Bound by flames: Half-baked.

Very dissapointed with this game, it came out of nowhere, a new IP, and an rpg to boot. I expected a low budget RPG, but with atleast decent combat, (that's what the buzz around the game was in the e-community) but man, this game doesn't even have that.

I can excuse a bad story, terrible graphics, bugs, animation issues, pacing issues, hell, even a short game, I'll give it a pass, if it's got good combat. This game doesn't even have that.

I typically play as a female when I'm ever given the choice, but I skipped this time around, because the modeling on the female was atrocious; it was obvious one of those last minute decisions you see in low budget RPG's, where they reskin their male character (looking at you, demon/dark souls) and make it a box they can tick. Painfully obvious this is the case with BBF, and so I said fuck it, I might as well play a beardly man then. Whatever.

I'll go ahead and start this off with the positives: I actually like the main character, he's written well. There were several complaints about his voice acting, saying several of the other characters are far better than him, but that's not true; he delivers his lines well, and the voice matches the character.

The transformation is also one of the very, very few aspects of the game I enjoy; the transformation is unique in that it morphs your armor and augments your abilities in a pro/con light. You also get a much deeper, more demonic voice, and NPC's begin to question your appearance. A nice touch, I thought.

That seems to be where they spent the majority of their money, however. The combat in this game is TERRIBLE; initially I thought it felt pretty clunky, owing it to the early game mechanics and me not having everything unlocked yet. I'm almost done with the game now, and it hasn't gotten any better. The enemies have very high health and do a lot of damage, and the game constantly sends three or more at you at a single time; the combat itself tries to be more in line with dark souls or demons souls, having a slower, more methodic pace to it, but that doesn't mesh well with the chaotic fast enemies who take a long time to whittle down.

Toss in many sequences where you're fighting groups of enemies for long stretches trying to get from A to B, with boss fights that throw in constantly spawning minions as well as the boss to deal with? It's a recipe for disaster. I can see where they tried to borrow mechanics from RPG's they enjoyed, but it seems they tried to mash them all together and it doesn't balance well at all. The faster, more horde-like enemies need to be able to be dispatched quickly, with a stronger, more dangerous enemy being able to be left alone so that you can pick him off; it's a depth of strategy that would have been nice, but instead every enemy is the strong, dangerous enemy, and there are a lot of them.

I eventually dropped the game to easy, because the combat was so boring and tedious that I just wanted to one-shot everything and get this damn game over with, which was both frustrating and disheartening, but the game just isn't fun. I'm finally at the point near the end of the game where my fireball spell almost one-shots every enemy, and it's actually kind of fun.The weaker enemies aren't a threat, just fodder for me to mow through, while the boss-like enemies I can kill in one or two hits.

I was very, very dissapointed that boss fights didn't give you a epic loot chest, or even a unique drop for killing them; you essentially pick up their trash crafting materials to make your potions, and then you move on. The best weapons and loot are found randomly strewn about the level, or from sidequests, which I haven't really seen very many of, actually.

Crafting your own weapons and armor was a bold-faced lie, as well. I was VERY annoyed to find out that you can't CREATE your own armor and weapons, you simply augment them. Your weapons and armor have one to three slots, and you choose an "upgrade" for that slot, and it applies it to the weapon. It's basically gems from diablo, except much more dumbed down, and it requires crafting materials to make them.

You do make your own health potions and mana potions (and that's exactly what they're called, there's no variety in them, you have health potion and mana potion), crossbow bolts, and explosive traps, though. That's the extent of their "wonderful" crafting system.

Crafting does give the armor/weapons a unique look, and being in third person it's kind of nice, but you really won't notice it much in the game, as everything is so hectic and chaotic.

The environments are pretty interesting, the story is fucking TERRIBLE, the enemies are neat but there are so few of them it's not really worth mentioning; the voice acting for the majority of the characters isn't that great, and the only thing the game has going for it besides all of that is the music, which is pretty decent for how terrible this game turned out to be.

Overall, I'd recommend avoiding this game, or maybe picking it up on a PSN sale for $10-$15 TOPS. Outside of that, AVOID THIS GAME LIKE THE PLAGUE. I see groundwork for a potentially decent RPG from this studio in the future, but this game is not that, this game isn't even CLOSE to anything resembling that.