Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms Reviews
Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms has fresh ideas, but needs more time to develop everything else.
Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms provides a great value and a superb action RPG experience.
The ideas that could have made this a great game are often undermined by the actual clicking feeling subpar.
Those who are used to the slick action RPG combat of Diablo, Titan Quest or Sacred will probably come away with the same assessment I did, while those who are more interested in Planescape-style questing will find the patience necessary to trudge through the combat to get to the game's tasty dialog-saturated center. Since I am firmly in the former of those two categories, I walked away feeling very disappointed with Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, and wish more than anything that I could be a member of the latter group.
The first chapter of Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms is pretty solid, offering a great mix of narrative and combat, but the following ones seem to favor combat over substance, which is a bit of a disappointment.
The first game is referred to as 'Book One' so I assume that there must be more episodes to come. Overall, I think this game is well worth the investment of both your time and interest. It's a fresh spin on the action RPG genre and has plenty of new features to carve it's own niche. Definitely an excellent find for those of us who want to play a game that manages to be both familiar but fresh.
Despite its linearity in most situations, Shadows shows the importance of story-telling in video games. The same cannot be said about the gameplay however. The awkwardness and cumbersomeness of it all makes this game a struggle to play at times, but is worth enduring if you are enjoying its story.