There are a number of RPG around these days - such a positive trend after a long empty stretch. We have Wasteland 2 and Divinity Original Sin keeping me awake at nights. Then Eliminage Gothic came around the corner showing me its stuff.
LOX just sounds like one of those old games - what the heck is an "Xulima" anyway? I read about the others but my eyes keep on getting attracted to this one. Can't justify spending lots of cash on games to my Mrs these days - although my Steam account has about 200 games in it (shush - keep that quiet). When I look at this one and read about it - it's like looking at a Mega-kebab soaked in chilli sauce with fresh Doner available on request. Saw this review online as well which makes me more hungry.
http://www.ripten.com/2014/08/08/ripten-preview-lords-of-xulima/
As a genre, the old-school, isometric RPG never really held my attention the way other RPGs managed to. With a few exceptions – notably
Planescape: Torment and
Fallout– I never really had much interest in this particular style of game, and those that employed a turn-based combat system even less so. That being the case, I wasn’t expecting much out of
Lords of Xulima, a title currently in early access on Steam that models itself unashamedly in this classic style. Several hours in, I was rather surprised to find that, firstly, several hours had passed, but secondly, that I was quite enjoying myself.
Early access is kind of an unpleasant trend these days, but
Xulima is a game that doesn’t exploit the system: there are no game-breaking bugs, no obviously omitted features and no wild, impossible promises to get people to pull out their wallets.
Numantian Games billed the title as exactly what it is: a high fantasy RPG in retro style. Early access only unlocks about 50-60% of the full game (with an estimated play time of about 50 hours), but, so far, it’s been more than enough for me.
Like most of the genre,
Xulima is a very methodical kind of game. If you’re not interested in the style, it’s what you might call ‘slow.’ Levelling doesn’t happen particularly quickly (I’ve clocked about eight hours so far, and my party is only at level 5), which makes progression through the story equally deliberate. You’ll have to do most, if not all, of the offered sidequests and exploration in an area before you’re strong enough to tackle the next. Of my eight hours, about seven were spent in Velegarn, the game’s first questing zone. Some of that is due to my general unfamiliarity with the difficulty of the game, learning to strategize in combat and figuring out which sections of that first zone I could tackle early, but I would be surprised if later progression was any quicker. This is not a game that you’re going to be able to shoot through in a day.
It’s also not a game where you can really grind. Enemy numbers in a given area are finite: there are a certain number that appear on the map, and a certain number that will ambush you. Once you eliminate all of the enemies in a ‘danger zone,’ they won’t respawn. You get an XP boost for clearing out a zone entirely, so it
is beneficial to hang around an area until you’ve cleared it out completely, but it’s not going to net you a ton of extra levels. I was only level 2 (possibly 2-and-a-half) when I cleared out the first dungeon.
You also have to balance clearing out an area with progressing early on, because you’re hampered by a food system. Basically, you can purchase food from a vendor that will last you for a certain number of days. Travelling drains your food, as does resting to heal your party. Once your food is depleted, your party can’t recover health in the field: you’ll have to rest at an inn, heal at a shrine, or find a vendor and buy more food. Part of the reason you’ll find your game time stretching out is because you’ll be stopping after every few battles to rest, and possibly doubling back to a food vendor to replenish your stock. Gold is at a bit of a premium early on, so you have to ensure you’re doing enough quests – which are the easiest source of gold – to keep your coffers filled.
Xulima is mired so heavily in its chosen style that it likely won’t appeal to you if you’re not already a fan of the genre. I wouldn’t have bet that I would like it as much as I did. Part of it might be the art style: the game mixes hand-drawn 2D backgrounds with 3D character models, and makes excellent use of a varied colour pallet. Things go from bright and vivid to dank and dull, hitting every note in between, usually accompanied by similar shifts in the music. I think, for me, this game embodies the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’m not crazy about every individual aspect, but when it all comes together, I find it extremely compelling.
That said, there are a few aspects that I hope get tweaked a bit for the final release. You can use either the mouse or the keyboard to move your character, but you have to hold the left mouse button and guide your character to move them. You can’t just click on an area and get them to move there. This is particularly annoying when you come across something you can interact with (be that a chest to open, a character to talk to, or what-have-you), and left-clicking on it doesn’t send your character to it. It’s a little thing, but I was surprised at how much it started to bug me as I continued to play.
There’s also an issue I had with buying food. As I said, you buy food in day-long increments – paying 100 gold for one day, 240 for two days, 440 for three, etc. Firstly, obviously, there’s no real logical progression to the price of multiple days. It seems to have a bit to do with the HP of your characters, but that’s about all I can figure. Secondly, you can’t buy food for a number of days
less than what you have in your inventory. For example, if I bought a day’s worth of food, went out exploring, and found enough to last me for two days, I couldn’t then go back to the vendor and buy another day’s worth at 100 gold to bring my total to 3 days. I’d have to pay the full 440 gold. I suppose the best way to describe it is as consecutive, rather than cumulative. It does add to the strategy (I’ve never bought more than 2 days’ worth of food at a time), but it also seems kind of silly.
I think the biggest issue I had, though, came before I even started playing. Upon beginning a new game, you can create a party of five characters to follow the main character, Gaulen, on his adventures. You can choose to use premade characters, or build your own. Naturally, I chose to build my own party from scratch. You choose a name and a gender, which is easy enough to figure out, but then you choose a class and a god to worship, as well. The problem is that there was no real information about the classes or the gods. Now, I can see classes as being kind of straightforward: a soldier is going to use melee weapons, a mage is going to use magic, a cleric is going to heal, and so on. But some of them weren’t so obvious: what’s the function of an
arcane soldier? What does a bard do in this particular game? How does a barbarian differ from a soldier in this instance? As for the gods, how am I supposed to know whether being a disciple of Yul is more beneficial than being a disciple of Raznet? So, I just picked the classes I knew (or
thought I knew: I was pretty sure an arcane soldier used magic and weapons), and chose the gods at random.
It was only after I started playing that the game informed me that holding down the right mouse button on an object would give extra information. After I read that, I went back, and, sure enough, holding down the right mouse button on a class gave its specialties and base stats, and holding it down on a god told you what kind of passive bonus you got. It would have been nice had there been a little prompt at the top of the screen that said ‘right-click an object to get more information’ or something of the like, just so that I would have known from the start.
Obviously, though, those are small gripes. It’s easy enough to get from point A to point B with your character using the movement system as it is, I got by with the food system, and the extra information wouldn’t really have swayed my decisions in character creation all that much. Ultimately,
Lords of Xulima is what it is: an RPG of the eldest school you could find. It takes the isometric viewpoint and the strategy heavy turn-based combat of the genre’s kings (the developer specifically lists
Ultima and
Might and Magic as influences), andlooks to bring those retro sensibilities back to the modern era without relying solely on the nostalgia you might have for those old series. The result, so far, at least, is pleasing, if not a little bit familiar, and is definitely worth a look if you have any ties to the classics. Personally, I’m quite looking forward to the full release in the fall.
