It’s easier to create video games now than ever before. Free game engines are available for developers of any level: free Unity, Unreal Engine – with some reservations and many others, less known and popular. However, most of them require specific skills from the developer, and a person without a base of certain skills simply will not be able to work successfully and comfortably with these engines.
Fortunately, there are projects that allow people who have no or minimal programming skills to create their own games. And even if you can’t make a blockbuster with beautiful cutscenes and helicopter explosions using these engines, they still remain an excellent option for small indie studios and solo developers who don’t have the resources and experience to work with the same Anril, but there is the main thing – an idea that you want to implement. One of these engines “for beginners” is RPG Maker. This is the engine the game is made on Heroines of Swords and Spells.
Let me make a reservation right away that in my review I will try to take into account the limitations of the engine, and not criticize the game for those things that cannot be implemented within the framework of RPG Maker it’s simply impossible.
The review has a video version, which is under the spoiler right here.
Heroines of Swords & Spells invites us to assemble a team of girls from four standard classes – thief, warrior, mage and priestess and take part in a fun and moderately epic adventure to save our native village from goblins. It would seem like a very banal premise – but in fact, the plot and narration are one of the strongest sides of the Heroines.
The developer’s humor is obvious from the very beginning of the game: before us is not just a thief, a warrior, a magician and a priest. Thief – Diana, believes that taking someone else’s property is not good, and sometimes, breaking into someone else’s house, he sees that things are not going well with the owners and offers to throw them a tidy sum from the squad’s reserves. Warrior – Anastasia, a girl from an old noble family, a noble, pardon the pun, a coward – that’s why she is terribly afraid of rats, spiders and violence in general. Mage – Felice, for many years she was the student of a powerful witch and she even has her own book of spells, but, alas, she has not yet managed to write down a single spell in this book. Finally, Svetlana, a novice of the monastery and a priestess of the three bright gods – a greedy, quarrelsome, foul-mouthed woman whose healing spells have practically no power.
In general, all four girls clearly have difficulties with self-identification.
This is the miracle team that the player will have to manage. Since this is an RPG, during the course of the game the heroines develop, receive new levels and new equipment, as well as new abilities. Some abilities are acquired by leveling up, some by completing side quests.
The game map contains several small locations: one city, four villages and various notable places, through which you can move more or less freely almost from the very beginning of the game. Unfortunately, the squad of heroines at the beginning of their journey is practically incapable of combat, so for the first few hours I wandered around these locations, picking up all the loot and avoiding encounters with opponents. This, generally speaking, even works for the atmosphere – it would be strange if these four goonies decompressed the trolls and minotaurs from the very beginning.
The atmosphere is revealed even better through the dialogues of the heroines with each other, which occur quite often. In general, there is a lot of text in the game, and it is written well, cheerfully and cheerfully. Reading the heroines’ lines is a pleasure, and more than once I laughed out loud after another wild thing that one of them managed to blurt out. Moreover, humor is not all there is to local dialogue. To fully appreciate the quantity and quality of references, allusions and references contained in the in-game text, a good education in the humanities will not hurt. The girls casually quote that Benjamin Franklin, That Alexandra Kushner.
Moreover, even if you Pokerstars-Casino.uk do not recognize the reference, the dialogue will still make sense. Fatty plus in the game’s treasury.
Unfortunately, I cannot fully praise the other part of the textual component – books containing the lore of the world, as well as some monologues of non-scripts that reveal this very lore. These parts of the text are written dryly and evoke a strong desire to skip them, despite the fact that the author of the game clearly tried to develop the lore – again, here you have historical parallels and religious theses that correspond to the real history of the Christian religion. However, there is a catch here – sometimes the developer forgets what he called this or that event within the game lore.
Yes, in the library Strizhinsk you can read books, in particular a book on the history of local religion, which mentions first All-Great Council, obviously referring us to First Ecumenical Council, real historical event that happened in325 AD. According to the game’s lore, this Cathedral the rule was adopted: “You cannot serve the Light and Mamon” – again, an obvious reference to New Testament. To be precise, the Gospel of Matthew, chapter six, verse twenty-four.
Further on in the plot of the game we encounter this thesis again: you cannot serve the light and Mammon, only in the course of its discussion it turns out that it was no longer adopted first All-Great Council, and on the first Ecumenical. That is, the developer simply forgot that he renamed the real event. Such negligence is very upsetting, fortunately there are not many of them in the game.
