Lionheart suxx0rs

Games
1

OK, I take back everything good I said about this game in other threads.

You wouldn’t think a horrible final battle and a bad denouement could ruin a game… You wouldn’t think so…

So the designers apparently couldn’t come up with a final boss and boss level formidable enough within the conventional rules to be worth fighting. Obviously the AI is too lame to handle a space with enough room to maneuver, so you get cramped into a tiny little pen with a large dragon. Even then, if you retreat from the dragon you get teleported back to it for no reason that you can see – there is no trap activating, you just appear next to the dragon again.

This stupid dragon has an automatic knockdown attack. Every melee attack, it automatically hits (it even shows you that it is rerolling until it hits, as the combat log always shows miss miss miss miss miss miss miss miss hit+critical) and then it gets an automatic knockdown critical. Can you imagine anything more annoying for a melee character…

Then there is the lame summoning trap. The battle starts as soon as the game unpauses on the level, so it’s not very likely you’ll notice it without being spoiled. But I guess you might conceivably notice the faint glimmer while 23 other special effects are zapping around the screen. Without disabling the trap, an infinite supply of extra monsters will inevitably kill you. What fun. OK, so you have very high personal perception, or you’re spoiled, and you disable the trap. You use all your potions and scrolls and gunpowder and you fight for 2 seconds at a time while being knocked back for 10 seconds at a time. Naturally all your companions die, and finally… finally you kill the damn dragon.

W00T, we’re done! what next. This is the Fallout system, I don’t suppose we’ll get anything as cool as the Fallout denouement with all the after-story of what you did and what it affected. No? OK, maybe we’ll get a cool cinematic ending scene like in Baldur’s Gate? No? Oh the hell with it, just have Leonardo tell me how cool I am and show the sun rising over Barcelona. No?

This is the most goddamn stupid RPG ending ever conceived. You kill the dragon, it transforms back into the bad guy (who you only meet for the first time in the last chapter, so who gives a rat’s ass about him anyway.) The bad guy promptly escapes through a portal. Galileo insults you, Leonardo gives you some faint praise, and we cut to Barcelona where some imbecile of a Knight Templar is telling folks at the Cathedral that everything will be just great if they all just swear fealty to Ahriman. Ahriman of all people, the evil Zoroastrian god. Just what you’d expect from a Catholic knight… And then it ends. That’s that, roll credits. In other words, you fought through all this crap and everything you did was futile and a complete waste of time in the game world.

I guess Reflexive studios had some fond hope of coming out with a sequel (yeah, right) but this is the worst possible way of setting one up within a story.

Sigh. OK, all done venting now. Time to play some Ricochet Xtreme!

2

Wow. That’s about the most awful thing I’ve ever heard of, in an RPG ending. Also, laughing at you for playing through to the end.

3

Wait for it…

It’s a trap!

  • Alan ‘Itsatrap’ Au
4

Bah, it was a piece of crap weeks ago, but did anybody listen to me, huh?? Huh? Well, actually, plenty did.

5

Thank you, Laurence Brothers, for suffering through that so the rest of us don’t have to. Seriously, well done. Ladies and gentlemen, the man with the coolest name on Qt3, Laurence Motherfuckin’ Brothers.

There but for the grace of God go I…

 -Tom
6

The thing that pissed me off was I thought the bulk of the game was actually pretty good, everyone else in the world to the contrary, but the weird Diablo/Black Isle mix goodness was totally ruined for me by the ending.

7

What amazes me about these games is how I follow their developments for years reading every preview and impressions article available, and yet so many of these write-ups fail to accurately describe core gameplay mechanics the reporter was either demonstrated or actually experienced via hands-on beta time. In this case, I can’t recall a single preview article on Lionheart portraying the game as anything other than a hardcore RPG and not the Diablo clone it shipped as.

Hopefully nothing like this happens with ToEE.

8

So let’s get this straight:

Because of the combat model they’ve implemented, the most survivable character throughout most of the game is a melee combat monster.

Then you get to the end boss…who is designed to hose melee combat monsters.

Bleah. I’ll replay Thief instead and wait for Riftrunner. (Div Div followup…not that it had a spectacular endgame, but they might learn from their mistakes.)

9

And then there’s the beautiful save game corruption bug. They aren’t going to fix it because only 10% of players are getting CTDs from it.

10

Haha its funny cause the EB I convinced to let me return it was all mad that I was returning it. Apparently, according to them, Im supposed to wait for a patch that makes it a good game.

11

No amount of patching will make it a LONGER game… This frickin’ 20 hours per game crap needs to stop.

12

Lets all remember the infinity engine games.

Ahhhh…

Cept the first Baldur’s Gate release, I think I went through 3 cd drives playing through that one.

13

You clearly were wise enough not to play to the end of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

14

You clearly were wise enough not to play to the end of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

Well… when the first review said “don’t load this, it will break your computer” I decided to give it a miss…