Grand Battle

This is how the developer describes Grand Battle: “a new Action RPG developed by AKC for the individuals who want the very best in gaming. The story is majestic and compelling, the characters are rich in story, the combat is innovative, new and exciting. Grand Battle is using the latest technology to bring visuals you have never experienced before! Get your hands on a copy of Grand Battle today!”  I’d describe it as a steaming pile of garbage, sadly. Whilst playing the game I’ve found myself wanting to pull the hairs out of my scalp more often than not. Read why in my review for Grand Battle!

• Doesn’t happen much, nothing: I’m genuinely having an extremely hard time finding anything about this game that I liked. I’m in love with the concept, but the poor execution of the game just ruined everything. There’s absolutely nothing that I found enjoyable, I’d go as far as to say I despised it. And that’s coming from someone who’s played a lot of games, and a huge variety of them, but I’ve never come across anything that looked like such an underdeveloped, buggy, rushed, mess.

• Story: You start of the game in a pub at a round table, with four NPCs’ and yourself talking about a dragon and a meteor that has struck the land causing monsters to appear… That’s the story. That’s it. It drops you in the game after that with the quest objective “travel and gain strength.” I had absolutely no clue what to do, and the game barely gives you any directions.
• Playable characters: The player models weren’t that bad, however these weren’t made by them but bought off of the unity asset store, which in my opinion is just straight up lazy. There’s a mechanic inside the game that allows you to switch to different characters with the press of a button, by itself an interesting mechanic, but also very buggy and did not work half of the time. Character progression was also very detailed, but very indistinct and hard to use.

• Enemies: Ugly, generic, and have barely any sound or any decent animation, I’m not sure, but I feel like these were also ripped straight off of the unity asset store. Their spawn rate is also abysmal, it’s so low, and they always spawn in the same locations, it’s very predictable and bland. The experience gained from these monsters also doesn’t increase as you progress the game, or at least not a sufficient amount as it felt I was constantly grinding the same three bland and generic enemies for a good 40 minutes to be able to progress.
• Terrible sound mixing: There’s a severe lack of proper sound design, the statues (which are used to save your progress) have an extremely loud generic fire sound, that sound warped and distorted, and with these being placed basically everywhere it’s anything but enjoyable to listen to.
• Visuals: I usually don’t mind these very much as they do not make or break a game at all, and I actually like a cartoonish, or even pixelated graphical style. But here the graphics are just oversaturated, to the point the entire game looks orange and out of focus, even blurred and distorted at times. Which isn’t just ugly it’s also a major eye sore. The environment was empty, generic and plain ugly, there was nothing there to explore, no landmarks, no interesting points, simply nothing.
• Boring gameplay: After beating the same 3 types of monsters for over 40 minutes, I finally gathered enough experience to kill a boss fight. When I approached the boss, a dragon! The loudest and most obnoxious ‘Thump’ Sound ever played after every letter that appeared on screen. To kill this dragon, I spammed my ‘A’ button for a few seconds and voila, first obstacle out of the way. Possibly the most underwhelming boss fight I’ve ever experienced. I progressed through to the next part of the game, and quickly realized it was the same pattern, go fetch that, kill that boss, slay 20 of that monster, come back, etc. At that point, I realized there was no hope, and I was sinking into a deep state of disappointment and gave up.

Developer: AKC Publisher: AKC
Played on: PC / Steam.
Perfect for: I honestly have no idea.
Steam Game Store link: click here