REVIEW: The First Templar

How I came upon this game is a story in itself; so indulge me for a moment. On the sunny morning of Friday 6^th of May, I strolled in to my local GAME store to peruse their offerings, even though I didn’t have any cash and I was only doing it to tempt myself. There I was drawn to a game that I’d never seen that had Knights on the front. I like Knights. I read the back, thought it looked pretty cool, but was reminded of the fact that I’ve just pre-ordered L.A. Noire.

I came home, melancholy, disheartened and somehow with a bag of chocolate buttons. I don’t know how that happened. I logged onto Twitter, which seems to be my knee-jerk reaction to turning on my PC and saw that GAME were doing a twitter competition to win this exact game. “What a co-inkidink!” I thought to myself, so I did a bit of answering of questions and re-tweeting of things, you know the drill until…YES YOU’VE GUESSED IT. I won the game. Awesome stuff. So I have GAME @gamedigitalto thank for this offering. If you’re still with me, the review is actually going to start now.

I had utterly no idea what to expect with this game. I’ve deduced that either I was living under a rock or the marketing on this game was non-existent. I’d never heard of it; never seen any previews or screenshots; never found a single paragraph on any website or magazine that would attest to its existence. It’s developed by Haemimont Games, a Bulgarian company who’ve made nothing I’ve ever heard of. Not that that means they can’t blow us away with their most recent offering (Spoiler Alert: they won’t).

It tells the tale of a French Templar Knight, Celian, with an odd English accent and his suitably anachronistic, under-clothed female companion, Maria, as they set out on a decidedly medieval/fantasy-style adventure, complete with swords, fugly monsters and mythical powers. They’re looking for the Holy Grail, as Templars are so prone to do.

"Do I, at any point, get to see thy boobies?"

What I can say about The First Templar is that it has lofty aspirations. But of course, that doesn’t mean they amount to anything. It’s trying very hard to be many things but doesn’t manage to do any of them well. It has a character driven story and levelling up system based around an RPG but only a very simple one. It has lever puzzles and trap levels à la Prince of Persia but they’re uninspiring and merely require you to walk around them. Its fighting draws upon common elements from action-adventure games such as combo’s and cinematic finishing moves but the animation is jerky and dull so they fall rather flat.

 Speaking of other games, it isn’t hard to see from where The First Templar has drawn its inspiration. It evokes a decidedly Prince of Persia: Sands of Time feel, from the traps to the female companion. In PoP, this worked wonderfully because Farah and the Prince were very well written, well rounded and witty characters. Sadly in The First Templar, the dialogue between our two protagonists ranges from lame to excruciating. It just isn’t funny and I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s the writing, the voice acting or both. The dialogue and characters are verging on hilarious. Our protagonist, Celian starts out with his brother as his companion. There’s no real character development so when his brother chooses to stay behind and face certain death while Celian escapes with Maria, his new companion, it has utterly no gravitas. Basically, you don’t give two hoots. And then there’s some fantastically rushed dialogue where Celian’s all like, “I must go back and save him!” and Maria’s all like, “He’ll totally be dead by now.” And Celian’s reply is along the lines of, “Oh, okay. Well… I’LL AVENGE YOU BROTHER! Now let’s get some treasure!” Classic.

There’s also a hint of Assassin’s Creed going on here. Not due to the time period because two games can draw from the same era without being a copy of one another but because of things like the cinematic finishing moves in combat, or stealth missions where you have to creep around (Except with Altaïr, it seemed a little more plausible because he was creeping through a crowd and wearing robes. In The First Templar, you’re behind bookshelves in one room, wearing clunky metal armour and sneaking around about 3ft away from the most unobservant guards ever.) Also, holding down LB will initiate stealth mode, much like how holding down RB in Assassin’s Creed would put you in a ‘high profile’ state.

You gain XP from fights and you can use it to upgrade your attack moves or your health and ‘zeal’ orbs (Zeal being used for executing more complex and special moves). To this effect, it has that rather nice combo system but I never used it because alternating between mashing X to attack and holding LB to block were all that I needed for every single enemy. The AI has all the intelligence of a wet biscuit and with far less charm. Enemies will crowd round you in such large quantities that they could quite easily start the hokey cokey and crush you but instead, they all wait around for you to hand them their ass. Although to its credit, your companion’s AI is slightly less thick. If you go to replenish your health (which you do by finding food and water on the road side), Maria will do the same; if you go up behind a guard in stealth mode and press X to silently kill them, she’ll do the same to the one next to you without prompting (thank god they only ever seem to go around in twos…) But that’s about all the nice things I can say.

It’s quite linear in progression but that’s not necessarily a bad point. However, it feels linear too because the environments and vistas are not great. Unlike in some pretty linear games; the sort of games where a twig sits in the middle of the road but you can’t go around it, (*ahem* Final Fantasy XIII or Lost Odyssey) the environments are so crisp, beautiful and wonderfully rendered that it doesn’t matter; you FEEL like you could go anywhere. In The First Templar, the graphics quite honestly look like something off a PSP; they’re blocky and cartoonish. Although, graphics certainly aren’t the be all and end all of a game; if the story is really strong or the game play is really good, you can sometimes forgive poor graphics but with The First Templar, it doesn’t have any other legs to stand on and bad graphics are the last nail in its ill-fated coffin.

To be honest, this picture has done the graphics more justice than they deserve...

All in all, it’s a very unpolished experience. For example, there are bonus missions tacked on to the main ones and I usually like bonus missions because they allow you to explore more of the world and more of the characters but sadly, in this game they are very flat and futile because they have utterly no effect on the outcome of the mission. One bonus task saw me burning enemy food supplies but it was totally pointless because it didn’t make the enemy weaker or fewer in number. It’s just burning things for burnings sake. What it really means is that you have no desire to complete side quests because not only will they amount to nothing, but the world you’ve been given to explore isn’t worth the time it would take to explore it. It’s also just far too simple and hand-holdy. Next to aforementioned food supplies were a conveniently placed brazier and set of torches to light. It just feels insipid.

I will tell you now that I haven’t finished it and to be honest, haven’t really got that far into it at all. This is for a number of reasons, the most blinding one being that I seem to have experience a humongous glitch in one of the early levels that causes my screen to go dark and give me the option ‘restart’ or ‘main menu’ if I cross the imaginary threshold between two buildings. Although annoying, this wouldn’t have been a problem unless my next objective wasn’t RIGHT BETWEEN THOSE TWO BUILDINGS.

So I’m only about five or six hours in and have no intention of completing it. For the sake of the review, I tried seven times to cross this particular point and seven more times crossing various other points but to no avail.

(EDIT. I need to make an amendment to aformentiond glitch proclamation. This isn't a glitch, it's just a little error in design. What you need to do to pass this section is kill all the guards and then turn the wheel (which is on the wooden platform to the right of the gate) until the big grate closes the gate, then you may proceed. The weird insta-killing I experienced was actually me being decimated by a trebuchet but without a warning to that effect. So I apologise, this wasn't completely the fault of the game, I was also being a bit thick. Standard.)

It seems even The First Templar itself wants me to stop playing it. Thank god for that.

Follow me on twitter @minnieliddell to hear more of my musings or merely to berate me for being so mean to this game...