By Sam Coles:
Do you ever play those games and say why am I
playing this abysmal mess? Well that was my experience with Lichdom: Battlemage
on PS4 where it runs at 15 frames per second at best. Not to say that it couldn’t
of been a good experience because under the bad frame rate there is a good
game, but I’m not willing to push through it because it makes my eye balls
bleed with the slideshow like performance.
The story takes place in the standard generic
fantasy medieval period where you can pick from a male or female protagonist. I
picked a male who happens to be a black smith, the main villain meets with you
and wants to buy the best sword you have made but it’s not for sale. He doesn’t
take this statement lightly as he decides to attack you and then murder your
wife, which kicks off the over used revenge tale. It’s not long before you’re
granted the ability to shoot fire out of your hands which is awesome because
you’re not hampered by mana pools or spell cool downs. The story is uninteresting
and is there to set up the context as you murder your way through legions of skeleton
warriors and other mythical beings.
The gameplay is from a first person perspective and
when I started playing it reminded me of games like Hexen because it takes the
first person shooter formula and replaces guns with magic instead. I like this
because it’s not used often the last game that I can think of that used this
gameplay concept is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. You unlock Sigils which
conjure up different elemental attacks like fire and ice and you can combine
the two to create some devastating attacks, so you can freeze an enemy with ice
and shot a quick fire ball to make them explode. It changes up play styles in
battle and it adds variety to stop it from getting stale.
Graphically the game looks nice with different towns
and caverns you traverse but the character models look a bit bland and clean as
they don’t have any distinct blemishes. The particle effects with the spells
look beautiful with the explosions and the icicles hanging off enemies when you’ve
used your ice spell. This is probably what is slowing the game down are the
particle effects because there is a lot going happening on screen, however I’ve
played games like Ratchet and Clank and
Doom with lot’s particle effects and those games ran smoothly.
Now to address the problem that made me stop playing
the game all together is the frame rate. The game runs like an old age pensioner
crossing the road as it runs at 15 frames per second. I don’t know who tested
this game and thought “Yes this is playable even though my eyes are bleeding”
this is unacceptable for a game in 2016 as you have games with better graphics
that run at 60 frames per second. It bogles my mind that a game runs like an
N64 game in the year 2016 where frame rate shouldn’t be an issue anymore, this
game runs worse than the original Two Worlds on the Xbox 360. I hope this
problem is addressed because there is a good game under this major problem, but
at the time of this review being published it is not playable.
Do not I repeat do not buy this game on console it’s
unplayable and is not worth your money at the moment I would suggest playing the
PC version if you’re desperate to play it. I’m very disappointed of developer with
the fact they thought they could get away with this shame on them.
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