Strategy games have always been a kind of love-hate relationship for me. While I love all the layers of stats, making a strategy, and watching that strategy play out, the dice rolls have always kind of made them frustrating for me to play. The idea that all your carefully planned out work can be destroyed in a single domino effect of bad luck is something that has infuriated me about the genre. Though, I have grown to love the genre despite my frustration with its random elements, and Blackguards 2 is no different.
Blackguards 2 is a turn-based strategy RPG that takes place after the events of the original Blackguards. You start off by being thrown into the gladiator’s labyrinth, underneath the city stadium. You are playing as Cassia, a woman that was thrown into the labyrinth for no apparent reason and seeks to find her way out will retaining her sanity. As part of the side effect of remaining in the labyrinth for so long, Cassia becomes obsessed with the idea of ruling, and that’s where her insane conquest for world power begins. As part of this quest, she decides to find and recruit the gladiators that defeated the Nine Hordes from the first game, who will be your party members for the entirety of the game.
Blackguards 2 has a pretty basic RPG battles system. It puts the units in the battlefield in an order, and when you get control of a unit, you decide where to move, then decide what action you want to take. Whether it be to use a spell, an attack, wait, or end turn. It’s a pretty basic battle system, but it gets the job done. Even with these simple actions, it opens up to a lot of complexity that made battles last for over an hour, most times. While I didn’t have a problem with the grid system itself, I wish that they had implemented the feature of skipping your opponent’s unit’s turns, because a lot of the time I was just waiting for opponent to move all of their units.
The battles themselves are pretty straightforward. Either kill all of the enemy units, or gather materials and leave. These two kinds of battles can get boring pretty fast, especially since once they get more complicated, they can last for over an hour. I found myself getting a little bored with the repetition, but the boss fights became the saving graces, with them all having unique mechanics in order to mix things up.
The whole point of the game is to move along the world map, taking over spaces and upgrading your party members. The towns you take over let you buy additional equipment, armor, and potions, as well as do pillaging missions, and interact more with the characters you meet along the way. Periodically, the towns you take over will also be attacked, requiring you to defend them with your traps and fortifications. These missions do a good attempt to add some variety, but the saving grace of the game’s battles are definitely the maps, as all of them are pretty unique, and add mechanics and variety that helps break up the monotony of the normal missions.
All of your party members are upgradable in any way you desire, although most of them have specific upgrade paths that they succeed in, and you will most likely upgrade them in that specific path. Cassia is basically a blank slate, with every ability, spell, and upgrade being open to her for you to build her in pretty much any way you want. The spells are pretty varied, and allow you to do a variety of things, although choosing what will be most beneficial to your party is up to you, though the ones that buff all party members or debuff all enemies are obviously the most useful.
The game has a pretty expansive campaign that clocked in at about 30 hours for me to completion, and that wasn’t even with all the possible spaces on the map taken, so I would guess completing the game would take you around 40 hours, which is a good amount of time for your money.
The game’s story is interesting, and while the characters don’t really pop out at you, they are interesting enough to warrant getting to know more about them. A lot of what made the game interesting was the optional dialogue trees that really show you a lot about what these characters are about, and why they are helping Cassia in this one-way suicide mission. Cassia is the most interesting by far, however, with her character overall being very well developed. You get a real sense of what she is supposed to be like, so much so that both good and bad choices still feel like the same character, that’s just making different choices for different reasons. Her characterization really stood out to me, and is part of why I continued to play the game all the way to end.
Overall, Blackguards 2 is a solid turn based RPG that has everything you could want out of a standard RPG. Its strengths lie in its solid combat system, interesting maps and boss mechanics, and the interesting characters. It does fall flat however, because of the repetitiveness of missions, and it would have been nice to see more variety in what each individual character could do, rather than giving them all the same upgrades and abilities to pick and choose. That being said however, the game is solid and is worth a try to all those hardcore RPG fans out there.