'Hidden gem', így nevezik a figyelő tekintetek elől megbújó, hétköznapi ember szemét elkerülő, sokak számára ismeretlen, mégis nagyszerű, értéket hordozó dolgokat. Pár hónappal ezelőttig nem is hallottam a játékról, majd az értékeléseket böngészve eltántorodtam tőle, hiába volt a képek, videók alapján mutatós darab.

Valóban tartanom kellett volna a távolságot? Egy jókora akció keretében sikerült rátennem a kezem, a többi pedig, ahogy mondják, már történelem.


Jó pár negatív vélemény fellelhető, melyekben főképp azt sérelmezik, hogy lassan és vontatottan történnek az események. Érzésem szerint ez abból adódhat, hogy a Steam felülete is 'akció'-'RPG'-ként hirdeti a művet, s ránézésre is annak szeretnék feltüntetni. Ennél nagyobb tévedés nem is történhetett volna..

Magam is úgy ültem neki a Wolcen után, hogy újfent elérkezett az idő a szörnyek aprításának. Eltelt fél óra, eltelt egy óra, eltelt másfél.. rá kellett eszmélnem, műfaját tekintve ennek semmi köze sincs az előbb említett címhez, sem a Diablohoz, sem hasonszőrű társaihoz. Ha viszonyítanom kéne, talán a Divinity: Original Sinhez áll a legközelebb, annyi különbséggel, hogy a körökre osztott harc helyett jelen esetben valós idejű, ám ugyanúgy taktikus csatározás mellett döntöttek. Természetesen ezzel semmi gond, egy tanácsot tudnék adni még így, az elején: aki egy darálós, a lények ezreit hentelő, vérbeli ARPG-re vágyik, az meg se próbálkozzon vele.


Már a kezdeti órákban világossá válik, hogy ezúttal nem az 'üsd-vágd, nem apád' fog dominálni. Alapjáraton egy teljesen szinkronizált, történet-vezérelt, stratégiát igénylő harcokkal megtoldott, különböző elgondolkodtató feladványokkal megfejelt játékmenetre számíthat az, aki úgy dönt, hogy megismerkedik a Heretic Kingdoms világával.

• ▲ Első kiemelendő pontom mindenképp a játék nehézsége lenne. Hard fokozaton vágtam bele - gyanítom azért normálon is hasonló a helyzet -, nem fogok köntörfalazni: ez bizony feladja a leckét. Kifejezetten pozitívumként tudom értékelni, hogy nem nézi hülyének a játékost, főleg annak fényében, hogy manapság nem különösebben divat a kihívás és a gondolkodás, kevesen vállalják csak be; itt viszont össze kell szednie magát az embernek, ha túl szeretné élni az összecsapásokat, bossharcokat, illetve meg kívánja oldani a számos, különféle fejtörőt.
  
  
• ▲ Nem mehetek el szó nélkül a látványvilág mellett: hangulatos, elbűvölő, részletesen kidolgozott, helyenként az Ezeregyéjszaka meséire hajazó, máskor az ókori Kínát inspirációként felhasználó területeken kalandozhatunk, melyhez remek optimalizáció társul, végezetül mindezt kiegészíti a táj változásával az adott hangulathoz illő zene.
  
  
• ▲ Külön öröm volt nekem, hogy a térképek nem gigantikusak: nincs kifejezetten kedvemre a végtelenben való céltalan futkosás, többnyire sikerült belőnie a fejlesztőgárdának, hogy mennyi az elég..
  
  
• ▼ ..azonban néhol érezni - főleg a végjáték felé haladva -, hogy egyes zónák és rejtvények csupán az időhúzás végett születtek. Ugyebár, labirintusszerű csatornák és pusztaságok..?

Ritka az olyan mű, amiről alig lehet elmondani valami rosszat, jelen esetben mégis ez a helyzet.

