It looked promising, but the further I went the worse it got, until the third chapter shit the bed completely. Barren corridors filled to the brim with repeating, annoying enemy combinations. At that point it was better to just run past them and rush to the ending. Well, at least the trailer was cool and the OST is probably the best part of the game. The ending reedemed it a little and the final boss of this game was the only final fight where I actually had to use nearly every potion and resource I had gathered throughout the entire game to win. Hoarders rejoice.

A Focus Home sempre buscou fazer jogos com propostas interessantes e diferentes com o curto orçamento (comparado aos AAA de hoje) que possuíam. Bound By Flame possui uma história interessante, com gráficos ruins, e uma jogabilidade travada e com péssimas mecânicas comparados com os RPGs da época, porém ele foi de vital importância pra Focus chegar a empresa que é hoje, mesmo nos jogos atuais você consegue notar os pontos fortes (poucos) que esse jogo possuía.
Veredito: há RPGs muito mais divertidos e bem feitos pelo valor desse jogo, mesmo se tiver um PC fraco há possibilidades melhores.

It started out to be what seemed like a good start to a good game. Storyline was fair but as the game progressed, the mechanics of the game itself just degraded. The battles were frustrating in many cases. there isnt much in terms of upgrading your characters or the weapons/armor. Timeline wise, the game itself is rather....short. only 3 chapters and then the final boss. Overall, it could have been better if more focus was put onto character development, battle dynamics and maybe extending the story a bit further out somehow

Eu não cheguei nesse jogo com grandes expectativas. Lembro de um amigo meu que pegou nele no PS4 ou PC dizendo que eu provavelmente não iria gostar. Ainda assim, resolvi dar uma chance por que eu queria pegar um RPGzinho e a capa era bonita. E também por que eu comprei uma porrada de jogo usado barato nos ultimos 2 anos, e cedo ou tarde eu vou jogar todos eles pois não me permito gastar dinheiro à toa. Sem mais enrolação, vamos pra a review. Aqui a versão curta: Isso aqui é um Dragon Age da Shopee.

Bound By Flame tem uma cara de super projeto ambicioso quando você pensa na ambientação e na história, mas tudo cai por terra na execução. Vertiel é um mundo de Dark Fantasy até legal, parece bastante um filme dos anos 80 de Espada & Magia, tipo Conan. A ideia de você ter mocinhos já na retranca lutando contra magos poderosos até que de repente surge um protagonista anti-herói badass é basicamente a premissa desses filmes, então Bound by Flame não ganha aqui na originalidade, MAS, por chutar tão seguro no clichê, pelo menos não faz (muito) feio. O problema é que aí sobra ganhar na execução, e a execução desse jogo é beeeem meieira.

Os diálogos são 200% Edgy e variam entre pouco inspirados e tenebrosos. Fora isso, se você não for atrás de cada personagem pra ter umas conversas expositivas sobre quem eles são e o que fazem, o jogo não faz a MENOR QUESTÃO de te apresentar nenhuma informação. Como resultado, você acaba se perdendo na história (que já é confusa) e fica impossível gostar de qualquer personagem, ou mesmo se interessar por eles. Por exemplo, um dos companheiros é um príncipe elfo que eu fui descobri que tinha alguma importância só no meio do Ato 2, por que eu ignorei ele completamente no Ato1. Fora isso, tudo parece acontecer de supetão; melhor exemplo que posso dar é o romance, que no meu caso foi com a Sybil e durou incríveis 12 segundos nunca mais foi mencionado. O voice acting eu não cheguei a achar ruim, só básico demais. Os ângulos de "câmera" nas cutscenes são bem meh.

O combate é meio difícil (até na dificuldade normal eu tive trabalho, e em todas as superiores eu mal consegui sair do prólogo), e dá pra personalizar o boneco pra focar naquilo que você prefere. Eu fiz um espadachim defensivo com magias de suporte de defesa/dano e que eventualmente soltava algumas bolas de fogo. Parece genérico? É por que o jogo dá MUITO ponto pra tu investir nas 3 classes. Eu peguei duas quase completas. Os monstros tem vida demais pra o próprio bem, e mais pro final do jogo eu estava tão de saco cheio que comecei a pular a pancadaria por que o XP e os itens simplesmente não compensavam.

