Developer: Liber Primus Games
Publisher: LIber Primus Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
A Land Fit For Heroes – Review
Richard Morgan has made a name for himself with his trilogy of novels called ‘A Land Fit For Heroes’. After the success of the books, a game that is based on the books has recently been released on Steam. It is basically a kind of novel where you get to make your own choices and get to fight your own battles. For those who are already familiar with Richard Morgan’s work, this might just be an exciting new take on it all.
Story
As A Land Fit For Heroes is a story driven RPG, it’s only natural that the story is quite elaborate. There are three main characters that you will have to play with: Kirellin of House Caith, Calnar, the major warrior, and Ilaria, a master thief. The story is told chapter per chapter, one character at a time, before moving on to the next chapter. In the final chapter, all three characters come together.
Kirellin goes on a quest to the marshes, to find out why children have been going missing and since his family governs the region, he is chosen to investigate these terrifying events. He is a great warrior and war veteran, yet he suffers severely from posttraumatic stress, making him wonder more than once why he is still alive.
Calnar was often abused by his father during his childhood, yet never really stood up to him. His father thought of him as a coward, a son you’d better not have, as he is nothing to be proud of. Nonetheless, now that his father is dead, Calnar travels to his final resting place, to make peace with his spirit.
Lastly, Ilaria finds herself in some dangerous situations, as she would basically do anything for money. She was brought up on the streets and since she owes quite some money, she found it best to take a job going to the swamps, where she’ll be relatively safe.
The story is told in a very pleasant way, sucking you in right from the start. Depending on the choices you make, the flow goes a bit slower or faster, but overall the story keeps a nice pace. It is just a bit too bad that quite often, there are words missing or double, which might mess with your reading tempo. Also genders are mixed up every now and then, which has probably something to do with the choice of sexual orientation you have to make at the beginning of the game. Certainly for a game that is based on a novel, it is sad to see that no more attention was given to these kinds of mistakes.
Graphics
Most of the time, you’ll just see your text, every now and then livened up by a nice illustration, and next to it all the information about your character. You’ll mostly use his backpack, as well as his overall ability chart.
The battles are reminiscent to a game of Stratego, as you and your opponents are represented by cards, standing up in a little clip, just like your characters in Stratego would, and you’ll have to move over a grid that indicates the steps you can take. The battles all look graphically quite appealing, yet quite simple and always more or less the same, but other than that, the game looks very nice.
Sound
The game has quite an uplifting tune to it when you first turn it on, yet as soon as you start reading, the music moves to the background. The tune is quite repetitive and rhythmical though, which really starts to annoy after a long read. During battles, another tune kicks in that is a bit more arousing, yet again, it is always the same tune in every battle. On top of that, the other tune we talked about, doesn’t stop during battle, so you’ll have the two together. It’s not that noticeable, but quite annoying once you have noticed. Other than that, there are some added sounds of clashing steel and so on when you are in battle.
Gameplay
In this story driven RPG, you will first of all you have to personalize your characters just a bit. You’ll have to hand out some strength, health, speed and so on, as well as some abilities such as climbing or picking locks. To finish, you will have to decide whether your characters are heterosexual or homosexual, something that will influence the storyline just a bit. After that, you’re pretty much good to go.
The story is built up in four chapters per character. First comes chapter one of Kirellin, then chapter one of Calnar, then Ilaria and so on. In the last chapter, you’ll be all characters together, as they will finally meet then. You’ll spend most of your time reading, and at the end of each page you’ll have to make a decision. Sometimes you can only choose one option, whereas other times there are multiple options to choose from. This means that you can really act upon the circumstances the way you would yourself, putting you right in the game. At certain times, these decisions are more substantial than at other times. You will for example have to choose the order of the people you’ll visit, or more important things such as which direction to go in, or to fight or avoid a fight, kill or show mercy.
When a battle is unavoidable, you’ll have to show your worth. Each time before an attack, two dice are rolled. When the amount of your dice combined with your attack value is higher than your opponent’s dice together with his defense value, you will be able to hit him. Here your abilities will come in handy, as they will mean more actions, more damage, more luck and so on. You can choose between a melee attack or a ranged attack, though you can only use the latter when you have a bow and arrows.
The difficulty of the battles mainly relies on your abilities and on luck. If you had a hard battle last time, it will affect the following battles as your health points will have dropped. Also, the rolling of the dice quite an impact on the outcome, thus if you are just really unlucky, there is nothing you can do to avoid being killed. The battles never take too long though, and the mechanics are easy to master.
You will be able to pick up or buy certain items, which you will then be able to use during battle. You can also learn feats when your abilities are high enough, which will also come in very handy when you’re fighting the enemy.
Along the way you can pick up certain important information, which you will have to send to the other characters in time. If you fail to do so, you will get stuck at some point because a certain character doesn’t have the right information on time, which means you’ll have to start over, as you can’t simply go back.
During your read through, there will also be various ability checks, which can grant you more dexterity or strength and so on, yet if you fail, the story will take a turn to your disadvantage. You can spend a luck point to prevent bad things from happening, but it is often a wild guess, so you’ll have to spend them wisely.
You can add bookmarks to your game whenever you like, which are basically just some saving points. It is best to use them often enough, seeing when you die, you’ll have to start over from any bookmark of your choosing. In theory, you can try the battle once again, but that often just doesn’t load, causing you to have no choice but to go back to a bookmark. Quite often though, you might get really stuck, when your character encountered too many villains already, and is just not able to win the battle at hand. Since this is a result of your previous choices, you might actually get completely stuck, which means you’ll have to start the whole story over, which is a bit of a throwback.
There is a multiplayer mode as well, where you are just one character, instead of all three. You’ll have to team up to have all three characters, and then all of you will have to read through the first few chapters separately. You can only continue to the next chapter when everyone is done reading the current one, which might get a bit annoying if you have to wait. In the final chapter, you will finally battle together.
Conclusion
A Land Fit For Heroes tells an interesting story that is well written and will suck you in right away. It’s nice to see that the decisions you make really do have an impact, even though it might mean that you’ll have to start over completely. The battle sequences are nicely done, but always look quite the same, but luckily there are also other challenges such as the ability checks to add in some more variation. Overall, it is definitely worth checking out, despite the few –sometimes annoying- flaws.
No Comments