Amit feljebb említettem, nem is feltétlen vehető hibaként, lehetséges, hogy csakis jómagam éreztem annak. Nem szokásom elsiklani a negatívumok felett, most mégis úgy ülök itt, hogy nem tudnék mit kiemelni. Bugok? A végigjátszásom alatt eggyel találkoztam összesen, amit a pár perccel korábbi mentésem visszatöltése meg is oldott. Játékmeneti gondok? Effélét sem tapasztaltam. Fagyások? Egy sem.

A Shadows: Awakening egy méltatlanul alulértékelt és ismeretlen cím, melyet sokan lehúznak a lassabb folyása és nehézsége kapcsán. Kerek perec megmondom, engem ritkán köt le ennyire egy játék. Nem merül el a Divinity mélységeiben, nem vadul meg, mint egy Wolcen, ellenben tökéletesen ötvözi a különböző stílusok keveredését, ezáltal létrehozva egy különleges elegyet. Ha teljes áron nem is, de kedvezményesen, avagy különböző oldalak csomagjaiban kínálva pár euróért beszerezve teljesen jó vétel. Végszóként annyit tehetek hozzá: egy kóstolást mindenképp megér.

You play as the demon. In this one, the demon is a devourer of the souls of lost heroes. By devouring a soul, the demon can give that hero life again, basically swapping into their body and running around as a sword-swinging fighter or fireball-flinging spellcaster or, the archer one. You can have a handful of puppets (the game’s terminology) at any given time. It’s a party-based RPG but your party is mashed into one person.

That person includes the demon. The demon can jump into the realm of shadows, which not only means more chances to kill things and take their stuff, it can also provide new avenues around the level, additional chances to make money or upgrade, and story tidbits. And everyone levels up, unlocks skills and abilities, and otherwise progresses.

The fun twist on this is that swapping happens instantly, which means you can effectively swap characters mid-combat. Learning how to make this work is when the game really opens up. Initiate combat as a spellcaster, swap to the fast-moving demon to get back out of range, jump to an archer/ranger type and pepper them with arrows, then switch to one of the fighter types to finish them off. Enemies are tough, even at low levels. You’ve got to work every angle, not just charge forward face-first.

Shadows: Awakening follows the Diablo script: Journey to a hub, go through the hub and do all the quests and find out what’s going on, beat up monsters, kill them and take their loot. As in Diablo, it’s a good idea to smash everything you can because it’s full of silver, and then explore every last nook and cranny for secrets. The main story clocks in at around 15 hours with 15 hours of side quests coming to 30 hours total for one playthrough. With each character and mission, there is new dialogue and a new path. While isometric RPGs can be a negative to some, Shadows: Awakening absolutely nails it in the artistic department for environments, enemies, and overall immersion.

THE GOOD
- Replayability is high
- Intuitive Controls
- Puzzles and synchronized attacks
- Talented voice actors
- Immersive atmosphere

THE BAD
- Gameplay can get repetitive
- Progression feels controlled


DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE

If you like this review, then please consider giving it a thumbs up. I've also reviewed other games that you might find interesting. If so please follow Top of the Chart.

Reviewed on: Win10 Home 64-bit, Intel i7, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4MB GDDR5, 8MB RAM

Shadows: Awakening is a really nice ARPG game where you control one of up to four characters which you can switch anytime. One of these is a demon in the shadow realm which is a special layer of the material world if you want. It's basically the same world, but with important differences. In order to fulfil quests, solve riddles or succeed in challenges, you often need to do things in both layers of the world. For example, a bridge may only exist in the shadow layer and once you moved over it, you can switch back to the material layer and continue on the other side.

There's an individual skill tree to each of the playable characters, allowing to enhance their skills and abilities as they level up. Of course there's lot a loot to collect and not all items are useable by all characters. Items come in four different levels: normal, magic, enchanted and legendary. Of course you're watching out for the legendary stuff.