Especialmente sobre os monstros, o jogo é desbalanceado pra caramba. Por um lado tem mob que limpou o chão comigo, do outro tem chefe que caiu que nem merda. Destaque pra o combate final que eu macetei o boss colocando 100 minas terrestres no chão e descarreguei 50+ virotes enquanto me enchia de poção e spammava magia defensiva. Não foi técnica nem inteligênca, fui eu dando exploit mesmo. E sem esse exploit o boss pocou meu boneco em 4 segundos de vacilo. Daí você tira como o jogo tá bem feito.

Tá Tony, mas se você só vai reclamar, como esse jogo ainda consegue 2? Primeiramente, por que eu me diverti. Em segundo lugar, por que o combate e o mundo são medianos mas me entreteram (tem uns elementos muito legais enterrados no meio da mediocridade). A sensação que eu tive na real é que esse jogo de 2014 parecia um jogo muito mais velho. Se isso fosse um RPG de Mega Drive ou Super Nintendo (ou até uma cria do RPG maker no PC) eu provavelmente teria adorado.

Playtime: 20 Hours
Score: 8/10

A real hidden gem that I only played through now and was blown away! When I tried this game back in the day I didn't like it at first, but after recently finishing and loving Greedfall from developer Spiders, I decided to give this game a second chance, since this was their first game.

What I found was a really compelling RPG at its core and definitely scratched my itch for a new Dragon Age game, as you can see Spiders took a lot of inspiration from those games for this one. In this game you play as Vulcan, a mercenary in this fantasy world that is plagued by war with the Ice Lords. One day, you're character gets merged with a demon and you now have the power to stop the Ice Lords. You can either embrace the demon within you or stay true to your human side. I went evil since, as you get further into the game your character transforms more into a demon if you choose to which I thought was cool.

The one thing I loved a lot was the combat, as it has this very hack/slash God of War (PS4) type combat, but the enemies hit hard even on easy so you have to parry a lot and pick when to attack. In contrast, after finishing this I started a playthrough of Dragon Age 2 and the combat in that game doesn't even come close to as good as this game IMO. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story and the characters, as the writing definitely had me hooked and invested. The music as well is also fantastic even though there's only a limited amount of tracks.

In terms of complaints, this game was made on a very small budget for a game of this scale so most things like graphics I can look past. The only real complaint I had was some of the enemies in that they hit so hard even on easy and in most encounters they throw some of the toughest enemies at you in big groups, which can be unfair sometimes, especially if you play on the higher difficulties. The final boss is also very unfair to fight even on easy, and I died a lot. Once you figure out how to fight them its easy in a sense, but you essentially have to change how you play completely compared to the rest of the game.

Overall though, this game was just chefs kiss for me for the most part. I really love Spiders games, and I hope the continue to make great games like Greedfall and this! Really want to try the Technomancer now!

All Games I've Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/

Platform: PlayStation 4 (Via PlayStation 5)
Date Started: December 2nd, 2023
Date Finished: December 3rd, 2023
Time Played: 10 Hours

"Short but sweet."

Despite some kind of weak writing, extremely janky game-play, combat that feels spongy and too unforgiving even on the easiest difficulty and repetitive sections, especially near the end in the ice area, I still had an absolutely great time with Bound By Flame, a small, tight RPG that scratches the Dragon Age itch while feeling quite unique.

There are only a few hub type areas in this game, it's a really small and compact, but the first two in particular is a real joy to walk around. The forest and village areas are really nice to look at and be in, and the side quests are surprisingly relevant to the plot. Seeing as you play as a mercenary hauled in these locations with your company, having to do side quests helping out the villagers suffering in the current war by collecting supplies and helping their defences against incoming attacks makes it feels like you are making a difference to the world rather that doing menial tasks for experience.

