The Relic: First Guardian Review

[00:02] Guardian looks like it could be a solid addition to the growing ranks of beadless action games that punch above their weight. A sort of recommendation you drop your friends looking for something to scratch their itch between

[00:14] big games to let them know you're really into this action game lifestyle for real. Up close, The Relic is the exact opposite. It's clearly inspired by the From Software lineage, but doesn't even come close to meeting the high bar they

[00:27] goals well. >> I can't believe it. He was always so >> Shoddy and broken throughout, barely propped up by its engaging combat, and

[00:39] let down by how lackluster or straight up unacceptable every other piece of it up unacceptable every other piece of it is.

[00:53] Visually, The Rug does not make a good first or even second impression. either run-of-the-mill medieval European fantasy peasants, knights, and

[01:05] preachers, or designs out of place enough to be curious, but feeling incomplete, like your [music] Bloodborne doll standin, Eliza. area. >> The fidelity of these models are poor

[01:19] all around. This is what your character looks like in the menu screen. The lands you explore have the mood of a dead world with how most of its settlements are ghost towns and all the fortresses are ruins. And yet they all look nearly

[01:32] another. The few towns that do still have people in them feel almost >> No way. >> The mix of geography and whatever hazy color filter is fogging everything up is the biggest indicator of which of the

[01:47] three main regions you're in. Here's Minty Greenland. This place has that yellow glow that the movie set in the Middle East in the 2010s used. These color filters get oppressive in Burning Villages where everything has an orangey

[02:00] red glow that makes details like pathways to progress hard to find and the overall image quality looks smudged. Then you have the caves that artificially narrow your vision range by darkening the edges around the screen,

[02:13] [screaming] [groaning] could avoid getting stuck on random geometry aloing waist deep into the

[02:27] geometry aloing waist deep into the ground at a checkpoint. stairs into a weird tower can be tempting, but sometimes it just leads to

[02:40] time spent trying to understand how a fast travel point ended up completely embedded inside a wall, inaccessible, and completely useless. It's very easy into side quests or dungeons around the corner because records left behind by

[02:55] countryside, leading you into points of interest like a breadcrumb trail. by your character, making Batman-like deductions based on some sort of

[03:10] noteworthy thing in the environment, like a broken cart, or told in the voice conveniently left progressively revealing notes behind right before the >> Beautiful vial she treasured caught my eye. It was gleaming gold, and its

[03:25] surface was engraved with a strange symbol. Seriously, I know every game does a version of this kind of storytelling, but The Relic really technique with a frequency and reckless abandon I don't think I've seen before.

[03:44] Korean folklore are somewhat compelling, even moving at times. They tend to follow the formula of a sad story leads to a boss fight, but they don't all end with a bang. One story had me trekk up a mountain reading scraps of notes from a

[03:58] wife waiting for her husband to return as her daughter gets more and more anxious playing with pinw wheels to pass the time. At the top of the climb was just a grassy plateau filled almost hauntingly with pin wheels presumably

[04:11] left there by a daughter who eventually stopped waiting. I liked the rare occasions when a story resolved in a subversive way and was disappointed when these kinds of stories had boss fights wedged into them awkwardly.

[04:28] meaningful value in the relic. The rolling hills, deep forest, and dank dungeons of its world have hundreds of shiny little loot markers scattered into every nook and cranny, and almost all of them are just a scant pile of 30 to 50

[04:41] guarded by bad guys or tucked at the end of a divergent path in a cave, and almost all of them have about 600 gold. If you're wondering, that's weirdly specific. Well, so did I. until about 20 hours in when I stopped touching any of

[04:56] carrying more gold than I could responsibly spend by the third act. As someone who genuinely enjoys clearing map markers in games, my 30 or so hours with the relic was the first time I can remember being turned off at the idea of

[05:11] remember being turned off at the idea of getting them altogether. overwritten and put together in a strange way that suggests it was essentially put through translation software without any other linguistic

[05:26] touch or localization effort. >> Welcome home to the young man who has returned. We're glad he survived and made it back from Eden. >> This goes for most dialogue as well. Whenever I think a shopkeeper or guard

[05:38] easedropping on is done, more lines of dialogue keep pouring out clumsily. Every time I strike the hammer, I think of my daughter. It's why my hands have grown more precise.

