Are you a fan of strategy games? Or do you like a good adventure? Or just Indie games in general? And are you interested in knowing what it’s like to play The Blackbird of Armor? Well, read ahead! This for sure will be an interesting review, one of the kinds I have not yet written before.
Indie developer BCETracks has released its first game “The Blackbird of Armor”, which they label as ‘adventure, indie, strategy’ for a price of 17 Euros at the time of writing in the Steam store. Based on the fact that it has been labelled as available since December 19th, 2019, without any reviews, got me a little sceptical, and rightfully so. I will be skipping the usual “what we liked”, since this is game does not deserve a mention in this category. I thought that after Crucible, I would never play a worse entry, but it seems I have to reconsider here.
What we liked!
- Unfortunately, I will be skipping this part, as I mentioned in the intro.
Somewhere between
- If there are no things I liked, maybe something that was still worth something? Nope, not here. I’ll only be discussing the things I didn’t like.
What we disliked
- Soundtrack and variation: The game plays the same song during the whole “story”. If you do actually reach certain scenes, it does swap to something else for a little moment, just to return to the main track again. After one hour I just got sick of the sound and put it on mute. (No idea why they even dare to sell the audio track separate for 79 cents but ok).
- Story: The story feels stolen, but yet quite original. I don’t read many visual novels, but this game did not represent what could have been for this genre. We reviewed some other visual novels in the past, which felt more interactive and better told than this one, for example, Ars Fabulae.
If you would want the short story idea, feel free to head over to the steam webpage and decide for yourself if it is worth the playthrough. - Combat: Combat feels odd in multiple ways. First of all, it’s turn-based, and it brings confusion. If it’s the other enemy’s turn, your UI changes too. That being said, the hint popups stay for too long, and you have to click them away constantly. If all of that has been clicked through, there is little variation in the fight itself and feels overly hard to actually get through.
- General game vibe: The game characters are drawn quite nice, but that’s all I can say about it. Besides this, my screen felt filled with grey accents that just kept pushing a sad feeling whilst reading. What could have made this so much better, was a decent voice over.
- Gameplay controls: The game controls are just not explained, you have to figure them out for yourself. Enter seemed to be the way to go, and when you can’t get further with pressing enter, start moving your mouse over items until you have something to click. Felt just flow breaking and harsh.
I would not recommend this game at all, it feels rushed, with a mediocre story and annoying combat. Maybe if the game would be down priced, and the category would be swapped to story/novel, instead of adventure, then I could see a reason to buy this game. But for now, a sad reminder of what a game shouldn’t be.
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