As the game goes on things feel less exciting, the final hub area in the ice temple isn't very nice at all and the enemies are very cumbersome to fight, causing things to end on a much more sour note - especially with the tricky final boss.

The characters are solid, as is the story, despite some silly dialogue, the music is outstanding and, overall, it just feels like a really cosy small budget RPG, something I have a soft spot for. I'm looking forward to going on to Greedfall!

Certainly an improvement over Mars War Logs but that only serves to highlight how far behind its ispiration it is. From what I remember of Greedfall and now playing through their older games, I'd say Spiders is much better at ideas than execution.
Unlike their other IPs, the setting and story here is a bit too generic but the characters in theory should be interesting. There just isn't enough meat to their story to really flesh out their personality. The romance is good microcosm of the whole issue in all their games, where characters show 0 romantic interest in you, you get a half hearted romance scene towards the end outta nowhere and then it's back to what it was before.
They really need to stop this checklist approach to RPG design and hire writers that can write more evocative characters. Otherwise I'm sure the upcoming Greedfall sequel will fail too.

They had one good idea and ran out of steam almost immediately. Everything about this game is annoying to do, and it doesn't have enough going on in the story to make it worth it.
The last act feels like it was cut short. Without getting into spoilers, it introduces several plot threads and ends them all at once after one short section. It's just not a good game. Impressive that they made it and it wasn't filled with bugs, but it's still not a good game.

The reason this is a 1-star is because there isn't a reason to play a game without an ending or a payoff, or any memorable... anything about it, other than the fact that it just ends when the budget did.

Bound by Flame marks a pretty big step in the history of French developer Spiders. After two downloadable RPGs, some work porting other people's games, and a region locked title co-developed with Cyanide they were finally given the resources to make their first full retail release and capitalize on all that potential they had shown in the years prior. Unfortunately, this would not prove to be their breakout success. While the increased scale of the project compared to their previous efforts allowed them to show off their strengths to a wider audience than ever before, it also made it harder to forgive the areas where they came up short due to the higher price tag.

The story is a little derivative of other works of fantasy such as Game of Thrones, but it really shines when it comes to choice-and-consequence. The tone is very bleak with the stakes only becoming more desperate as you progress. Some decisions will cause allies to turn on you no matter what you choose and you're constantly being tempted by the demon that occupies your brain in the beginning of the game. Not all of the endings are fulfilling as you can tell Spiders didn't put much effort into some of them, but you do get to feel like you had a definitive impact on the fate of the world before the credits roll.

In theory the combat should have been just as satisfying. You're given multiple skill trees to invest in, several different fighting styles with their own perks and trade-offs to switch between on the fly, and variety of gear to come across. All of which allow you to have just as much flexibility in defining your character as a fighter as you do in defining them as a person. The problem? Most of the time battling is more frustrating than fun, especially early on.

Spiders tried to go for that Dark Souls level of difficulty where one slip up can spell your doom. They mistook cheapness for challenge though and the whole thing suffers because of it. It's simply impossible to dodge multiple attacks coming at you at the same time from every direction, and Bound by Flame likes to swarm you with enemies in cramped locations that do just that. Your AI controlled companions are basically useless as the tend to die in a few seconds. Except in boss batlles where they become oddly resilient out of nowhere. While you do genuinely feel yourself getting more powerful as you level up, making hunting down the side-quests a worthwhile effort, most of the time exploiting the one-hit kill stealth system by taking out a single foe at a time and then running away so the rest of the group forgets about you is often the only way to avoid unfair deaths.

Some padding designed to stretch out the length near the end of the game is the only other really major flaw I can think of. You're literally forced to fight the same boss four times in a row as part of the main quest. This comes only a few hours after having faced it once already. Also, if you stumble onto part of a side-quest while exploring the environment before officially being given it by one of the characters the dialog option to accept the task will still be available after you complete it. Selecting that option in conversation will cause them to give you the quest again, only now it's uncompletable. Not a huge issue by any means, but an oddity I felt worth pointing out nonetheless.

