The Lady or the Tiger or the cRPG
I don't believe I've ever before played a game from Daedalic Entertainment except for Valhalla Hills, which was crap. Most of their stuff looks like simpleminded tablet fodder, and the few more promising titles' customer reviews amount to a "meh" chorus. However, I do love a good gothic ambience and am always on the lookout for turn-based RPGs, so it's high time I tried Blackguards 2 (on a hefty sale.) Conveniently, it's rumored to be a short campaign and I need something to tide me over until Wasteland 3 launches in a few days. Let's give it its fair shake.
All through the early game I struggle to figure out whether I should already know all these characters and political factions from having played the first installment or whether the writers are just so enamored of dumping the player "in medias res" that they can't see all their obtuse references pile into a jumbled mess. Apparently they expect all their customers to have played both The Dark Eye tabletop setting and the original Blackguards, and even within its native Germany I'm guessing that would be a stretch of the imagination. Other cRPGs like Tyranny or The Age of Decadence can drop you into a new world and by the end of the first mission make clear the current and historic conflict, the moral milieu in which you must operate and your standing within that world. Here I'm several missions in, having recruited three champions of who-knows-what and a mercenary company worshipping... some kind of generic deity... and I've yet to figure out what it is I'm trying to conquer. A city? Ok, a city, sure, why not. What's so special about it again?
On the other hand, the setting and the characters' personalities strike the right tone, grim and merciless yet not too cartoonishly evil, each with their own distinct backstories which occasionally become relevant to your campaign. Annoyingly repetitive music but surprisingly good voice acting in the English version. On the other other hand, the main plot's not very engaging. The heroine seems to just trip into success at every step, everyone she meets weirdly eager to take the masked hobo up on her promises of future glory and declare her a prophecied conqueror - all in the worst tradition of cheesy RPG plot devices.
By mid-game I find myself enjoying both the stratetic map campaign (along with pumping NPCs for relevant factoids to use during your missions) and the basic tactical gameplay. Mana runs out quickly so your casters can't just spew magic missles all day long. Missions are laid out with a heavy emphasis on choke points and controlling your enemy's movements, enemies' stats are slanted just heavily enough to encourage prioritizing targets without making them one trick ponies, and every map contains interactable objects.
Unfortunately, you are given no information whatsoever as to any of this! Instead, missions are so overloaded with event triggers as to make foreknowledge the only "strategic" option.
On this particular map you're told to activate levers/winches to lower those bridges in the background to summon reinforcements. All well and good, except on other missions the same levers/winches summon adds. Sometimes you can see a monster next to the lever, but as often as not it's literally a case of "the lady or the tiger" on your first run through a mission. Good luck figuring out which winch is which! Or whether dropping a particular pile of rocks will kill everything under them or merely stun! Or whether the puddle of bubbling mud slogs your clogs or flares into instant death!
Walking into the summoning circle in the middle of this map triggers a swarm of high damage/low-health insectoids to drop down on top of you. In every other mission you traipse across summoning circles with no repercussions.
You're told the ent in the top right is "controlled" by the chimes next to it, but activating the chimes instead only activates the summoning circle, presumably for you to lure the ent into it to banish it.
I also went this whole mission without realizing the beehives on this monster type's horns can be targeted independently, and had no way of knowing they leave behind a permanent poison AoE wherever they fall, including upon the ent's death... or that it's a poison with strength 2 and my cure spell only works on strength 1 because I've never encountered poison before this relatively early mission and justifiably assumed it would scale gradually. They're poorly scripted to boot, performing a 1-tile-radius AoE attack even when the only character in "melee" range of them is a spearman... with bonus reach.
On other maps your mission success might depend entirely on knowing exactly how each particular enemy's scripted to act (e.g. it's the shield mook who goes for the winch, so you need to focus him, or the insectoid surrounded by guards will all turn on you as soon as you're in range, or the boss casts immunity on himself in the first round, negating any debuffs you might cast on him, or the reinforcements summoned by an enemy blowing a horn are on your side, inexplicably.) Even the interface can be a crapshoot: voiceovers frequently play with no visual clue as to the speaker's location, attack previews randomly show 0% odds or your pointer doesn't register as hovering over a gigantic 7-tile monster, and have fun hunting pixels for a beehive superimposed on a convoluted mob's twisted horns.
Oh, and did I mention you can't save inside missions?
Every time a monster pops up out of nowhere or you misclick shifting pixels at a critical moment or you activate the wrong doodad or you realize enemies keep spawning unless you advance to tile #123, you will likely have to redo the entire mission.
A-yup.
As annoying as it can be to admit you've been ripped off by a bad game, watching an otherwise worthy title stumble into an undeserved early grave somehow bothers me even more. Blackguards 2 does not deserve its current banishment to the dollar bin. Its tactical gameplay is fairly solid, its writing on par or better than the Neverwinter Nights original campaigns, its level design far superior to cRPGs' average, its monsters more interesting.
Yet still, when every single map contains a brand new mechanic or some moronic scripted "surprise" halfway through to be discovered by sheer trial and error forcing gratuitous restarts every time, the main criterion for success in this campaign is obviously... having already played the campaign.
There's replay value, and then there's the cheap old "rocks fall, everyone dies" routine which only cheats players out of their time investment.
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