Barbaras against Rome. Sacred Fire Review: a Role Playing Game

An unusual role -playing game made in the form of a visual novel. Review without spoilers. Early access.

The game is declared for platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOS.

Our hero lives in a village of barbarians, on which the forces of Rome are approaching. The inhabitants of the settlement while also finding out relationships among themselves. I will not spoil, in short – plots are available.

The gameplay is a mixture of RPG and visual novel.

The seriousness of the role system begins to manifest itself when creating a hero. He needs to choose stats and/or perks that quite strongly affect the passage.

We are told a small background and the adventure begins.

In fact, all events in the game belong to one of the three types of activity. Consider each of them.

Conversations/making decisions. In good RPG without it, nowhere. There are a lot of dialogs, there are also enough solutions that twist the plot. Here we build relationships (can be very different) with other characters, gain certain features of the hero that will significantly affect the passage.

The battles are ordinary. At some point, you will have to fight with ordinary opponents and then there is a battle, which is a sequence of moves of both sides of the conflict. Ordinary battles were remembered by the fact that the enemies die from one blow, and with our failure weakly beat.

Epic cuts can also arise with https://triumph-casino.co.uk/ ordinary enemies – they are not attacking one at a time.

Elite battles or duel. Everything is more complicated here. The enemy, as a rule, is strongly and will need all the dexterity and luck to win. It will not work to win from one blow, the chances of successful actions are sharply reduced, and the price of error becomes high.

You can increase your chances in such a fight of a waste of mana to increase the accuracy of the blows. But it is necessary and not to overdo it, to spend a limited resource reasonably.

About the role system

The game has such an interesting and branched system of forming the character of the hero that he decided to highlight a whole chapter under this.

In addition to stats and perks that we see at the beginning, a bunch of parameters is added.

The hero develops the image of thinking, fame, relationships with key (with secondary ones, but they are not shown) characters and, in addition, a tree of pumping objects appears. The development of different aspects depends on the actions of the protagonist during the game. All this is accompanied by sufficiently detailed descriptions.

You can play a leader or be an ordinary fighter. You can get to the point that the hero will hate everything. The scope for wagging the role is very wide.

And even relationships with any one character when considering are divided into several more subspecies, which open as the level of trust and passage of the game develops. I have not found any special (although some – there), but the very opportunity opens up broad prospects. You can both establish and spoil the relationship.

The global influence on activity (conversations and all types of battle) has the current mood of the hero, which dynamically changes depending on the events and the situation. Two scales are typed – fear and rage, which affect the probability of performing different actions. There is an opportunity to calm down by spent manu. And in battle, for example, to take his emotions under control is not always useful – the hero misses more often (experimentally found) this is really the highest role pilot.

Consider the pros and cons of the game, let us summarize.

+ Pretty, although simple graphics.

+ Good musical and sound accompaniment.

+ A simple plot, due to the study of the characters, is unexpectedly revealed in the depths.

+ An excellent role -playing system for the development of the hero and his relationship with the world, and it is not necessary to be only a « good boy ».

+ Battles (in the visual novel!) keep in tension and some rather complex.

– There is no Russian localization of the text, but you need to read and understand quite a lot. My average-nosen knowledge of English is enough, I have to climb the dictionary.

– It seemed to me that in a battle with an elite centurion, the balance is not in favor of the player. Although « on paper » I supposedly have a sharpened warrior for such a battle. Without options for losing. Sad.

A very unusual game. The content that is – pleases with its elaboration. Role -playing system is extremely original. However, so far only one act of three is ready and it remains to be hoped that the developers will not reduce the quality bar, which is in the existing part of the game.

PS: probably did not reveal all aspects, could miss something. I will be glad to supplement/adjust the review or answer questions in the course of communication in the comments.