I kept hearing that this was some sort of secret Elder Scrolls-killer, a cult classic, “Oblivion on steroids” it even says on the back of the box. And I gotta say in all honesty: No it is not.

The graphics and animations look worse than a lot of PS2 games. Seriously, some of this shit looks like it belongs in GTA 3. Yet despite that it runs at a framerate of about 20 most of the time and still constantly freezes and stutters, rendering the game almost unplayable. Combat sucks. Attacking is incredibly imprecise, the attack animations are floaty and stilted, you look like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber, and whatever you’re using, swords, spears, clubs, your attacks have dismal range, which is especially infuriating when you’re trying to chase down something that keeps running away from you like an archer. When either you or your enemies get hit, you jitter awkwardly in place and there’s a low res blood effect that looks like it’s from an early version of After Effects, and bafflingly, the sound when you hit enemies, again with anything, swords, clubs, whatever, is a stock cartoon punch sound effect, like something out of a Nostalgia Critic video, as if it was a placeholder sound that they just forgot to replace before the final release. There’s also a backstep with stupid long i-frames that’s easy to abuse and isn’t even animated, just has you rubber band backward. The enemy AI can also be really stupid, and they’ll sometimes just sit there throwing attacks while you’re out of range. Under normal circumstances, I found most enemies were fodder, I found myself getting screwed over by the janky mechanics a lot of the time, but when things lined up (aka, I abuse the backstep), regular enemies could be dispatched by the dozens with ease. But then it’ll hit you with these really abrupt difficulty spikes and suddenly throw you up against enemies far higher a level than you that can kill you in two or even just one hit. The game also theoretically has an open ended main quest structure, but the level and reputation requirements for each area roughly constrict you to doing them in a certain order unless you plan on grinding insubordinately. There are debuffs too, which I think are supposed to immobilize you, based on the animation, but you’re still able to move through them so it’s you sliding around in the animation of you standing there, covering your eyes or something. Quest design is basic at best and repetitive at worst. Most quests are just you talking to a guy, then he sends you to talk to another guy, who sends you to another, then another, then another, and it just keeps repeating ad lapidum, until it culminates in you being sent to fetch or kill something. The whole experience is also buggy as hell. Animation glitches, audio glitches, several moments had me or my horse getting stuck on nothing and having to reload a save.

To top it all off, the writing is awful. On the surface the story is basic, find the mcguffins, save your oddly sexualized sister. In practice, it mostly just boils down to exposition, you being told things that you’re almost never explicitly shown. And it feels like every character is drunk, as characters make some of the dumbest, most baffling and counter intuitive decisions I’ve seen in a game like this. The dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like they wanted to make it old timey, but couldn’t be bothered to do the research, so they just threw words like “pray” and “verily” into sentences at random. The delivery makes it worse, this voice acting is some of the most horrendous I’ve ever heard, I have to mention a particular npc in the Japanese part of the map, who cycles between like three different accents in the same conversation. Then again, you’re probably not even going to hear all of it though, because the volume is hugely inconsistent, I had frequent cases of the music drowning out the characters voices.

This game is a complete disaster. But I hate to end on a completely negative note, so if there’s one positive I can think of off the top of my head, I found it amusing that bandits had a pocket sand attack.