Bound By Flame

Bound By Flame is a third person action roleplaying game developed by a French studio called Spiders and published by Focus Home Interactive in 2014. It didn't look like the most expensive production but I hoped it would still be able to provide entertainment.

Lower budget action RPG

Story-wise Bound By Flame is not particularly memorable. There's some undead army conquering the world and you are a member of a mercenary company escorting some scholars that I guess are planning to stop the threat. You get involved in a ritual -- accidentally -- and get fiery powers that also make you a possible world savior. Or a doom of other kind, I suppose. There's a moral choice of sorts which affects the plot to a degree.

There are different companions who can travel with you one at a time. They have their own little stories but I found the characters dull. The less than stellar English voice acting didn't help either. In combat the companions also get easily overwhelmed but at least keep some of enemy attention away from you for a moment. Sometimes they even manage to hold their own when told to fight defensively.

The game wasn't as linear as I had expected; there are quite a few side quests to complete. Running through the same maps doesn't add that much excitement however as the scenery doesn't change.

Difficult combat

Bound By Flame has the right amount of mechanical depth for its size but for some odd reason its combat falls a tiny bit short from being good. The game is unreasonably punishing even on the default, the second of four difficulties. If you're not blocking you will die very fast. But that's not really the reason for the lacking enjoyment. You die quickly on The Witcher 3's Death March too but its combat is still fun.

Maybe having no alternative evasion options is one of the reasons. There is no sidestep or combat roll; you can only parry when wielding a two-handed weapon. With dual daggers equipped, pressing the block button performs a backwards dodge which still is essentially the same thing as parry. The dodge does work better against some enemy attacks though.

A perfectly timed parry/dodge results in a satisfying slowdown effect but there's no follow up to it. Riposte attacks seem about as effective as normal ones. Enemies are rather spongy too. I focused on maximizing my damage output but when I ran out of upgrades, there were still enemy types left that took unnecessarily high amounts of hits to kill.

You get three skill trees to spread your points to: one for two-handed combat, one for daggers, and one for fire spells. The last one is complimentary because spells alone don't do enough damage to finish fights in a sensible time. You also can't block while casting spells, which is dangerous.

I took all the damage increasing stuff from the two-handed tree and then focused on the fire tree. I also took the dagger dodge improving upgrades. You can stealth while wielding daggers but I didn't bother with it. I'd say the daggers are viable outside sneak attacks too though. Even unspecialized I found them to kill some enemies faster than two-handed weapons.

Many of the upgrades I didn't take give interrupt resistance. Presumably the stat keeps your attacks from being interrupted when taking damage. That seems useless as the problem is not getting interrupted rather than dying. I think the perks should rather give some form of damage reduction bonuses.

While the game is annoyingly challenging on the default difficulty, it's not impossible -- until it's time to fight the final boss. I had seen a tip on how to beat it easily but tried it first on my own. The first phase of the fight is ridiculous. The boss attacks so mercilessly fast that you simply can't fight in melee. You can block but there's no opening for safe counterattack. With spells you can stay relatively safe but you deal damage so slow that the fight moves onto the second phase with barely any progress. The second phase is much more manageable but after it you're back in the first one again.

How to win the fight easily is by utilizing traps which are your character's specialty in the mercenary company. You can lay them in combat but a far smaller hassle is to set them all in the small area just outside the encounter's trigger zone. I had gathered enough materials over the game to craft 60 traps. Once the fight started, I lured the boss into the them and the second phase started instantly. After that I only had to score one hit in the first phase again to finish the game.

Bound By Flame ran as smoothly as I expected from an Xbox 360 title. One town area had very slight framerate issues but otherwise I have no complaints on performance or bugs. Also, uncommonly for a 3rd person game, there is an FOV slider. But rather than being able increase FOV, I'd rather be able to zoom the camera in and out. It's surprising how few games of the genre have that feature.