Lichdom Battlemage (4 DVD)
Let’s
return, however, to those initial hours. Lichdom: Battlemage is built
around the most satisfying spellcasting this side of Kingdoms of Amalur,
and it’s this one system that drives the adventure from beginning to
end. There is no mana bar obstructing your access to deadly magic. The
only cooldowns you need consider are the intrinsic casting times of the
spells themselves, not additional timers that dole out casting
permission at specified intervals. Wizards and skeletons spawn into the
level from nowhere, and you fling icicles at them or soften them up with
a hive of buzzing parasites that floats above your head.
Casting these spells
from Lichdom’s first-perspective feels oh so good, and they come in
three types of magical flavors, called sigils. Each sigil allows for
three casting techniques: a focused attack, an area-of-effect attack,
and a parry--termed a nova--that typically offers its own kind of
offensive enhancement. A focused spell might take the form of a
continuous ray of elemental energy or a ball of filth, though I was most
taken by homing missiles, which I could fire off in quick succession or
charge up for a more thorough display of destruction. To turn an archer
into a pile of ash is simple enough with such a missile: hold a mouse
button, then release that flaming projectile and watch your target
skeleton dissolve into the wind when it hits.
Forgive my
focus on fire and ice. It’s easiest to describe these types of magic in
light of the more complex sigils, such as kinesis and delirium, which
allow you to control the battlefield in various ways, turning enemies
against each other or halting them in their tracks. I grew fond of a
slaughterous trio comprised of necromancy, corruption, and ice.
Necromancy does what it says on the tin, turning fiends into friends
when the grim reaper comes to visit, while corruption allows you to
spread an epidemic of tumorous growths and ravenous parasites. These
sigils often work in tandem with each other, turning a sequence of
properly-timed blitzes into a colorful spectacle of frozen sorcerers
shattering into a trillion pieces. This may be magic, but I am more than
a mere magician: I am a demigod.
More
specifically, I am a Dragon, capital-D, and a significant figure in
Lichdom’s baffling story, which stars you--a battlemage of the gender
you choose--and a scout of complementary gender whose role would best be
described as "exposition faucet." He or she flits in and out of your
travels to share the details of a story that’s never properly
established, making every line of Lichdom’s dialogue a mess of white
noise. "Here’s a story about something cool you’ll never witness for
yourself," says the scout, in essence, and you move on to making your
own story. The beautiful environments thankfully have stories of their
own to share; twisted tree trunks and tarnished temples rise from a
fetid swamp, and you see massive sea vessels encased in ice, as if they
were frozen in time before their captains were aware of such an unlikely
danger. CryEngine 3, the same graphics technology that humbled many a
PC in 2013 in Crysis 3,
has returned to remind you that your machine really needs a new
graphics card. To be fair, however, the game looks great even with
medium-ranged setting activated, though the game’s liberal use of motion
blur will have you rushing to tweak its visual options to diminish the
discomfort.
As tempting as it is to compare Lichdom: Battlemage to Skyrim,
what with the early snowy environments and all that magic, this is no
role-playing game--at least, not in the traditional sense. Lichdom does,
however, grant you plenty of agency over how you exercise your magical
talents. Your spells are not assigned to you as if they are medicines
prescribed by a doctor (burn two brutes to a crisp with this
bog-standard fireball and call me in the morning). Instead, you drive
your own destiny by designing your spells using the various materials
that occasionally rush to your body after a kill as if drawn to your
magnetic personality.
Elemental
powers aren’t the only ones you command in this magic-driven action
game, but they are the two that define the initial hours of Lichdom’s
overlong campaign, which hobbles to a close long after it milks the joy
out of its excellent but single-minded combat.
I
couldn’t possibly begin to detail Lichdom’s convoluted spell creation,
which isn’t ungraspable, but requires that you make sense of various
terms--mastery, control, critical effect multiplier, apocalyptical
chance--and interpret the results of each step of the crafting process.
At first, it’s difficult to tell why spells behave as they do,
especially when there are countless statistical minutiae differentiating
one spell from the next. ("These two spells are the same except one
offers a slightly larger attack radius and the other does slightly more
damage. Is it worth spending time on a decision that won’t likely matter
much on the field of battle?") It’s both empowering and somewhat
tedious to have so much control over so many magical attributes, but
whether or not you fall in love with this system, you’ll spend plenty of
time attending to it: more powerful demons shall arrive, and you will
have to create higher-level spells to destroy them.
After
several hours of winding your way through Lichdom’s linear levels, it
becomes clear that developer Xaviant relied on this combat system to the
detriment of other basic aspects of game design. One by one, combat
scenarios appear, each one exactly like the last. Enemies spawn into
being out of nowhere--and should you die and have to relive the battle,
they always materialize in the same locations with no concern for your
position relative to their spawn points. You wave your hands about,
spreading disease and death, until every demon has fallen--or until you
are wholly annihilated. You then interact with a floating sphere that
generates a purple hologram depicting two or three characters talking
about apparently vital story events you never get to witness for
yourself. And then you repeat this scenario, with only boss fights and
the occasional appearance of your opposite-gendered exposition vessel to
disrupt the flow. Necromancy, ice bolt, ice bolt, fiery aura--once
more, with feeling.
To
be fair, the flow is also disrupted by frequent deaths, an annoyance
that’s sure to hound you when you enter new areas with spells that no
longer adequately protect you, but without the components that would
allow you to create stronger magic. Some battles are teeth-gnashingly,
hair-pullingly grueling, particularly those with enemies that enjoy
freezing you in place, and Lichdom almost takes a perverse delight in
how far apart its checkpoints occur. And so you take part in a tedious
video game version of Groundhog Day in which you perform the
same amazing supernatural feats so often, and in the same repetitive
scenarios, that those feats become as boring as collecting Gandalf the
Grey’s dry cleaning.
That isn’t to say that I
don’t appreciate the inherent diversity of Lichdom’s spellcrafting; a
ray of focused flame behaves differently than the necromantic conversion
of dead demons, after all. But the game's general approach takes the
burden off the design and transfers the impetus of creating variety to
me--and without innate structural variety, Lichdom stretches its one
excellent idea to the point of tearing. The game’s inordinate length
only reinforces the monotony. I hesitate to suggest a game should be
shorter than it already is, but Lichdom itself makes an excellent
argument for brevity. Xaviant miscalculated the formula. (Great
spellcasting) - (mana bar) + (meaningless story) + (unvaried battles) is
not, in fact, equal to 15 or 16 hours of consistent enjoyment and
$39.99 of your money.
While Lichdom makes a strong case for a shorter game, it also makes the case for another
Lichdom game. If there is any game this year deserving of a sequel,
it’s this one. With a steely backbone of meaningful world-building,
sensible storytelling, and proper pacing, a Lichdom 2 could have an
unassailable place to hang its best asset. The game at hand is concerned
only with the magic. A few hours in, I was convinced that it might be
enough. The love affair didn't last, but I’ll always have those golden
memories.