Everything about Bound By Flame is familiar. As you start it you’ll feel like you’ve played this game before and in a sense, you have. The plot and setting is typical high fantasy nonsense, the action RPG flavor offering up the usual button-smashing combat and levelling possibilities, combined with some creatures to kill and magic to do it with. Everything here is nicely crafted- it looks good and sounds just like it should but it’s missing still something… and that might be a personality of its own.
Bound By Flame's Brutal Combat System Detailed [VIDEO]
In Bound By Flame you play a mercenary codenamed Vulcan that’s part of a group called the Pure Blades. As part of a contract you’re watching out for a group of mages called the Red Scribes, who may or may not be trying to save the world against a group of rampaging Ice Lords by increasing their own power. Your character is customizable but no matter which race and gender you select things end up the same. The story (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) revolves around a group of evil creatures (the aforementioned Ice Lords) that are taking over the world piece by piece, while a group of elves and humans band together for one last fight. Your character Vulcan ends up being a bit of a secret weapon in this battle- during a ritual gone wrong you are possessed by the soul of a flame demon, which as you can imagine is handy against Ice beings. The flame demon gives you immense power and the ability to throw fireballs, as well as an annoying back-seat driver during the many good/evil choices throughout the game.
Besides those clearly obvious “karma system” choices (which can change your appearance to that of a demon the more evil you get) the dialogue selections are ancillary. Talk to one of the many bearded gentleman in your party that you’ll never be able to tell apart and you’ll find that Bound By Flame has the kind of dialogue system where you’re just hitting every option beat by beat in order to get all the information, instead of engaging in a conversation. It’s as if the designers wanted to make sure you didn’t sit there too long without hitting a button. Being spoken to isn’t so bad for a game when the dialogue works, but unfortunately here your potty-mouthed character likes to curse every other line.
A Look At Bound By Flame's Companions, Including An Undead Warrior
Look, kids- cursing is cool. There’s nothing like a well-placed four letter word to punctuate a sentence or express yourself. It’s when you use it all the time that you start to look like someone who’s trying to look more adult (or tough) than he or she really is. It doesn’t help for your character’s image and you’ll soon start to hate him or her. Spiders is a French studio so perhaps there’s a little bit of a language barrier that gets in the way here, but that still doesn’t explain how disconnected you feel from your little party. You’ll never know or care anything about any of them, even though they do all have their little backstories and side quests.
But at least there’s the combat. Unlike most games which lock you into a certain style of playing from the beginning, here you can switch your style on the fly, from handling two-handed weapons to dual-wielding daggers and dodging. It’s a clever system that lets you play as you want and quickly change it via a wheel that slows down time, and will be familiar for Dragon Age fans. The flame demon allows you to learn new spells that can equip you with a burning blade, send out a shockwave of flame, and other things that burn enemies up real good. There’s lots of enemies to fight and the combat can be satisfying but it’s very easy to die in this game, which has brought up many Dark Souls comparisons. Dark Souls this is not, though- the times you die aren’t because of your lack of skill, it’s because enemies are cheap and can kill you with a couple of blows. It doesn’t help that the hit detection is such that the enemies can hit you even when they’re apparently out of reach.
But even though the combat is fun you never feel like you’re learning anything. Every time you level up you’re afforded a chance to choose two skills to level up but you’ll soon learn all the basic attacks and realize… that’s it. There’s no more combos or moves to learn, you’ll just spend your points on exciting things like having a 2% better chance of stunning an enemy. Your stats don’t level up automatically like other games so you feel stagnant, stuck at the same health and magic levels for most of the game, which isn’t fun when former boss enemies become regular enemies with the same hit points, forcing you into pointlessly long battles as you hack and parry against familiar foes.
Despite hints of greatness here and there there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, and better. Things start off with so much promise and then go nowhere. The environments are technically beautiful yet bland and lifeless, the gameplay fun at first then becomes tedious.
Then there’s the end boss. Oh, the end boss. See, I leveled up my character towards the Fighter skill tree, deciding to focus more on strong attacks and parrying blows. I put a few points into the Ranger skill tree that lets you dual-wield daggers and dodge, as well as the Pyromancer, which lets you perform magic and generally set things on fire. Even after leveling my character up quite a bit she still couldn’t complete in the last boss. It turns out that the easiest way to fight the boss is with ranged fireball attacks, something my brute of a Fighter just didn’t have. My magic was puny and because of it, no matter how much I parried attacks and attacked I couldn’t break through. I won’t even tell you how long it took me to beat the boss, only that my PS4 controller nearly didn’t make it. Difficulty spikes like that aren’t unique to that one section, either, there are bosses that are complete pains followed by pushovers, with no real flow or progression to the game through the 18-20 hours it will take you to play through it.
It feels like someone who wasn’t a fan of action RPGs was told to make one, and they looked at the popular titles to see what makes them tick, just going down a checklist to make sure their game had all the necessary bits. It's certainly all there in Bound By Flame but there's no passion behind it, no real life of its own, an entertaining but unfortunately shallow misfire.
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Bound By Flame was reviewed from a PS4 version provided by publishers. It is also available for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC right now. The PS4 version allows you to utilize the touchpad to cast quickly cast magic and improved graphics but is otherwise the same as the other versions.