The world is nicely designed as you would expect from a solid ARPG. Environments are changing as you travel on in your journey, e.g. there's dungeons, desert, woodland, etc.

Fighting typically means clicking the enemies until they die (you can hold the mouse button for repeated attacks though). Depending on your character, you can use melee, ranged or magic attacks. The different skills allow for various special attacks of the respective character.

From my impression, the game is well balanced and fun to play. The graphics and music (from Dynamedion) are nicely done and there's an interesting plot the game is based on. The concept of switching to the shadow layer is unique and one of the best elements in the game. If you're looking for a nice ARPG for single player gameplay, this might be a good choice.

There's one more thing I'd like to add: The game was originally published as Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms by Bitcomposer. The game was incomplete and contained "book 1" only, which means that half of the story and content was still missing. Book 2 was supposed to be delivered some time later for free to the original customers. However, Bitcomposer eventually went bankrupt and didn't want to put any more money into the project. Instead they offered a 50% discount without notifying the dev studio (Games Farm) about it - just to make some more money from an incomplete game. The problem for Games Farm was that they wanted to finish their game and not let down their customers, but didn't hold the rights to do it. However, during the resolution of the insolvency, they fought for the rights of their game and eventually succeeded in this.

Now what they tried was to finish book 2 and resolve a performance issue as the original engine could not make use of multiple CPU cores. After a while they came to the conclusion that the whole game engine needs to exchanged, requiring lots of changes to most of the game. And while doing this, they reworked much of the UI and many details of the game as well. What you get with Shadows: Awakening is the result of all these efforts.

So why am I writing this, you may wonder? Well, they put in all the work without getting any money for it. They did it not to let down their customers and to hold up to their promise to deliver a complete game. In the end, all buyers of the original Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms received the all new Shadows: Awakening completely for free. In my view, this is very rare and really exceptional, so I want to stress the fact that Games Farm is a great studio who really deserve respect and acknoledgement,

Shadows: Awakening is a fantasy themed action RPG set in the Heretic Kingdoms. The main character is a demon called the Devourer, who only exists on the shadow plane. The Devourer interacts with the physical world by absorbing the souls of other important characters, which then allows the player to also control those characters.

There are around a dozen characters to "recruit", and you can have four in your active party, including the Devourer. You only control one character at a time, but you can instantly shapeshift into another at the press of a button. Each character is either a warrior, rogue or mage, and they all have eight unique skills, of which you can select three at a time for use in combat. These include the typical aRPG ranged attacks, radial attacks, summons and buffs.

When I’d got a full party and upgraded my favourite skills, I found the combat to be quite enjoyable, and a little bit tactical. I got into the habit of quickly switching between my four party members, using all of their skills instead of just waiting for a single character’s skills to cooldown. Skills with an ongoing effect continue to benefit all party members after you switch away from the character who activated the skill. Its also possible to protect characters on low health by switching away from them, giving them a chance to regenerate.

Most enemies only exist in either the physical world or the shadow plane, but more powerful enemies exist in both. Some have a shadow shield that has to be destroyed before you can deal physical damage. When you switch to the shadow plane, enemies in the physical world are frozen in place, allowing you to easily get in melee range before switching back to the physical world.

Unfortunately the story is very poorly written, and failed to hold my interest. It didn't help that the mage who summons the Devourer at the start of the game, doesn't really make an attempt to explain what is going on, who the bad guys are, or why its important to stop them, until several hours of gameplay have passed - by which time I'd stopped caring. There were a couple of other Heretic Kingdoms games released a few years ago, but I haven't played them. I suppose its possible that Awakening’s story could make more sense if you’ve played those other games, but I doubt it.

Voice acting is mostly terrible, including some really strange conversations with a race of wolf people who speak with normal Human accents. I'd expect this type of character to speak with a beast-like voice, with some amount of growling or snarling. I couldn't believe that these voices belonged to those characters and I found that quite distracting.

