Steam: Kult: Heretic Kingdoms on Steam
Premise: Take control of Alita, an inquisitor in training. You are tasked with investigating the disappearance of a legendary sword that was used to slay the God of the land in ages past.
Good:
- Story and world is interesting. The story takes itself seriously and plays out interestingly.
- Skill system and itemization is unique. You unlock skills by mastering items. Once unlocked, you don’t need said items to use the skills. For example, there are 4 types of fire spells, you unlock them through 4 different class of fire staffs. But, once unlocked you can use any fire spell as long as you have a fire staff equipped. You can actually unlock all the skills in a single playthrough.
- Not exactly an open world. You traverse from point A to point B, but there’s no restriction on how
- Side quest design is good. There’s a decent amount of them, so you’ll always have something to keep you busy.
- It’s an old game, but the art direction is still good.
- The game has a choices & consequences in the main story. They’re not super deep but still interesting imo.
- The game is short. 25-30h is all it’d take for you to complete the game. Add 10 more hours if you want to master all the skills.
Neutral/Bad:
- Game is old so getting into it might be hard for some since it plays a little slow at the beginning. Plus, there aren’t any movement skills and only one passive that increases your movement speed. But it’s snail paced.
- Enemy diversity and density isn’t too high. The sense that I got is that this is intentional, as this is more of a RPG than an ARPG. This isn’t necessarily bad as it allows you to have a peaceful experience overall w/ some action here and there in the middle.
- Not a lot of unique enemies and bosses. The ones that do exist aren’t super interesting either.
- Minimal voice acting. Important story bits are voice acted. It doesn’t bother me as much but figured I should call it out.
- No endgame.
My Thoughts
I still recommend playing it for anyone interested in a good isometric RPG. It kept me entertained for the duration that I played it for. It also plays quite decently for a game that is about 20 years old.
Other Games:
The game world has another ARPG called Shadows: Awakening on Steam. I personally haven’t played it, but I am thinking of picking it up eventually. This is the only one that you need to care about. You can ignore Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms as it was an unfinished piece of work that the studio was forced to abandon due to financial issues. With Shadows: Awakening, the studio had the budget, so they finished what they had started with Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms. To put it simply, Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms is just part 1 while Shadows: Awakening is the full game (which means it includes part 1). There are some differences in tone and aesthetics b/w these two games. Tech is also different, Shadows: Awakening was built using Unity while Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms was built using OGRE (the rendering engine used by Torchlight).