14 DAY TRIAL // Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms is the next installment in the Heretic Kingdoms saga, an action role-playing game made by Games Farm and published by bitComposer, currently available on Steam Early Access.
The game plays like pretty much any other Diablo-inspired game: you navigate the environment from an isometric perspective and hack and slash stuff (or cast spells) until it stops moving, loot, compare with your existing equipment, rinse and repeat.
There are, however, some twists to Shadows: Heretic Kingdom, that make it a pretty intriguing game. First of all, the game looks pretty good, a definite step up towards modernizing the long-dormant series.
The environments are pretty detailed, with plenty of doodads and eye candy, and the color palettes are fitting, nothing too flashy but not quite drab either, with some subtle differences when shifting to the astral plane.
Moving on to the bread and butter of action role-playing games, you have three classes at your disposal, the holy trinity of warrior, ranger and mage. Nothing new here, except for the fact that you also control the Devourer, a demon that swallows the souls of the dead and restores them to life in the mortal realm as his puppets.
This unique detail translates into a significant change regarding how you approach the game. The way it usually was, you would just clear room after room until you got to a quest boss, put him out of his misery, go back to town, and get the next quest.
The fact that you can switch at any time between the Devourer, roaming the spirit world, and his various puppets offers you a ton of freedom when it comes to navigating the world. Have you run into some rather nasty individuals that are prone to offer an early trip to the grave? No problem, just shift back into the spirit world, kill some easier enemies, go past the guards, and shift to the mortal realm again.
Each character that you can assume control of has his own xp bar, which means that if you want to be able to make use of that archer in situations where you don't want to jump right in and get overwhelmed, you should better level him up too.
The devourer is also the one you will utilize when making use of waypoints, where you can also revive and heal you party. You can also revive your fallen characters by using the devourer at any time during your adventure, but that will cost souls, a resource that is shared between all the characters and that is replenished by killing stuff.
Furthermore, you can also use the devourer to interact with various spirits that roam the spectral realm, so you should always make sure to explore locations in both planes of existence. A man who murdered his wife may pay you to get rid of her body in the mortal realm, but the vengeful spirit of his wife, only visible in the spectral realm, may ask you to put her to rest by revealing his crime to the guards.
The system has a lot of potential, and it's going to be really interesting to see how the developer makes use of the unique opportunities and freedom of interaction that being able to control several different characters on separate planes affords the game.
One area that seems a bit sketchy for now is the character progression, which feels pretty limited and linear for the time being.
The skills at your disposal are affected by the weapon you currently have equipped, with blunt instruments conferring you different abilities than sharp implements of destruction, and it seems that you have to make up your mind as to which suits your playing style better pretty early on.
In addition to this, the progression seems quite linear and doesn't offer you too much opportunity to experiment. It is, therefore, a pretty straightforward deal, being restricted to three paths per character, but hopefully this will change as development progresses.
For now, it seems a bit grindy, as the optimal way to go about the game is to clear a room in the mortal realm, then switch to the shadow world and clear it with the Devourer, which ends up feeling pretty tedious.
Hopefully, the devs will find a meaningful way to incorporate the transition, such as having different puzzles that require cooperation or unique ways to defeat monsters that make the transition feel like less of a grind.
There are also some issues with character animations being a bit laggy, in the sense that it takes a lot of wind-up for some attacks to land, and skills are sometimes not very responsive.
The game was just released on Steam Early Access last month, however, so most of the kinks will be ironed out over the course of its development process.
Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms certainly shows the potential to become a great game, but it is only up to the devs to get their creative juices flowing and capitalize on the unique premise of being able to switch between different characters.
So far, the game seems pretty good, not a game changer by any means, but something that will definitely turn out to be at least worthwhile if not good, simply needing the right amount of time and polish, and a strong creative vision to drive its unique points across.
