Dungeon crawling in the dark
Sometimes you play a game and can get flashes of greatness, glimpses of what the developer wanted the game to be. You can see all of that glory thorough the haze of bugs and glitches, that it hurts when you can’t get to the promised land so it is with Blightbound. Despite a beautiful gothic art style, a large cast of playable characters and a very entertaining gameplay loop, Blightbound is marred by issues that makes it extremely frustrating to play and enjoy.
Developed by Romino Games (creators of the wondrously fun side-scrolling MOBA Awesomenauts) and published by the good folks over at Devolver Digital, Blightbound is a side-scrolling, multiplayer. Hack-and-slash. In it, the players will choose from three classes; Mage, Assassin and Warrior with each functioning as Healer, Damage, Tank. The initial setup is quite promising, as the game plays out like a mix of old school Gauntlet with some Dungeons and Dragons. Each class has a basic attack, class ability and a few other skills that is up to the player to figure out how to mix them up for maximum effectiveness. Overall combat is one of those bright spots that this game has as its quite satisfying cut down evil creatures. Simple to pick up, I could play the game by mashing the melee button. But I would have be doing my team and I a great disservice as success lied in my ability to work as a team and utilize my skills. Upon finishing a dungeon run, players are rewarded with all the loot that was found as well as any heroes they managed to rescue. These people will all become playable characters to choose from. As I said, everyone falls into the three classes and archetypes, which means that all of the characters will play similarly minus a few exceptions.
MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $19.99
Another area where Blightbound deserves some props is the story. The world in which our heroes live is in a word awful. A Shadow Titan lies slain after at destroyed the sun and its blood is infecting and covering the land with Blight. It is the job of the player as the hero to venture down from the mountaintop retreat in order to push back against the blight and rescue any of what is surely the last of humanity found along the way. The art style, and environments really help to sell the grimdark state of the world. Not to mention some of the creature designs are shockingly grotesque and really help personify the twisted landscape from which they spawned. As one progresses through each dungeon each of the characters may push their individual narratives forward as they have a task or memory about the particular dungeon. If playing in single-player players will only move the narrative of the hero they are controlling not one of the bots taken with them; the same is true in multiplayer only now of course each person will make progress with their hero.
But as I said above, Blightbound is a game unfortunately plagued by more than just the blood of a Shadow Titan; one of my many issues included getting stuck on a simple switch puzzle. In addition to the combat, Blightbound has some light puzzle solving to keep things fresh. It’s a welcome addition to break up the fighting when it works correctly. The setup for my aforementioned puzzle problem is easy, two switches on either side of a gate and one block on the side the team is on. So, we just need to move the block to a switch while one person stands on the other and the remaining folks go to the other side once the gate opens to stand on those for person A to pass… Whew… this was a lot to type but should have been simple in process. Well the A.I. decided to not cooperate unlike they had just done on the puzzle before this. So instead of moving when I trigger the gate to open they just stand still, and with no way to progress I was forced to end yet another run due to no fault of my own. Not only losing time and progress but also any loot that was gained up to that point. Well you might be thinking that you can just play with friends and that will solve the AI issues. You’d be correct, it would stop the AI issues but not the others.
My time with Blightbound was sadly marred by multiple issues. The most egregious of which was the multiple hard locks I experienced while playing, the game also suffered from frames dropping to almost unplayable levels when the action picks up. There is a crossplay matchmaking function for those of us who might not have a large group of friends, which would be great if it worked correctly consistently. Multiple times I would be searching for a match for 15 minutes or more while I watched the game connect me to one person, then disconnect me, then connect me to a different person then disconnect me and that dance continued until it dropped me in with two others. We were able to play for about 5 minutes until the server crashed and we were separated and kicked back to our offline lobbies. Sometimes I’d matchmake and just never get successfully matched with anyone, there was no rhyme or reason to it either.
When Blightbound works the way the developers intended the game is fantastic fun! Working together with your team searching levels for loot and fighting bosses is a blast. Which makes it that much more painful when you run into the issues with this game. Because you KNOW there is fun to be had here, you want to progress the story and find out more about this dark and gothic world. The beautiful contrast between the bright colors and dark a dreary environment is really a sight to behold. The puzzles, however simple they may be work to bring home that “adventuring” aspect of the game. Sadly, just about everything else is broken, and it makes you want to pull out your hair in frustration. Coming off of what was a year in Early Access on PC I had high hopes that most if not all of these things wouldn’t be an issue. But the team can correct these things with some patches, and hopefully that is what they are going to do because its going to be a shame to let this universe languish and go to waste because the potential is definitely there for greatness.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