Bound by Flame is a good RPG in need of better action. It's no replacement for Dragon Age or The Witcher, but those who have enjoyed more flawed series like Risen or Two Worlds should find plenty to enjoy here. Spiders' ambition just once again outweighed their ability in a few key areas.

7.5/10

Bound By Flame (3/10, 6/10)

I just finished it. This revery is gonna be on the longer side of things. Overall, Bound By Flame is a janky ARPG with grand ambitions and a lacklustre execution. That’s apparently how a lot of other people view the rest of Spiders’ games too. However, I thought that there was a fair bit of charm in Bound By Flame, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. However, that’s probably because I haven’t played enough janky RPG’s, and when I think about everything Bound By Flame does, or at least tries to do, I can’t help but conclude that this game was quite garbage. Graphically, it’s nothing impressive, which is fine with me considering that games are more than just their graphics, but it’s not helped by the uninspired aesthetics and derivative art and world design. Conceptually, the game is neat. In a dying world that’s being taken over by ice lords and an undead army, you’re possessed by a demon and you’re humanity’s last hope. You theoretically have to try to fight against the demon even though it gives you powers. There’s a lot of interesting things that could be done with this world and concept, but it does absolutely nothing with it. Its combat is super basic, but functional enough. It took a bit of time to get used to the dodging since you can only dodge backwards, and I’m unsure if parrying is even functional. There were many times that enemies’ animations lacked some conveyance, and the hitboxes were awfully inconsistent, so it was kinda inconsistent to parry anyone.

Granted, I’m pretty bad at video games, so the problem could just be on my end, but in many cases, I don’t believe it was. I found it much more useful to dodge attacks instead, since dodge-breaks had stupidly long counter windows since it would go into slow-motion every time I dodged an attack properly. However, the proper “times” I had to dodge enemies was also a tad inconsistent, with some dodges going into slow motion towards the beginning of the enemy attack telegraphs and others going into slow mo right before the enemies hit me. Occasionally, it would go into slow motion after I got hit by an enemy and took damage. Suffice it to say, combat is inconsistent. Oh yeah, I just realised I forgot to mention the demon powers, which is a problem in and of itself given that it’s essentially the game’s main selling point. The powers were extremely forgettable and underpowered unless you’ve upgraded them and gotten a bunch of skills. It really is a shame because it just serves as janky fire-themed magic that you’d find in a basic fantasy game. It’s even more ridiculous when you take into account that this is literally the first fantasy game I’ve played that isn’t Dark Souls, and I cannot even remember the magic powers, even though they’re literally the SELLING POINT of the game. There’s also an extremely barebones stealth system that clearly demonstrates how pathetic the AI is. I could be crouched directly in front of an enemy and they wouldn’t see me, so I’d go around them and stealth kill them. I don’t have much else to say about that, other than that I was playing at the hardest difficulty and that still happened. The bosses were also pretty inconsistent and uninteresting for the most part. They ranged from pathetically easy to stupidly difficult. The final boss in particular was fucking atrocious. It was WAY harder than everything else in the game. I managed to cheese it with a ridiculous amount of traps and arrows, but that was after many deaths from numerous stun locks from the first phase and broken hit boxes from the second phase. It was the only multi-phased boss in the game that I can recall, too. Basically, it was not just a difficult fight, it was an outright broken one at times, and it’s the most absurd difficulty spike in the game. While it sounds like I’m complaining about the game being broken and difficult a lot, it really isn’t difficult at all. In fact, I’d say that it’s too easy at times. The main difficulty either stems from the game not functioning properly, or from the enemies being total damage sponges. Even basic enemies can take up to a minute to kill at times. There were several times that I’d beat bosses and mini bosses on my first try. The final boss of act two was especially pathetic, having beat it on my first try. It was made all the more pathetic, though, when I had to fight it 4 more times in Act 3, since the devs felt the need to pad the game out with filler content that they didn’t have the time or resources to create. That’s one of the biggest problems with the game. It felt like there was too much in the game despite the fact there wasn’t enough content to span the course of it. There’s a lot of mechanics and systems and characters, but anything I could say about them is just limited to either “it’s barebones” or “it’s inconsistent.” The side missions? Barebones. The story? Inconsistent? The level design? Barebones and inconsistent.