There's also some frustrating puzzles involving guiding a rolling boulder onto a pressure plate to open a door. You have to pull levers in the correct order to activate platforms to stop the boulder falling into a cavern. If you mis-time one you have to start all over again. Its like the most difficult challenges from the UK TV show The Crystal Maze. And there are other puzzles that require physically pushing a boulder onto a pressure plate. Its almost impossible to push it in a straight line for more than a couple of seconds, as the boulder starts to curve off course to the left or right. So its a case of push it a bit, reposition your character, push a bit more, reposition, push a bit more, continue for a couple of frustrating minutes.

Overall Shadows: Awakening is another of those games that makes me wish Steam had a third, neutral rating. If you’re a big fan of action RPGs, you might find some enjoyment from the combat, although the default purchase price is ridiculously high. I finished the campaign in 23 hours, so you should wait for at least a 50% discount. But if you want a good story, you should look elsewhere.

The game always crashes, I was unable to start it at all.

It took a while, to get an answer from the support and now they not answering again.
The first time they referred to the big number of support tickets. It means for me that the quality of the application is very poor.

Highly recommended for fans of European rpg's.

I'm finding this game to be a hybrid of several different games, as far as playability and style. It *does* look like Diablo on the surface, but it's definitely NOT one of those loot farming grindy ARPGs - if you're expecting PVP and NG+, and working out the best tactical skill tree development ala Path of Exile/Grim Dawn and company, this probably isn't your cup of tea.

Instead, it borrows more from Fable and Legacy of Kain - it's an action adventure, with a lot of story and exploration and puzzle solving built into the core mechanics. The lore and world building are optional, but highly enjoyable for RPG fans who don't just rush the quests. Then again, I played "Heretic Kingdoms Kult" back in the day, and am pretty old-school.

There's actual moral choices here, though as of yet I'm unsure what it all means (does it ONLY change the appearance of the demon, or the endings?). And from playing around with the 3 different archetypal starter classes, the dialogs with npc's and quests vary as well. You're meant to replay this as the different characters, if you really want to see/do everything. For example, there were doors I couldn't open and npc's who wouldn't give me information, unless I was playing a particular main character.

I'm also a fan of quality voice acting, and I'm getting a huge kick out of the voice over narration by Tom Baker and the lady who voices Evia. The rest of it's a bit cheesy, but you can tell where most of their budget went here.

Finally, for "lighter" players (aka filthy casuals) - it's still got rather challenging boss fights. I needed to borrow my gamer spouse even on "Easy" mode, on occasion (they tend to be "puzzle" bosses though). And they love their trap dungeons here. It's not super casual friendly, but easy enough for anyone who grew up playing realtime isometrics. The hardcore crowd will probably find it TOO easy and just roll through the game in 2 hours, but it's a nice balance between quest and skill based rpg's. IE if you can play Bethesda games, you can do this just fine.

Shadows: Awakening may look like a Diablo-like on its face. But it has its own thing going on. Let me qualify that, as far as it being an isometric hack and slash with loot and levels — that's exactly what it is, however you play as a demon with other people inside of them — a devourer of souls.

Shadows is a bit more story driven than its contemporaries. And while you will be picking up loot and leveling, the game places significant importance on dialogue decisions as well as quests taken and completed. Some areas will have lite puzzle solving as well, additionally, many side dungeon/caves are available. — Now, enemies to do not respawn should you decide to travel back to a completed area stay for a few enemies that pop out of jars or some other environmental object. So, there isn't much reason to return unless you want to satiate the completionist in you that missed a side quest. You won't need — or even be able to grind levels or gear out of those areas once you've moved on.

You primarily control the Devourer, and up to three active puppets at any given time. There are more than three throughout the game to find and recruit but you cannot ever take more than three with you.

