Bound By Flame

 

Im running low on newthings to play on my Steam library so Im just checking out some meh looking RPG's. Bound by Flame is a relatively obscure one from early 2010s by some sort of unknown rpg dev by the name Spiders

This game came out around the huge hype of the Souls franchise and immediately I can tell they're trying to capture some of that audience. Even from the first tutorials and introduction in the game, I can notice many similarities. Even the first enemies you see look almost identical to the Hollow soldiers from Dark Souls. Wow. The combat has the same type of lock on system and similar controls, and the difficulty is particularly ramped up to be stupidly hard seemingly to jump on the same sort of trend as the Souls games, too. So they were trying to target a certain audience here it seems.

Bound By Flame's premise is...I don't really know, its a nonsensical RPG plot where the plot is some kind of high-fantasy good VS evil demonic possession thing going on where you get a band of allies which you can swap in and out taking 1 of them at a time with you on your travels across the world to..defeat the evil guys. A lot of the plot just went over my head or I skimmed a lot of the writing because after a few hours it just got so convoluted, stupid, and fantastical that I stopped giving a shit, the writing and story is just another dime a dozen generic fantasy plot. The game is really heavy on narrative, cutscenes, and dialogue, and that actually might be one of the best things about it, which usually isn't saying much, which usually I dont say about games because I dont really typically care about game stories, but the sad fact is the game just doesnt do anything right or enjoyable so atleast a brief reprise from the awful combat and laughing at the stupid dialogue is the most entertainment I've found here. The dialogue is this baffling blend of taking its self too seriously but also constantly juvenile undertones where the characters cuss frequently dropping bombs like "dickhead"  "balls"  "asshole"  "fucking bitch"  and making fart jokes. Its just so out of place and awkward. The voice acting is hilarious too, it sounds just like someone with a stone-faced expression reading off a sheet of paper most of the time, despite the content of the writing supposed to be some dramatic shit.

I could write a bunch more about the story/plot/writing dialogue etc but I just dont want to. I really didnt enjoy the game, like at all. Theres a few different main character NPC's that you can swap in and out taking on your journey, standard 'class' types like a wizard girl, a healer girl, a warrior guy, and a archer guy. They all have stereotypical, boring, dull personalities, I never got invested in anything they said beyond the shallow humor of their half assed voice acting and stupidity of some of the juvenile cuss words they kept saying or the sexual innuendos constantly.

The real failure of this game is the actual gameplay, RPG mechanics, level design, etc. The combat is just awful. For starters, it has these two 'stance' modes. Warrior and ranger. You press a button to swap between the 'stances'. In warrior mode, you can only use 2h weapons like Swords, axes, and maces. You also get access to a block button and parrying ability. In 'ranger' mode, you can only use daggers, however instead of blocking you get a dodge button. I just hate this. Just let me use whatever weapon I want and dont lock different controls behind each stance. But the thing is, the game has 3 skill trees.  Warrior, ranger, and pyromancy. It doesnt really seem viable to dump points into all 3, so you have to just pick one or two. Well, playing the whole game with two little daggers just isnt appealing to me, so I initially picked the Warrior tree. It's sort of mundane standard type of upgrades, more health, better parrying, more stun , stuff like that. It's nothing that interesting or exciting, but it means now I cant really swap to the dagger stance because it has no points and its not levelled. The problem is that the game seems to be either really badly balanced or just really stupidly difficult in a really unfun way. For example, it just never felt like my character ever did any damage. Sure, the game has loot you can find, different weapons to equip and modify, new armors you can put on - But its few and far between. I changed my body armor / gloves etc maybe 3 times in the ENTIRE game, because its that rare. I changed my weapon maybe 5 times total. No, the RPG stats doesn't really seem to matter that much in this game, its just designed in such a way that it artifically wants combat to be this annoying tedious slog where your character can never do significant damage so even generic 'weak' enemies like fucking flying mosquitos take 20 hits to kill, while they can kill you in 4. ALL of the combat just becomes this really annoying tedious dance of waiting for an enemy to play out its animation and then swinging once or twice, waiting again, repeat. Like a single enemy can take 60+ seconds to kill of just waiting for animations to play out and tediously get your jab in. I know theyre trying to capture the Souls audience or something, but they fundamentally dont fucking understand what makes those games fun and challenging. In Dark Souls you can kill all of the first half of the games enemies in just a few hits, you can easily upgrade your weapons to one hit most enemies in the game. But this game doesnt get that, it thinks difficulty and challenge is just in making your player being a boring, weak piece of shit that cant do any damage and dies in 4 hits. The controls are just awful, having no dodge button as a warrior just sucks and makes it turn into this janky, clunky  walking around in circles to avoid damage thing instead of exciting combat, the moveset doesnt even make sense. Every weapon seems to have the same fucking animation/ability, theres only 2 attacks: Standard attack, and this circular sweep thing.