I am aware that this particular little detail was almost certainly only noticed by me – purely due to my theological education, but for me personally this inconsistency ruined the atmosphere significantly.
Also in the game, no, no, and the current Russian political agenda will slip through. Personally, I don’t really like being fed politics in games, especially when they are games in a fairy tale setting. In my opinion, this negatively affects immersion in the game world. Some people will probably find it the opposite. It’s a matter of taste here.
In general, the level of in-game text is very, very high. What is logical: RPG Maker limits the developer in creating expressive means, so text remains almost the only way to immerse the player in the atmosphere. And that’s why I paid so much attention in this video to the text component of the game. Generally speaking, here, in my opinion, the advantages of the game significantly outweigh its disadvantages.
Unfortunately, during sparkling conversations it is almost never possible to choose an answer, and you have to read the already written dialogue. The developer promised to fix this in the second act of the game, which, as I understand it, is now in the process of creation. The content that is now available in the Steam version of the game is about 15 hours of gameplay.
In fact, in addition to dialogues, we have three activities – loot, explore and fight. At the beginning of the game, as I already said, the heroines are weak, and any opponent larger than a rat causes significant inconvenience. The combat itself is a classic turn-based combat from JRPG. When meeting an enemy, characters occupy one side of the screen, opponents occupy the other. You cannot move around the arena, you can only attack the selected enemy, or use any ability.
Considering that for a good half of the game the heroines’ abilities are one or two and miscalculated, most of the early battles with ordinary opponents come down to stupid calling. The behavior patterns of each type of enemy are the same from battle to battle, and each new encounter with rats, spiders or scorpions is no different from the previous ones. You will quickly remember who and in what order to attack to minimize damage.
At the same time, the reward for such victories… Well, nothing, a few dozen units of experience, while for the simplest quest of experience they give several thousand. Generally speaking, farming exp on ordinary mobs is boring, uninteresting and ineffective. It’s good that the game almost always allows you to bypass the enemy.
Complex quest battles, especially those that occur closer to the middle of the game, are a completely different matter. Here, buffs, debuffs, AOE spells, and even consumable items are already used – which is generally surprising, because I’m used to the fact that in most RPGs, potions and scrolls are only good for sale.
The complexity of some battles is simply off the charts, and this particularly applies to battles in which opponents have several phases tied to their health indicator. God bless you Svetodar, if you happen to get into such a battle without a fair supply of heals. I found myself in this situation when meeting with Priest of the Earth in the temple Laverne, and after the thirtieth attempt to take him down with two healing potions in his pocket, I was forced to turn on the story mode for this battle. It’s too painful for him to hit the entire squad at once.
Towards the end of the game, battles go to the other extreme: the heroines have many abilities that, when interacting with each other, abuse the game mechanics. The most important resource here is mana; by replenishing it in time, a lone enemy, for example, can be forced to kill himself without any risk to the group.
However, at the end of the game, a won battle already brings a significant amount of experience, as well as, more importantly, loot, which is sold in order to replenish the supply of consumables. So at the end of the game you don’t want to avoid combat anymore.
Heroines of Swords & Spells motivates the player to explore the game world in a fairly simple and elegant way. The game does this with the help of chests and traps. Level hacking – one of the skills Diana, increases with each successful use. And chests and traps, generously scattered throughout all locations, have varying complexity. Accordingly, if in the starting location you find a door with a lock complexity of 40 to 50, then until you manage to upgrade your lockpicking skill to the corresponding values, nothing will happen to you. This means we need to look for other doors, chests and traps, easier ones, so that later we can return to a more complex castle. And if everything that could be hacked at the starting location has already been hacked, why not look for new chests, doors and traps… say, in a neighboring village?
Of course, this approach leads to backtracking: the heroines run around the same villages back and forth, like crazy. However, this negative effect is mitigated by the features of the second skill Diana — Perceptions. Increases this skill Diana during the development of the main plot and after completing some additional quests, purchasing Laverna’s gifts. The more you Diana Gifts, the more hiding places, hiding places and traps she notices. So, returning to a location that has already been completed, the player is likely to discover something new.
What happens in the end? But it turns out that it’s quite possible for one person to make a good game on RPG Maker. Yes, Heroines of Swords&Spells is not without its shortcomings, but it brings much more positive emotions. My respect to the author of the game, Kirill Pestryakov.
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