[05:51] >> Even worse is the generally poor voice [music] performances across the board. >> It was thrilling to kill that girl. It was so funny how she cried and shouted >> I almost couldn't believe that some of the takes I heard made it into the final

[06:06] game. >> Save me, please. Just me, please. >> Save me, please. Just me, please. [groaning] roam the land is where the relic is at its most cohesive, but that's a

[06:21] relatively low bar that it barely clears. Each of the five available weapons are distinct from one another, while each one only has one combo string. You can't just mash it out since each subsequent swing requires proper

[06:34] timing. The sluggish responsiveness from the controls make this rhythm a chore to lock down in the early game, and I found myself dropping strings that felt right even after some practice. Only your defensive options cost stamina,

[06:47] encouraging you to be aggressive more freely. Like you, enemies can be stunned when they've run out of stamina through either your attacks or when you parry theirs. But it's frustrating that they don't have visible stamina bars, so

[06:59] you'll never know how close they are to a full stagger until it happens. >> Each of the three regions have their own key roster of bad guys specific to them,

[07:11] but none of the regular FOD or test your skills all that regularly on their own. harm. Groups of monsters are the most dangerous [music]

[07:25] due in part to the janky lock on system and jittery camera becoming wolffully and jittery camera becoming wolffully unreliable. like this guy, enemies don't have the visual appeal worthy of a top tier grim

[07:40] dark fantasy world. They feel like they are trying to ape the twisted nature of the from software aesthetic. After a while, they just become annoyances, not valuable for farming materials since they only drop middling amounts of gold

[07:54] or low-level crafting items that I could just go buy somewhere. By the late game, I would do my best to completely avoid them out in the world. running past them to the next checkpoint while in dungeons as I ran out of patience for the Nazis.

[08:12] in both of these respects, as their attacks create way more of a puzzle to solve and generally look more detailed and more interesting than the run-of-the-mill mukes. But these fights are also where I had to employ the most

[08:24] tedious tactics in order to avoid the cheapest deaths. There are a lot of bosses, over 75 to be clear, and most of them are optional. The worst of these take advantage of the relic's affforementioned technical woes, while

[08:36] environmental hazards, status effects offense that you can't reliably interrupt.

[08:49] example, this lady who didn't even bother to show up at all when I respawned, leaving me in an empty room that they could occasionally fire into, which I couldn't leave without reloading my entire set.

[09:11] spice up combat, adding some punchy offensive and defensive options into the offensive and defensive options into the mix. weapon, the more complete they feel with a more fleshed out move set. And each

[09:24] weapon has a two-sided skill tree that firmly divides them into even more distinct play styles. The battle staff is a good example of this with one side making you a dangerous whirlwind in melee and the other giving you some very

[09:36] fills [music] the role of a traditional mage. However, the massive amount of relic points required to unlock all of these skills in any one path will make it hard to see the full scope of any style before the very late game. You

[09:50] can't grind these points either, as they only come either as reward from certain boss fights or some quests or can be found as specific blue shrines out in the world. With an item that is really easy to come by, you can refund any

[10:03] points invested and respspec it as you see fit. I did this many times in order play styles if I thought a new approach was needed to get through a new boss.

[10:17] drawbacks, some of which have pronounced effects on combat. Relics are stones that modify or enhance your stats and add an extra layer of customization. With some outside of the box thinking, these can bring flare to your builds,

[10:30] which worked well enough where I didn't even care that much that there is no regular stat progression or leveling up at all. Most relics are basic, raising hit points or stamina, bolstering defenses, and so on, but some can offer

[10:43] invincibility when you take fatal damage. with special attacks that seem like they would be a cool combo. But like most of

[10:55] the sloppy design of the relic, it didn't explain which special attacks they applied to or even what a special attack was at all.

[11:08] Guardian is all the potential it squanders. It is the bones of something that could have grown to be a notable action game, especially in its energetic combat. But everything about this experience, including its combat, is

[11:20] marred in some way by its own shambolic state. The janky subtitles and sometimes straight up terrible visual quality could be tolerated, but the relic is inexcusable ways. It's a gem that's barely cut, let alone polished.

[11:42] Campaign Evolved or our final review of Cow. And for anything else in the world Cow. And for anything else in the world of video games, stick with IG.