Game Reviews

Tales of Illyria

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Tales of Illyria

Fighting Fantasy, Oregon Trail, and traditional tabletop RPGs have all had a huge influence on video game development. They've shaped the structure and tone of many adventures, and plenty of games still rely on Dungeons and Dragons rule-sets for combat and exploration.

This tends to mean that most Western RPGs take place in a handful of different settings. Many are set in an early modern fictitious Europe or the middle ages, except splashed with sorcery and quite possibly dragons and other mythical beasts to shake things up a bit.

So it's unsurprising that Tales of Illyria falls rather neatly into this category too. It also sets out to tell a tale that has been well trodden before.

Killer king

Having being framed for the murder of his family, earning him the title 'Parricide King' - which is technically the wrong term, but we can gloss over that - Elric sets out to clear his name.

His journey, which includes an inordinate amount of walking, sees him visit various towns and castles as he forms partnerships and seeks vengeance on those who have wronged him.

It's very much a by-the-numbers adventure, except for the fact it paints itself as a Fighting Fantasy journey as you make decisions that shape Elric's path. These aren't as groundbreaking as you'd like them to be, but - coupled with the randomised nature of encounters - this feature does mix things up rather nicely.

A walk like no other

One of Tales of Illyria's selling points on the Play store is that it contains four novels' worth of text.

This would be brilliant if those 250,000 words were actually well-written. Unfortunately, dialogue is broken and dull and event descriptions are full of repetition - it's just wholly uninspiring to dredge through all that poorly written text.

If that weren't bad enough, the hand-drawn artwork that makes up Tales of Illyria's visuals are so rough they make you want to stop playing out of embarrassment. Even downloading the high-resolution 1080p artwork makes little difference, as the absence of polish looks worse in high-definition.

The same can be said of gameplay, with animations looking cumbersome and characters having, quite possibly, the worst walking animation anyone has ever seen. Imagine the moonwalk performed forwards and you'll have an idea of what I mean.

Combat is equally dull, as you can leave any battle to be played out automatically. You can wade in yourself and issue commands, but it really makes little difference and you'll have to act fast if you don't want the AI to kick in and take over.

While Tales of Illyria undoubtedly has its problems, this is definitely one of the most ambitious Android RPGs around. It features everything you'd expect of a big PC adventure like Neverwinter Nights and more beyond, but it's hard to focus on all this ambition when everything else is just a joke to endure.

Developer Little Killerz claims that this is an "early access" build, seeking to justify the game's shortcomings by pointing out that it's currently half price (at a still-expensive £2.57) and updates are on the way.

But the problems don't come from poor mechanics or bugs - they all stem from poor design choices and a lack of truly engaging content.

Tales of Illyria

An ambitious adventure that might be fun if it weren't swamped in poor design, boring gameplay, and terrible dialogue
Score
Vaughn Highfield
Vaughn Highfield
Quite possibly the tallest man in games, Vaughn has been enamoured with video games from a young age. However, it wasn't until he spent some time writing for the student newspaper that he realised he had a knack for talking people's ears off about his favourite pastime. Since then, he's been forging a path to the career he loves... even if it doesn't love him back.