Here are some impressions, after completing the game.
Music is beautiful, inspiring and epic. Music in launch trailer made BbF look almost like an AAA title.
VO is a mixed bag. Some voices are pretty good (including protagonist), most are decent but there are some
lets just say disturbing.
Gameplay. BbF is an ARPG, so its no surprise youll spend most of your time fighting. Combat is far from perfect, sometimes may feel glitchy and unfair. Prepare for few frustrating difficulty spikes. That said, combat is pretty fun, challenging and it works fine most time. Switching between fighting styles on fly and addition of fire magic makes pretty potent mix.
Story choices related to your demon side affect gameplay to some extent. By increasing your fire affinity, youre forced to do some trade-offs (i.e. lower ice resistance). I like this system, its a breath of fresh air and one of strongest points of this production.
Graphics. Unfortunately game looks dated. Some locations are better than others, most are rather uninspiring. Models of Vulkan and his companions (other than Sibil) are pretty nice, npcs didnt get the same treatment. Combat animations are passable, nothing great about it but they do the job. If youre hoping for blades collisions (like on gameplay trailers) well, you can stop now as save yourself from a disappointment.
Now to negatives:
- World. *sigh* Collection of corridors that never expand into any form of more open space.
- Story. Even though setting seems interesting, execution falls below even modest expectations. More you play, less sense it makes. In the end its hard to care about anything or anyone, with all those flaws and holes in script.
- Dialogs. There are some funny moments, but mostly its pretty trashy.
- Choices don't seem to carry much weight.
- Game is short. Ive completed it in 16 hours, listening to every single (boring) dialog, doing most (generic) sidequests. I expected more.
In the end
BbF could be called Bound by Budget.
Game lacks scale. When it focus on smaller things (like defence of swamp village) it does it pretty well. When it tries to be more epic, disconnect becomes tangible. There are some MAJOR world changing events that happens during the game and all we get is to live in their aftermath. You cant influence them, hell there is no way you can even see them. I guess visualization of large scale battles took too much money
Its jus one of many flaws, many faults. Its unfinished, unpolished. Story from act 3 and beyond could (and tbh should) be rewritten.
With all that said, I enjoyed my time with BbF. Maybe thats because there arent that many good RPGs lately (it might sound like blasphemy but Im not a DS fan). I played Mars War Logs and I think BbF is a step in a good direction. Spiders have pretty decent combat system, now they need to focus on story, dialogs and world-building. Looking at pace they are progressing, I doubt their next RPG will be on par with Witcher or DA series. Still - they might get there sometime in future.
If you like RPGs, BbF might be a game for you just dont expect GOTY material. For all others its cautious rent/skip.
