Aralon: Forge and Flame review
:: FORGED IMPERFECTLYPrice:
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Aralon: Forge and Flame is an open-world role-playing game not unlike Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series.
While it's pretty great to be able to explore and discover an open world on mobile, Forge and Flame has so many technical issues that it's hard to play.
Let's go exploring!
At the outset of Forge and Flame, you create your character and are quickly dumped into a quest to save the realm... I think. The game's story thread seems to exist just to make excuses for you to bounce from one area to the next - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, exploring the world of Forge and Flame is probably its strongest suit. Even though console and PC games have the horsepower to crank out larger and much more detailed worlds, Forge and Flame's ambition to create something like Oblivion on mobile is admirable.
Wait, something here isn't quite right... actually a lot of things aren't...
Unfortunately, this ambition comes with its own set of problems, and for Forge and Flame, these problems are more abundant and egregious than other games like it.
Examplesinclude: cave exits that take you to the wrong place, geometry that can trap your character, and an inconsistent auto-save system.
When playing through the game, I actually had to start using the game issues to my advantage to make it through to the end.
But... but patches will save the day?
Even if a future update tones down some of the technical issues with the game, Forge and Flame still wouldn't be that great. It suffers from a general clunkiness, making things like combat more of annoying than satisfying.
The bottom line
Overall, Forge and Flame is admirable for what it tries to accomplish on mobile, but its ambition doesn't offset its issues.