There are a few other gimmicky combat things you can do like laying traps, pressing a button combination to shoot with your crossbow, but I just never was interested in that style of gameplay. Theres a crafting system where you combine items together in a menu to get other things you might need like health potions and such, you can craft health potions using pickups from killed enemies but it takes a ton, you can carry as many health potions as you want at one time. The main way to get health is either health potions or health regeneration upgrades on the skill tree and on your armors. Its a pretty bad and boring system.

I knew the game was gonna be bullshit because even in the first few hours, all of the enemies take dozens of hits to kill, and frequently gang up on you which just doesnt make sense gameplay wise. But the bosses in particular is where the game is just downright trash and broken crap. The first boss is this werebear thing that attacks really fast or does huge AOE stun abilities, since my only attacks are using these big two hand swords that attack too slow, my options are to carefully run out of the way/block/parry and time my hits. Well, the damage on bosses is a joke. I'm talking each hit does 0.5% damage or less. So its this huge tedious task of grinding down the bosses healthbar over a dozen minutes of carefully waiting for the right animations to get your swings in. Its so bad. The boss can kill you in a fraction of a second, WHY the fuck is it impossible to do any damage in this game? I just dont get it. What the fuck were they thinking? Were they trying to be "hard just like Dark souls, cause thats popular and people are buying it!"  - Yeah, it wasnt because you do no damage, thats not it.

After dying tons of times I finally got past the first fucking boss but the game is just downhill from here. For one thing the level design is really uninteresting and boring. The game basically only has 3 areas, 3 acts. Act one is this generic copy paste maze swamp. Act 2 is wintery landscape castle place. Act 3 is like... a sewer and then more wintery shit. Act 1 is by far the worst, its just a terrible introduction to the game. All you do is trek through some really boring swamp place and the only enemies are these nonthreatening looking flying mosquitos but take dozens of hits to kill. Why did they think this is an exciting intro to the game? They should of used Act 2 winter castles as the intro to the game or something, maybe that would of fooled some more people into playing it more thinking it has something good to offer. Atleast the game has a useful overlay map thing you can toggle on which shows you where to go for the main objective, I liked that, it reminded me of the Diablo 2 automap. Basically, you just go around following the minimap to the objective, fight hordes of really boring enemies with bad combat, then get to really bullshit bosses that are hard for the wrong reasons.



After awhile I started to realize that no matter what you upgrade, youre probably going to have to upgrade the pyromancy tree. So I started dumping points into that, mostly the ability that adds fire onto your weapon.  Still doesnt make the damage output any significantly better. Beyond the three skill trees you can level, there is also a sort of perks menu where you can get passive upgrade perks. These are simplistic too, stuff like 10% more magic, more health, chests make a noise when youre near them, more damage or stun ability etc. Yeah I looked forward to leveling up , getting experience, to be able to make my character stronger to try to overcome the gruelling difficulty of the game, but it never really got much better. The game is just designed in such a way where your character is forced to be this really weak awkward janky piece of shit and all the enemies are supposed to be tedious to fight and take 20 hits each to kill, it sucks.

Theres all sorts of side quests, and you frequently get them without even noticing, and it automatically tracks them and pops up on your minimap and for the first few hours of the game I kept accidentally progressing side quests thinking it was a main quest. So its this annoying thing where you have to frequently keep opening up your quest log and unticking side quests that get added since I dont want to do any. The game is already unappealing enough, I dont wanna do any optional shit I dont have to.

