John Gillooly sits in the comfy chair and spends some time with the Spanish Inquisition.
New concepts in computer RPGs are sadly few and far between. Usually they involve saving some mythical land from hordes of deranged elves, never-ending trolls and seas of goblins. There are many fun games, but the vast majority end up feeling like a car crash between Middle Earth and D&D. Thank god for Black Isle Studios and its fetish for bringing different concepts to RPGs.
Sure, it was responsible for one of the prime examples of PC D&D in the form of Baldur’s Gate, but it also was responsible for games like Fallout and Planescape, which stand as some of the most refreshing departures from the tried and true RPG themes. This tradition is continued in Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, which has been developed by Reflexive Entertainment under the watchful eye of Black Isle.
The story goes something like this: During the Crusades Richard the Lionheart was tricked into performing a ritual that caused an event called the disjunction, during which magic escaped into the world, forever altering the course of earth’s history. Richard teamed with his Turk enemy Saladin to seal the rift. But of course the damage was already done. Set in the area around Barcelona during the Late Middle Ages, you are cast as the scion of Lionheart, a descendant of King Richard.
Barcelona is populated with several major factions and many famous names of history. Over the course of the game you will encounter such luminaries as Machiavelli, Cervantes and Leonardo Da Vinci. Besides predictable factions like the Knights Templar, or the wizards or thieves there is also one that nobody ever expects, the Spanish Inquisition.
Each faction suits different character development paths, swordfighters will find themselves drawn to the Knights Templar, the magically inclined will look to the mysterious Wielders, and the more talkative types will like to wield the chief weapons of the Inquisition: surprise and fear.
Each faction provides for a slightly different path through the game, but this is not one of the mammoth efforts like Troika’s Arcanum or Black Isle’s Fallout, rather it is a fairly tight experience offering days not weeks of gameplay. That is still a lot more than plenty of games out there, but Lionheart is definitely not an epic.
Lionheart is based around the SPECIAL system of character development created for the Fallout series. This system controls how your character is created and how it develops as you progress through the game. It is an essentially classless system, which endows a lot of freedom to develop characters along different paths.
Besides an array of statistics which determine your basic skills, the SPECIAL system allows for two important modifiers, called traits and perks. Traits are inherent, chosen at the time of character creation and modify your character in several ways. The quirky traits from Fallout like Bloody Mess are gone, but there is a huge range that helps to tailor your character to your playing style. Perks are similar but are given every three levels and act in a similar way to traits. These make for highly customisable characters and the SPECIAL system still stands as one of the best implemented in computer RPGs.
Unlike Fallout, combat in Lionheart is realtime, which is a generally clunky and unsatisfying experience, made worse by the stupidly restrictive 800 x 600 screen resolution (the way it’s meant to be played, my arse, NVIDIA). Combat works, but lacks the elegance and simplicity seen in other RPGs. You can recruit NPCs into your party who will fight alongside you but they are generally useless and more combat time is spent healing your companion than actually slashing the baddies. It wouldn’t get so annoying if it wasn’t for the fact that this is a combat heavy game -- no matter how silver tongued and light footed you are, at some point or another you are going to get worked and need to fight back. This is less of a problem when playing the game’s cooperative multiplayer, but this involves a straight replaying of the single player storyline and while fun, is hardly anything special.
Lionheart is so incredibly refreshing you find yourself forgiving faults like this but there are just too many ‘almost’ aspects to Lionheart. Combat is clunky, inventory management is nightmarish thanks to huge item icons that seem tailored to the myopic, dungeons usually have lots of monsters and bugger all else to make them interesting, and after a while the constant wading through pissed off bad guys gets annoying.
Reflexive and Black Isle have definitely made a good game with Lionheart, but they have fallen short of the greatness that games like Fallout and Planescape so rightly deserved.
Lionheart has such a cool premise and strong story that it does suck you in and destroy your spare time for a while, but the problems just keep grating. However, it is a fun enough experience to tide us over until Black Isle gets of its butt and announces Fallout 3.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012