There can only be one. —
Much akin to dissociative identity disorder, someone has to take the helm of the vessel. The game is structured in such a way that both the mortal and shadow realms are accessible at any time. However, only the Devourer can interact with shadow objects and needs at least one puppet to interact with the mortal realm. This is true for enemies as well, however, there are some enemies that exist in both realms. Death — or failure, really — is either when all three active puppets die or the Devourer themselves does.

At the start of the game, you get to choose from three traditional archetypes. A warrior, mage or a hunter. This person, alongside the Devourer will be set on their adventure that Krenze, another mage, sets out for you. You'll run into more characters but you can only absorb certain ones. Some of them are missable. And some are required to interact with certain clans or NPCs within a city.

Gear is not shared. But, soulstones are — soulstones can augment the entire party's makeup. I was a little confused as to the precise nature of how the soulstones worked at first. Each soulstone has a specific amount of charges it holds and each time you use a charge it will replenish either your HP or MP for one character. There are no potions in the game. The soulstones are the only way to heal. Stay for the passive trait of regeneration which you can acquire through XP. But that won't help in battle much. The only way to recharge the soulstone is to either kill enemies until one of its sections is filled or simply recharge it through Shadow Traders in exchange for a substantial portion of gold. No need to fret, you'll be finding a lot of junk loot you can sell — I never found keeping any of my soulstones charged very difficult. Shadow Traders usually hang out around sanctuaries in the Shadow Realm which will heal the whole party just by standing in it. This won't charge the soulstone, but it's a free action. Any fallen puppet can also be revived at sanctuaries.

THE GIST:
Shadows is a decent loot/story driven hack and slash that isn't necessarily focused on character builds, but more team composition. The voice acting is decent and the lore doesn't take itself that seriously. It's even funny at times. I didn't find it necessary to have played Heretic Kingdoms before this, though I'd venture you'd get a bit more out of the story had you done so. The art design is also pretty good with its weapon/armor design as well as having varied and interesting environments.

If you've read this far, consider following my curation — Station Argus

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2040319809

Szuper

hát ritka ♥♥♥♥ egy játék ami ér valamit az hogy jó látvány világ sztori orientált játék inkább

This is one of the games where you want to give it a score, not just thumbs up or down. The score would be barely 6/10, so this is a barely thumbs up.

The good:
A lot of different characters, which means a lot different skills, which means a lot of different combos
Nice soundtrack
Nice voice acting

The bad
Camera angles
Very short and unsatisfying ending cutscene
Player choices doesn't matter. For example you help someone rule a city instead of someone else in your playthrough. There is no difference. Not when you are in the city, not when you return to that city and no mentions about this in the ending cutscene either. Even some lazy pieces of ending slides would be acceptable but nothing. So what's the point in replaying the game with different characters and choices?

The meh:
Almost everything, which is why this game is barely 6/10
Gear is meh because cosmetics is the same, no legendary or set weapons no additional weapon affects. In some games gear changes your playstyle, in this game it's just +4 to def and +2 to agility

Leveling is meh because you allocate 5 points to str,dex and all that. And that's just it. There is no enjoyment or expectation because there are no good weapons you look forward to when you reach a certain lvl. Also you can reach max lvl 30 without any grinding which is good for some people and bad for others.

Talents are meh because they offer the same game mechanic as gear. If you have 50 str, a new talent gives you %5 increased damage. If you have 100 str, a talent gives you %10 increased damage. It's just that "+4 dmg +2 dex" mentality all over again. No excitement at all.

Crafting is meh because there is essences which you can craft into your weapon for gold. And that's just it. It doesn't require mastery, or lvl, or anything else just gold. They just give you +10 posion dmg or +5 crit chance etc. So you just find essence on the map (they don't drop, just found in demon-world chests) and slam them on your gear. If you craft 4 of them onto the same gear you get a legendary weapon (with no additional effect or stat). Meh.

Story is meh, And lore is meh.
Watch some gameplay videos and buy it on discount if you like.