Realms of Ancient War Review (XBLA)

Action-RPGs. A lot of love out there for them, including myself. So naturally I was excited to get my hands on this, the latest offering in the genre. But does it deliver? Oh dear. Two words I hoped I would never have to write.

You take control of either a warrior, wizard or rogue class of character and essentially just grind your way through basic, bland medieval fantasy surroundings with a typical isometric view. The closest comparison I can draw is the also-mediocre Dungeon Siege III, but at least that had some character and plot to it.

Each character has basic forms of attack assigned to the face buttons. Health potions and magic can be replenished with the trigger button. Be prepared to press them all a lot. Even from the very beginning, it’s a case of A,A,A,A,A,B, A,A,A,A,A,X, RT, LT, A,A,A,A, and so on, with unrelenting amounts of enemies dogging you. It’s just no fun, and it makes Fable’s combat look groundbreaking in comparison.

I appreciate grinding can be necessary in these games, but nothing is learnt from it here. There is no fluidity, no tactics, just button-mashing mayhem, and whatever ‘fun’ there is to be had soon evaporates. The enemies are bland and boring, and mostly consist of an alarming amount of spiders, typically overwhelming you. Cue more button-mashing boredom. It’s not pretty, nor is it clever.

Realms of Ancient War isn’t particularly pretty to look at, either. It’s all far too generic for a fantasy setting; rope bridges, castle dungeons, etc, are as expected with such a setting, but there is nothing new, with very little interaction with any of it anyway.

There isn’t even any sort of map, so be ready to encounter even more spiders whilst wandering around every nook and cranny till you find the one path to success. The missions are plotted poorly through NPC characters with no voices, but instead have an awful lot to say through reams of (thankfully skippable) text.

The quests themselves are your typical ‘kill this, fetch that’ scenarios, so, back to the A button again. Naturally, from these quests and the enemies you vanquish during them, XP is the reward, but even that is delivered haphazardly. You either get next to nothing or tons of it, leaving it almost impossible to calculate when you’ll reach that next level. Then there are the skill tre- oh wait, there aren’t any. More skills become available as you level up, with each skill capable of rising three levels. No stat application here either.

The idea of checkpoints in Realms of Ancient War is also baffling. From area to area you pass over Soulstones, but even in death, you are given a nine lives limit to re-spawn from these stones. Once the ‘lives’ are gone, game over it is. Nice. Even more baffling is that during co-op mode, this function is made redundant as the ‘dead’ player will re-spawn on the spot, in but a few seconds.

All these problems are apparent from the very beginning of Realms of Ancient War, all of them off-putting. This will test even the hardened action RPG fans, with its out of date graphics, gameplay and, well, everything. It makes Dungeon Siege III look like Torchlight in terms of quality. The cleverest aspect of the whole game is the title, an intentional pseudo-acronym of the word RAW. Woo and indeed hoo. Just go and get Torchlight 2, will ya? Nothing to see here.

Realms of Ancient War is out now on XBLA and PSN. There’s a free demo if you want to try it out for yourself.