After killing that werebeast thing you keep progressing Act 1 swampy marsh area, you go back to an outpost, you can trade with some vendors and buy weapons and armor but theres not that much to choose from and its all too expensive, eventually you go into a cave and the game introduces this Demonic possession plotline where you can choose to let yourself be overcome by this talking demon, apparently altering the storyline. I just let it happen because otherwise It wouldnt let me enter the cave as easily without doing some optional shit, so yeah. All it amounts to is your character talking to him self in some alter ego demon voice about wanting ultimate power or some bullshit. It was entertaining in a so bad its good way. But inside this cave is boss #2, this ghoulish vampire guy. Hes almost just as bullshit as boss #1. Lots of tedious deaths and the same annoying AOE stunlock moveset. Many deaths and frustration, it doesnt get better. Then, shortly after that, it makes you go back to the village and already its boss #3. This one is just stupid. Its this minotaur guy with a big sword and he keeps doing this big AOE freeze which gives you a frost debuff and makes you slow for 30 seconds, as well as being able to kill you in like 4 hits. The game is just way too hard. Its not the sort of hard gameplay thats fun to overcome or to "tryhard" at. Its just annoying bullshit. The game doesnt have the atmosphere, lore, level design, interesting enemies and equipment to back up being so brutally difficult unlike the Souls games does. In those games you want to get better, you want to overcome challenge, you want to persevere, because the world is so interesting, the controls feel good, the equipment is interesting, in Bound By Flame its just difficulty for the sake of it and to follow some trend they dont even understand.

This stupid minotaur boss is where I was at a point in the game where I genuinely just wanted to uninstall and be done with it. I noticed in the menu settings you can change the difficulty at any time. So I was on difficulty 2/5. I then put it on easiest difficulty from the menu. Fuck it, I'll just breeze through it to end credits, I just want this shit out of my backlog. To my surprise even the game on easiest difficulty is still very hard. Still died multiple times to bosses. Generic Enemies still take a dozen or two hits to die. Game is still stupid and shit. But atleast I got through it faster than I otherwise would have. I got to act 2 which is atleast better than 1, its a bunch of wintery landscapes and these frozen castle mazes. Enemies are slightly more interesting instead of just mosquito things its like weird frost ladies and spellcasters, except now everything freezes you and debuffs you with slowness which isnt fun.

 Its weird its almost like they stopped developing new ideas or the game at this point. You fight this one new boss this concubine weird lady demon thing. Then you get to act 3 and its still the same sort of frozen snow castles like Act 2. In act 3 it basically just has you going around to different boss arenas killing 5 or so of the same copy paste boss from act 2. What? Its like "Go kill the stalker, kill the Malevolent, kill the Watcher" but its all the same boss copy pasted lol. Once you do that, you get to the last boss which is insanely bullshit guy that shoots these black spells at you across the map which kill you fast and you have to dodge them like youre playing some shoot em up arcade game, its stupid. Atleast by this point ive crafted myself like 30 health potions so I just chugged them the whole boss fight and was able to beat it.  

The game is just bad, I hated the controls and combat system, I hate the 'stances' system with the daggers or 2h weapons playstyle, thats it, I hated the lack of loot variety, yeah it was sort of exciting walking around finding chests and looting the rare corpse here and there and finding a new big 2h axe or something, it just doesnt happen all that often, the equipment is marginal. I hated the annoying out of place music all the time with corny soft female vocals that sounded something out of an anime opening intro. I hated the boring generic story and plot, the only entertaining part was listening to how lazy and bad the voice acting is and the dumb humor of how the characters would randomly use cuss words or say stupid childish shit, I hated the bosses and unfair stupid difficulty, I hated the level design and boring uninspired maps and areas, I hated the enemy design atleast for the first half of the game especially with the copy paste mosquito enemeis, I hated how every single enemy is a damage sponge, I hated how unbalanced or unplaytested the whole experience is..theres not much to like. The graphics are medicore, I guess the interface/HUD/Menu systems were OK...some of the weapons and armor looked kind of cool? I guess the most interesting part of the game is how you can modify your weapons and armor, like put a new sword hilt on, change the blade, and it changes attributes like how fast it swings or how much it stuns, you can modify your armor to give health regen or more magic or resistances, thats about the only nice thing I can say about the game. Oh, I liked how despite being an RPG, it only took me 8 hours to beat! Yeah, thats the best thing I liked about the game - It's short. Usually, when a game is good, and it ends, you dont think to yourself "Yay im glad thats over". When a game is good you get sad when its over. But I was just speedrunning to the end credits while playing Bound By Flame, cause I was hating every minute of it.

3/10