With the popularity of Dark Souls at the moment, difficulty seems to be the buzzword of the industry. This can be a great boon and imbues games with a sense of accomplishment and worth when done correctly. Blackguards seems difficult for all the wrong reasons, from an obtuse user interface to mindbogglingly poorly designed stats pages.
While I appreciate that any game coming from an existing Pen and Paper world will always have a higher step up for the user than most, Shadowrun earlier last year seemed to create a system both faithful and functional while Blackguards seemed bogged down in it's own mechanics.
The story is about par for course and the voice acting is quite refreshing, but it just seems like the clunky mechanics just get in the way of that experience and the difficulty wildly differs so much you bound between feeling elated and cheated every few minutes.
While people howl off the rooftops at the percieved "dumbing down" of videogames, sometimes it has a point. Parts of the design feel snobbish, as if it wants to pat it's faithful on the back and tell them how smart and clever they are while with the other hand swatting away the "casual, filthy masses". Blackguards needs to get down of it's high horse and reduce the barriers to entry that stop it from being the good game I know underneath is has the potential to be.

With the popularity of Dark Souls at the moment, difficulty seems to be the buzzword of the industry. This can be a great boon and imbues games with a sense of accomplishment and worth when done correctly. Blackguards seems difficult for all the wrong reasons, from an obtuse user interface to mindbogglingly poorly designed stats pages. While I appreciate that any game coming from an existing Pen and Paper world will always have a higher step up for the user than most, Shadowrun earlier last year seemed to create a system both faithful and functional while Blackguards seemed bogged down in it's own mechanics. The story is about par for course and the voice acting is quite refreshing, but it just seems like the clunky mechanics just get in the way of that experience and the difficulty wildly differs so much you bound between feeling elated and cheated every few minutes. While people howl off the rooftops at the percieved "dumbing down" of videogames, sometimes it has a point. Parts of the design feel snobbish, as if it wants to pat it's faithful on the back and tell them how smart and clever they are while with the other hand swatting away the "casual, filthy masses". Blackguards needs to get down of it's high horse and reduce the barriers to entry that stop it from being the good game I know underneath is has the potential to be.