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Black Gate: Inferno

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Black Gate: Inferno

This is a freemium game review, in which we give our impressions immediately after booting a game up, again after three days, and finally after seven days. That's what the strange sub-headings are all about. Click on the links to jump straight to day three and day seven.

Another week, another freemium online RPG with a strong single-player component.

This time around, the hacking and slashing fun is being provided by Glu Games. Black Gate: Inferno is the studio's take on grind-heavy titles like Torchlight, Dungeon Hunter, Magicka, and so on.

Will it prove to be a shining Bastion for the RPG genre, or is it Diablo-lic mess?

Find out with me as I play Black Gate: Inferno for a week.

First impressions

"Slapdash" is a super-fun word that I don't get to say enough. It's also the one word I thought of constantly as I played the opening sections of the game - the presentation is just so, well, slapdash.

You choose a character archetype from a selection of warriors, thieves, knights, etc, give him or her a name, and start your quest. Right up until this point, everything looks and sounds impressive, with neat visual effects and a rousing score.

As soon as you're out into the field of combat, though, everything changes.

The UI is horrendous, with a stock font that's totally out of step with the fantasy tone, and featuring liberal use of everyone's least favourite colour of text: cyan. The text denoting a successful combo is a red-to-amber gradient that wouldn't look out of place in a late-'90s Sega arcade game, but here it looks ridiculous.

These may seem like minor criticisms, but they're indicative of the level of polish and thought that's gone into the presentation.

If you're not convinced that what I've described so far qualifies as slapdash, what about the strange crackling sound artefact that occurs during the main theme?

No? Perhaps the low-polygon objects that make round surfaces look more like octagons than circles will convince you.

Do I need to mention the pots that fade away rather than smash when you hit them?

Slapdash, slapdash, slapdash.

From what I've seen, the game isn't particularly deep or complex, either. But I'm only starting out, so it's possible that it builds on its basic routine of running around and hammering the 'attack' button.

Day 3: Ghost pots for a population of phantoms

I'm still not enjoying Black Gate: Inferno.

I've just about got past the sloppiness of the presentation, and I've even begun to find it quite endearing. But it's completely without substance.

Your health is represented at the top-left of the screen in red, your Mana for special attacks in blue. You use a virtual joystick to move your hero about the world, and press the 'normal attack' button until everything near you has been vanquished.

At the end of a dungeon you'll run into a boss creature, which attack you in exactly the same way that the minions attack you: by running in your direction.

Imagine doing this mission after mission, on levels that look more or less the same as the preceding ones.

It's boring, plain and simple. The densely populated MMO-ish world doesn't inject any life into it either, since no players are conversing with one another. The only topics I've seen on the global chat are children cursing at one another and people attempting to sell items.

The one feature I quite like is the automatic path-finding. You can't easily tell where you're meant to be going to get your next quest, but fortunately you can tap an option that literally walks you there.

This is not a narrative tour de force. At one point I spent three whole minutes dumbly tapping the screen to progress the inane script. The game then transported me elsewhere to speak with more people, before finally letting me start the next mission.

The main attraction of Black Gate: Inferno is meant to be the combat, and the ability to get down to it without delay is a thoughtful and well-implemented idea.

So far, though, it's the only well-implemented idea I've found.

Day 7: The return of "slapdash"

Continuing my humdrum adventure of tapping an on-screen prompt and waiting to get into action, I'm now just beginning to see the game open up, but even so there seems to be little of interest here.

You can select different quests to go out on, but I found that following the main path was the quickest way of making real progress. Occasionally, though, you'll run up against a wall of difficulty that arises from being too puny.

One such mission sees you protecting a group of goddesses from waves of attacks. To its credit, the game quickly joins you up with a party of other players, and they all seem pleasant enough.

Once again, I didn't experience any friendliness with the community, but there was no unwanted aggression either.

We fought valiantly against the hordes as they attacked us from multiple angles, but in the end I couldn't keep up with the rapidly increasing toughness of the bad guys. I was using potions constantly to top up my health, and when they ran out, I fell.

I received no feedback from the game on why I was so outclassed, so I assume it must simply be because my experience level isn't high enough. I've equipped all the best items I have, and while they do make a little difference to my performance, they're not enough to progress further.

The general shoddiness of the product has raised its head in key areas again too.

Things get very choppy in multiplayer, or when you're in a crowded area in the overworld, as the engine just can't cope with rendering so many characters at once.

When you kill a boss character, all surrounding enemies disappear for no reason.

Some enemies can pass straight through wall geometry when you cannot, which I suspect has more to do with bad clipping than magical ability.

Also, you can supposedly share your adventure on social networks via a button at the top of the screen, but, like most of the menus, it looks rough and unfinished.

"Enter content here", it demands, when it should read, "write your message here. It then asks whether a game called Armed Heroes can access your Twitter account, before unceremoniously booting you to the Home screen. Wow.

I don't recommend that you play Black Gate: Inferno. It's a tedious exercise in dungeon-crawling that may well have some depth but does everything it can to deter you from exploring it.

How are you getting on with the game? You can tell us and the rest of the PG community about your experiences by leaving a comment in the box below.

Black Gate: Inferno

A very poor excuse for an action role-playing game. The combat is dull, the levelling-up is unrewarding, and the story is laughably poor. Definitely one to avoid
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Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.