream, I can tell.

@arbitrarywater: Oh word this is a Haemimont joint? Big fan of their work, but I think I'll be forgiven for maybe giving this one a pass.

Edit: Also they're the ones doing that new Jagged Alliance. Not quite the Larian "Ego Draconis to Baldur's Gate" arc, but still.

Damn, I really like this game upon release, even though it's the kind of mid-tier joint that would age instantly. I'd still play this a dozen times before touching Lords of Shadow 2 ever again. And that's with the knowledge that publisher Kalypso only has a fraction of the budget than Konami would. This is Eurojank City bay;bee the girls that get it, get it.

... Now go play DARK 😈

I knew from the title of this thread that it was one of two community members here. Y'all need to do a collab (I think that's what the youth call it these days) at some point, maybe for Extra Life this year? Just throwing the idea out there.

@arbitrarywater: This isn't your gimmick because in the various wheels of questionableness you ask yourself "would I play more of this?" and then you mostly don't. I finished this abomination, and that was where the real self-harm happened. There's a version of this blog written about halfway through the game that's significantly more positive because there's still some novelty to some of the systems and some jank amusement left. It was only in the back half when the game just ground on pointlessly repeating the same beats over and over that I grew to truly dislike it.

I could see this doing decently well in one of your features if you play 1.5-3 hours. At that point it's kind of amusing in its jankiness and bad storytelling. Also if you play 3 hours you won't get to the level with strict time limits on all the combat, which is where I got actively angry at the devs, because up until then their weird decisions and laziness (lack of resources) were at least not progression blocking.

I also kind of disagree with your characterization of the game because this isn't really trying to be an RPG. There's no equipment, very limited abilities, no dialog choices or even choices of where to go or what to do next. There are sidequests, I guess, but they give no rewards and many of them are just optional objectives that appear out of nowhere rather than being given by an NPC. This is like one of the designers of one of the bad games you love decided to make an action game like Lords of Shadow. Except that game arguably had more RPG elements.

@daavpuke: Lords of Shadow 2 is a much better game in basically every aspect except unintentional comedy. Again, I don't like that game, but it has actual combat, much more interesting environments and storytelling, and feels just so much better to control. There are boss battles in that game and they don't feel like they came from a budget title from the year 2000. I don't think this game aged instantly I think it was born old and outdated. And again, I want to remind everyone that I'm not looking at 2011 era 360 games with nostalgia goggles. I played Alice: Madness Returns and Lords of Shadow (1 and 2) and Shadows of the Damned this very October, all for the first time. I know what games from this era were like and they weren't like this!

@bladeofcreation: Unfortunately I got on team @arbitrarywater's bad side because I recommended Starship Titanic as a bad adventure game. I'm pretty sure @zombiepie cursed me, Danhausen style, and that's why I ended up playing this game. It wasn't my fault after all. It was @zombiepie's revenge!

+

I have absolutely no recollection of being on this QL! God it's been a long ten years!

Speaking of games one finished and regret doing so... I finished Starship Titanic and @arbitrarywater was a witness.

It’s a poor video game and it made me angry

I'm late to the party, but this was a great write up, and now I must scour my local shop for a physical copy post haste.

I'm kidding, but I'm surprised I never owned this game, like 10 years ago I was attempting a complete 360 collection (I know not smart) but yet even back then I somehow managed to stay away from this game.