Blackguards 2 game review

Blackguards 2 is the sequel to original title from Daedalic Entertainment. It’s a campaign RPG, set in the Dark Eye world that some of you may identify as a popular German pen-and-paper RPG. It’s hard-hitting, strategic game.
You play as Cassia of Tenos, an aristocrat mistakenly trapped in a huge dungeon crawling with Corapias spiders. Over the years she’s imprisoned, Cassia’s character is damaged, as she is frequently bitten by spiders. Finally, Cassia escapes from prison with only one thing on her mind: to rule, and punish everyone who turned against her.
Cassia collects “heroes” together under her banner, including Takate the gladiator, dodgy Zurbaran the mage, and Naurim, a dwarf who’s all about the loot. If you’ve played the original Blackguards game, you’ll know them all.
The story is good. Cassia is a great character: once beautiful, now mad and powerful. It’s a lot of fun to play her as a truly bad character, and refreshing to come across a game that will let you do so.
Once she escapes from prison, is pretty straightforward: to triumph over all of the areas of Marwan’s control. These are marked as points on a map, and you can travel to these, as long as you have established a way to that point.
In cities, you can payoff spies for information, acquire new skills from scholars, and buy things from traders and blacksmiths. You can also access Cassia’s army’s camp, where she can talk with her heroes, cross-examine prisoners, and even check troops. There is some interesting chat that develops as a result.
Blackguards 2 is a strategic battle game. Once a particular encounter starts, characters will act in turn based on their initiative scores. One at a time, they move across the hex-based battle area and engage with the enemy, using their different skills and abilities.
While there aren’t many options in terms of pre-battle strategy, it’s nice to see that there are some different scenarios and environmental challenges, and there is a good amount of variety in the different encounters. Sometimes units will start off in different areas from each other, and have to achieve varying aims within the same battlefield. There are no real restrictions to what skills your characters can develop. This part was massively enjoyable, and if not for the bugs and design issues experienced, would have been enough for me to rate this title highly.
Unfortunately, there were a reasonable number of problems. To begin with, often battle objectives weren’t clear. Are our units meant to just kill everyone? Pull a lever and return back to where they started? Kill someone specific? OK, some may love that this game does NOT hand-hold, and there is definitely room for games that assume a certain level of player autonomy. But this reviewer certainly would have appreciated more information, pre-battle.
We also experienced quite a few bugs, including one near the end of a battle that took close to an hour to play through. Out of nowhere, the game froze in the middle of a bad guy’s turn. He wouldn’t take his action, and so the game wouldn’t progress to my turn. Our only option was to crash out and restart from the beginning of the long battle. In another encounter, the HUD suddenly disappeared and the keyboard stopped working. Another crash out.
Add this to the fact that you can’t save mid-battle, and the auto save doesn’t save frequently, and I was a pretty grumpy reviewer at this point. Protip: make sure you save often.
Conclusion

So, for all the greatness of the actual gameplay, there were many occasions where we shut the game down in frustration. That said, we still believe that gamers who like some good hard strategy with little hand-holding, and who possess a great deal of patience will certainly get a lot out of this game. For someone under time constraints and with little patience for having to repeat a long, slow, tough, scenario multiple times, we have to confess that although we wanted to like it, Blackguards 2 hasn’t been one of the top gaming experiences.

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