In no uncertain times, this yesteryear RPG isn't just bad, it's actually broken, suffering some sort of a mental breakdown in the middle of a fantasy tavern, proclaiming itself the "Lizard Queen". This is a stuttering, half finished, mess of game, that if you squint and cock your head to a 42 degree angle you can just about make out the outline of coherent adventure before it starts shouting in German.
And it will start to shout in German, as the localization still seems to be in progress. Translation seems to have been handed off to a man being paid by the sentence, and the budget came up short. The odd German word will crop up here and there, sometimes ruining but a tiny morsel of information, or simply making some unintelligible. Sadly my own skills of Deutsch only lends to asking for a "small portion of chips" and to add insult to injury, there wasn't a chip vendor in sight.
So, with the high hopes that you have a working knowledge of the German language, starting out in RoA:BoD takes you to a familiar screen of character creation. Like other dungeon crawls, a number of party members already adorn the UI, each looking at you like an embarrassed LARPer, any eye contact questioning why either of you are there, and how you should really take stock of your life.
While I understand any good RPG allows you to sculpt your best elven ears and modify the beard of your favourite dwarf, Crafty Studios somehow manage to grab the player by the foot and drag them kicking and screaming into a grim basement of dice rolls and D&D attributes. Each character must be adjusted to fit level one, with no descriptions as to what you are doing, no help, no recommendations, and a lot of the aforementioned German text mixed with the English.
So, assuming that you are "hardcore" enough to understand character creation, or simply, like me, started to play a random game of clicking boxes, it's time to adventure far and wide. Clicking to leave the temple, you then leave into the town of Thorwal.
For a game that comes bundled with the graphics option of "beautiful" RoA:BoD is ironically a particularly ugly looking game. Set somewhere between European fantasy, and an FPS circa 1998, those odd moments of nice textures are constantly underlined by waxy faced NPCs and the general glum of a developer struggling with the debut of this "3D thing".
And the performance fares no better. Optimisation seems to be skipped, perhaps in favour of the studio's "Icecream Friday" and what you are left with is an ugly piece of software that doesn't even have the good graces to at least play well.
Trudging on through the gloom, RoA:BoD doesn't actually point you in any particular direction, instead of simply toe poking you out into town and demanding a wall of silence from its inhabitants. The controls are woefully inadequate, talking to NPCs becomes a Myst-like puzzle, and then invariably the game will crash to desktop starting the process over and over again.
And if it sounds like I am describing the opening stages, I spent more than ten hours with RoA:BoD and in between stuttering around, crashing, and scratching my head, I saw almost nothing of this broken, half-finished game, spending most of my time just grappling with the client, desperately trying to inch further and further into town.
System requirements:
Operating system : Windows XP (32-Bit), Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8
Processor : Intel Core2Duo / AMD X2 CPU, min. 2.4 GHZ
RAM : 2 GB
Video Card : Nvidia Geforce GT 240 / AMD Radeon HD 3700, min. 256MB VRAM, DirectX compatible 10
Sound Card : Sound device compatible with DirectX ® 10.0s
Free space on hard disk : 7 GB
Total Size:2.31 GB
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