Forged of Blood Review (PC) - Softpedia News

Forged of Blood is a game of extremes. For every good idea it tries to implement, there's a completely faulty game mechanic that turns the idea into a nightmare. Forged of Blood wants to be a classic turn-based strategy game in the veins of XCOM, sprinkled with deep tactical RPG elements.

Although on paper this sounds great, some of the choices made by Indonesian developer Critical Forge are questionable, to say the least. Forged of Blood is a very ambitious fantasy turn-based RPG developed by a small team, which, sadly, fails to deliver on its promises.

The premise of the game is quite interesting: you play as a Neshalan prince who's on the run after a successful coup d'etat orchestrated by humans, a race treated as second-class citizens of your empire. Your main objective is to win back the throne by conquering most of the kingdom's provinces or convince them to vote you as ruler. You'll be playing against a hard timer, which means you have so much time to try and annex as many provinces as possible to ensure your victory, otherwise, it's game over without any backdoors.

Your first team of fighters will lose one of the most powerful members after 1-2 hours of gameplay, and it's not something that you can prevent since it's related to the story. In Forged of Blood you can have three armies comprising of five fighters. These armies are called talons and lets players tackle more than one mission on the kingdom map.

The idea is to have your talons spread throughout your empire so that you can counter any attacks on your provinces while expanding your borders as quickly as possible at the same time. There are no classes in Forged of Blood, but you can specialize your fighters in the use of one or more of the nine types of weapons present in the game. Unfortunately, while this an interesting idea, it's badly implemented.

Prepare for a wold of pain

After the first few hours, you'll have to start hiring more fighters to create your other talons. Each fighter that you hire comes with a certain set of skills, which is usually much weaker than the ones you'd want to use. Not to mention that you have a limited pool of fighters to choose from and most of the time they come with the same set of skills. After each successful mission, you are given a large number of skill points that you can distribute among different weapon trees. You can't do that with new recruits, so you'll end up having a party of 3-4 fighters who are using daggers, which adds an unnecessary level of difficulty.

On top of that, even though the skill trees for all nine weapons look impressive at first glance, only a handful are actually useful in combat, while the rest seem rather filler. I'm quite sure that this wasn't intended, but that's what I felt after trying out several builds with different weapons. Besides weapons skills, your fighters can also choose from a set of passive abilities that further improve their efficiency on the battlefield. There are a couple of these which are absolutely necessary like mobility and accuracy, but there are many that are simply useless and not worth taking no matter what route you want to go with some of your fighters.

Forged of Blood comes with a complex magic system, which wants to be revolutionary. Basically, you can create your spells using various proprieties and functions. To use these spells you'll need special stones that you gear up on your characters. Each stone has two spells and after using one, you'll have to use the other to be able to use the first one again. It's quite weird and unnecessary, so if you have a healing and a buffing spell on a stone and want to heal your fighters, you'll have to use the healing spell, then the buffing one, and then the healing spell again. But that's not the only issue with the magic system. As I said, you can create your own spells so that they deal or heal a certain amount of damage. For example, one of my healing spells would heal between 0-500 points of damage, but it never got above 100, which is quite stupid and annoying.

Now for the damage-dealing spells, you can tweak the range, blast radius, intensity, and duration. They work slightly better than the healing spells since you can remove chaotic effects to increase the minimum damage, although that will drop the maximum damage it can deal as well. The best spells are those who allow you to manipulate enemies to make them skip one or more turns or slow them down. I would have preferred something simpler and more straightforward rather than such a deep, yet convoluted magic system.

Decisions matter, but they are forced on the player

Unlike traditional RPG settings, Forged of Blood comes up with its good vs. evil alignment. It's called “Tri-Axis Personality Index” and shifts the protagonist to one of the three personality traits each time he takes a decision: hedonism, altruism, and rationalism. The alignment of the main character is extremely important in Forged of Blood because this is how you convince other provinces to adhere to your cause and, more importantly, it's how you keep your fighters keep fighting for you.

I don't remember how many fighters I lost because my alignment shifted more towards altruism following some of my decisions. Basically, the game forces you to take certain decisions to maintain your retinue of fighters. If you don't want to do that, prepare for a world of pain since your fighters will start leaving you and all the time you spent tweaking their skills will have been for nothing.

As far as kingdom management goes, there are no gameplay features to allow that. There's no diplomacy, spying, building or resource gathering, it's just straight-up conquering. Even though you'll eventually control three talons, there's no way that you can tackle every mission that pops up on the kingdom map, so you'll have to skip many side missions and focus on the storyline.

What killed the game for me is the pacing at which these missions appear on the map making it impossible to complete many of them. It's a race against time if you want to win the game, so everything else but conquering provinces comes second.

The Good

Interesting narrative, voice acting
Some interesting ideas

The Bad

Poor implementation of various mechanics
Overly complex magic system
Technical issues
Lack of kingdom management features
Appalling overall presentation

Conclusion

It's sad to see such an ambitious game fail to deliver on its promises. Forged of Blood is a game that wants to distance itself from traditional RPGs by introduces a handful of new gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, almost all of them are a nuisance rather than a pleasure. The magic system is complex for the sake of being complex. The only thing it manages to achieve is to make you spend more time trying to figure it out just to realize that you can do without it.

The classless system has many flaws and needs a complete redesign. You should also be allowed to tweak the skills of your new recruits right after you hire them, not after you use them in a battle. The same goes for the pompously called Tri-Axis alignment system, which is the main reason your fighters will desert if you're not taking the “right” decisions.

I'd also like to add that the game has some serious technical issues. It crashed about a dozen times, almost once every hour or two, but that happened before the game's full release.

Long story short, Forged of Blood is the best example of a project which was meant to be big but ended up being small. I wouldn't have been so disappointed if it was a “good” small rather a than “bad” small.

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