To start off, you’re fighting for very insignificant swamp-towns. In order to conquer the land before you, you must capture settlements, towns, and cities until you reach the goal of Mengbilla, the capital of South Aventuria. There were many moments where I was ready to chalk this game up as a big ‘NO,’ but after pushing through the early stages of the game, I realised that maybe there is some fun to be had in Blackguards 2 after all. Turn-based strategy games can often get away with lacklustre graphics, but I think there needs to be a certain graphical point that developers need to achieve before the game can be credited, and Daedalic Entertainment have not reached this point. The game looks so flat that I thought I was playing Runescape at times. In the game, it just appears as one rigid motion that hardly replicates the motions that would actually be made on a battlefield. Say you’re stabbing someone with a spear. I killed that guy with my club.” And this is really down to the graphics and animations.

I can’t say there was any point in time that I felt like a fight was brutal. Your rise to power is meant to be swift and brutal. You are meant to be conquering the whole of South Aventuria, a vast land of many terrains and environments. And then you think, “wow that looks really average.” That is basically Blackguards 2 in a nutshell. Surely you have thought about buying a game, but first, you decide to look at a gameplay video or a few screenshots. You’ve already heard me banging on about the visuals, but now I will expand on it. Although it isn’t essential to play the first, the inclusion of familiar characters will surely please fans of the series. It is set a few years after the first instalment of the series, which was released around the same time last year. She starts with nothing, but it doesn’t take her long to gather a group of followers, including some old characters from the first game, as well as a band of mercenaries. It follows the adventures of Cassia, who desires to rule over South Aventuria. Sure, Daedalic Entertainment’s budget probably wasn’t that sizeable, but it feels like the developers just had a quick look over the game’s visuals and just said “yeah that’ll do.” Thankfully, there are many redeeming factors about this game, which actually make it viable in today’s day and age.īlackguards 2 is a turn-based RPG developed by German studio, Daedalic Entertainment. By no means does this subtract from the fun you can have with the game, but the graphics, the animations, and everything that is visual about this game can be very taxing on the eye.

It looks like something that would fit right in with the games of last decade. It’s hard to believe Blackguards 2 is actually being released in 2015.

Blackguards 2 publisher