Dark Deity

I’ve always loved tactical RPG’s, so I picked this one back up while I continue finding things to do while watching my newborn baby sleep. I played this through in its entirety back in the day, but could not accomplish the same feat this time around as my game crashed repeatedly on the 22nd stage (out of 30). I would have been more annoyed about it, but at this point in the play through I was just slogging through out of a persistent need to finish as opposed to because I was still having fun.

So, first note – my game was crashing. This never happened on the first play through, but I just got a new computer so I doubt it is a hardware problem. I don’t imagine the bug that got me will bother everyone, but it isn’t great.

As far as the actual game – the tactical game play is solid and held my attention for a decent amount of hours. It’s a pretty simple tactical game, where some units have advantages over others in a rock – paper – scissors type of scenario. This is also mixed with a combination of characters that have a variety of attack ranges, and objectives for each map. It’s not super complex, as most of the abilities other than “attack” are underwhelming.

My biggest gripe is with the leveling system, which is often the core of a RPG. All of your stat points are allocated randomly, so you have no choice in how to develop your characters. This can lead to some characters becoming unreasonably overpowered if they get lucky results, while others have the opposite problem. There’s also a class tree, but it is also not super interesting as each upgrade is only for passive abilities, so the characters play pretty much the same no matter what you choose.

I also disliked the barrage of characters that the game introduces over time. You start with a small team of heroes, but eventually you have 30ish characters to choose from, while only ever using 14. I feel the need to keep using all of them, which is just unwieldy and hurts my actual team development. It’s also hard to manage – I stopped paying attention to the items and upgrades on my heroes eventually, because it was just tedious.

Speaking of tedious, this game clearly hired a staff member to just be a dialogue writer. They didn’t want this person’s work to go to waste, so you can’t really skip through any dialogue. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel just trying to click through text. The worst part of the game, more than a game breaking bug, is the Bond system. It is entirely optional, but for those of us who like to get rid of all of our notifications, you have an endless amount of clicking to get through this section. There are 30 characters, and each of them has a level of relationship with each other. Every time a relationship level from any of these characters upgrades, you can’t just click a button to get the completion, you must click through pages and pages of dialogue. It bugs me that I couldn’t just ignore this useless system, but they could help a player out by allowing a reasonable skip dialogue option.

Overall, the game is fine. There are much better tactical RPG’s out there, but if you have played those already, might as well give this one a shot.

My Score

5

OpenCritic Average

74

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