The biggest problem with the game, though, is that tied in a bow of
obviously rushed development. Bound By Flame was clearly envisioned at a much larger scale than it could possibly hope to achieve. The game begins with a large, scripted set piece, and it’s the only one in the game. Act 1 has a billion different side missions and characters and (admittedly similar) maps. It had a much larger scale than the rest of the game. Actually, that’s underselling it, Act 1 made up, like, half of the entire game. It has its own self-contained story and everything. It really demonstrates the ambition of the dev team better than anything. Act 2 feels barebones by comparison. They made more much enemies in it, but the maps were more smaller and more repetitive than Act 1. It was towards the latter half of Act 2 that the game really started to spread itself thin. There were many long-form fetch quests where I had to collect a large number of collectibles or kill a large number of enemies for the purpose of satisfying a character’s request or something. The side quests were less about the interactions between all the characters at that point, and were more about padding the game out. Sure, there were definitely mostly character-based side missions, but they mostly felt more centred around one particular companion in the game who shows up in act two. Oh yeah, there are also companions in Bound By Flame who follow you everywhere. They all do different things and have different backgrounds, that I’m not gonna go into because this thing is already way too fucking long. However, for the sake of comedy, I’ll go through and describe them all one by one. There’s the curious daughter of a magic wizard, a facetious elf cunt who does archery, a fearless knight who talks like a cosplayer and has a death wish, the ratchet precursor of 2B, and Mathras, the ancient spirit who has seen everything and serves as a walking plot contrivance. Overall, these companions don’t really add much to the gameplay except for an extra amount of stress, since they fight with the player until they die in battle. However, if they die in a battle, they aren’t gone for good, but the game never mentions that, so I kept being paranoid about letting them die and restarting from my last save for over 2/3 of the game. Anyway, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, Act 1 was expansive and ambitious, Act 2 was less so, and Act 3 was absolutely pathetic because they clearly worked on it at the end of the dev cycle when they lacked the most resources. There are TONNES of reused assets. All but two enemies are reused from throughout the game. One of those reused enemies was literally just a smaller version of the final boss of Act 1. Act 3 had a total of 8 side missions, and some of them actually counted as part of the main story. One of those was a romance scene with ratchet 2B. It’s as awkward as it sounds. And then after the admittedly decent final boss for Act 3, it’s over after just two chapters (compared to the 3 for each previous act). Act 4 immediately follows, and that just consists of the final boss and the ending. I know its taken me a long time to get to the point, but basically, Bound By Flame felt like an interactive timeline of its own development. It started as an endearingly janky game and it ended as a bunch of mechanics and ideas that were haphazardly slapped-together in order to reach a deadline. It’s a game that reached for the sky and fell flat on its face.

Despite my overwhelming amount of criticism though, Bound By Flame gave me a lot of genuine enjoyment. It’s fun to play a janky game and see how it flexes and crumbles when it’s in motion. It’s fun to laugh at a game that’s so clearly rushed and lacks so much polish. On top of it all, though, it’s interesting to see how a game as bad as Bound By Flame is able to hold my attention for its entire duration. Everything may have been barebones and/or inconsistent, but it’s also all put together with just enough competence that it wasn’t too much of a slog to get through. I feel that I learned a bit from playing this game, and frankly, that alone made it worth playing. The laughs I got from it was only the cherry on top of a freezer burned sundae.

If I were to give it an obligatory rating, I’d say that it was a 3/10 game that I enjoyed as much as a 6/10 one. Holy fuck, I didn’t mean to write this much about this game.

Do I recommend this game? No. Did I enjoy it, though? Overall, yes.