Blightbound is a new multiplayer dungeon-crawling action-RPG from Awesomenauts developer, Romino Games, and your favorite weirdo games publisher, Devolver Digital. Taking place in a hopeless fantasy world, it's up to you and two other players to save your entire planet from an awful blight that's ravaging the land. It's still in Early Access, but it looks to be a rather promising title if it can iron out the various bugs and glitches it's currently riddled with.
What A Horrible Night For A Blight
The game begins with a narrator regaling us with the tale of how the Shadow Titan - who you know was a bad dude because he single-handedly destroyed the sun - was defeated by some legendary heroes. Unfortunately, killing him unleashed a horrible fog called The Blight that basically killed everything aside from you and a few other people who have taken shelter atop a mountain. Everything that didn't die is now a terrible mindless monster. Now, you and two other players have to head down into the various valleys and caves to fight the creatures created by The Blight.
Even though they play very differently, reminded me of Darkest Dungeon in regards to its setting and presentation. This is a very gothic game where the skies are constantly dark and dreary. Every location that was available to play seemed to be a tomb, a cave, a graveyard, or some other misty place filled with dread. However, there were moments of levity that came from the characters spouting random lines about themselves and their individual backstories, so it's not all doom and gloom.
Much like Darkest Dungeon, you have a hub zone known as The Refuge where you spend time after completing various missions. This is where you improve your characters' stats, equip new weapons and armor, and do other tasks to make your heroes more capable of fighting The Blight. We didn't get very deep into what you can do here, but you'll be able to find or hire various NPCs such as a Blacksmith or a Merchant to stay there in order to help you on your quest.
The key difference between Darkest Dungeon and Blightbound is that instead of being a turn-based RPG that feels like a Lovecraftian death march, this more of an action game with RPG elements. There seem to be three classes of characters to choose from: the Assassin, which is your rogue class that can throw smoke bombs and stab things with their daggers; the Mage who can blast enemies from afar and also has healing abilities; and the Warrior, who's essentially the tank that's there to shield other players from attacks and can gain rage from blocking in order to grow larger and do more damage. Each of these classes serves a different purpose and has their own specific abilities including an ultimate. As you go on, you'll save more heroes which unlocks them so you can switch between them for missions. But the ones we saw seemed to always fall into one of these three categories.
To begin a game, you have to lobby up with two other players and choose from your collection of heroes. The game currently selects which class you'll play as at random, so you never quite know which role you're going to have when the level begins. The team of three then selects a quest they want to undertake with each one having its own separate objectives and difficulty level. You then hack and slash your way through enemies while finding loot, completing objectives, and rescuing new playable heroes along the way.
If Only We Could Stab The Bugs
The combat is pretty solid with each character having some fun abilities to take advantage of. It's reminiscent of games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Diablo where the screen is littered with enemies and there's a ton of projectiles and weapons flying everywhere. Movement could be a little awkward at times since you're moving flat 2D characters on a 3D plane, but it was quite fun.
There were also puzzles involving weighted switches on the floor that required all three members of the team to work together. None of these were all at that difficult, but I like the idea of Blightbound feat𒀰uring hectic combat with some puz🅰zles added in for flavor.
It's hard to say whether or not Blightbound's current system of choosing your hero class for you is a good solution. It does remove that annoying process of everyone arguing over who has to be the healer, but it might suck for someone who only wants to play as an Assassin and gets stuck with the Mage. If this is how Romino Games wants to keep its matchmaking system, it looks like you'll have to learn how to play each class well enough that you could switch to any of them at a moment's notice.
The biggest problem right now would be the litany of bugs, glitches, and server issues we encountered while playing. While some games would be fairly stable, there were a few instances where a hero would be frozen stiff on someone's screen even though they were hadn't disconnected or froze in their game. It made progression impossible as some doors and gates require everyone to be standing on a switch, but if one person isn't moving then the whole team is stuck and forced to restart. Sometimes this problem would be so bad that it would even force a complete reboot of the game.
There were times where enemies would be invisible but we could still attack them or items that we needed to interact with wouldn't have the proper prompt show up to activate them. The game was also notorious for throwing levels with impossible difficulty settings at us even though we were level 3 characters with low-tier loot.
Of course, Blightbound is still fairly early in its development so these concerns can still be addressed. Making a game like this that relies on multiplayer will always have some problems at the start. Romino Games has always put in a lot of care and attention to their other titles like Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers. It's safe to assume that they're already looking into these bugs and working on patches and hotfixes.
Hoping For A Delightful Blight
Blightbound has plenty of potential but it does need some work in certain areas. The kinds of loot available right now is pretty shallow. In fact, I ended up looting the same weapons, armor, and acc�🍬�essories over and over, which is probably a result of a lot of items not being the game as of yet.
It remains to be seen how in-depth the options go for character customization. Each hero is supposed to have their own special abilities, but I noticed the few heroes we unlocked appeared to use a lot of the same skills. I'm hoping for more variation among the characters along with a skill tree that allows for some real customization and doesn't just give minor, almost inconsequential stat increases.
You can jump into Blightbound to see it for yourself when it comes to Early Access on Steam on July 29, 2020. We're looking forward to seeing what kind of a dungeon crawling adventure it ends up being.