Dark Envoy

Look, I'm a big fan of all the games that this claims to draw inspiration from, and if this came out in 2003 instead of 2023, then it might be an amazing game. Times have changed. Graphics are decades behind now. Dialogue is wooden. Plot is dull and uninteresting. The world might be developed properly, but the gameplay and story don't really reveal the lore naturally and organically. It feels cheap and uninspired. Honestly, you play as siblings in a desert town who explores ruins for treasure, or something? And two different empires are now waging war on your doorstep and they're both terrible. And everyone in the town seems terrible too? Combat mechanics have potential, but the combat itself gets repetitive. And can be at times frustrating, when enemies spawn randomly behind your front line fighters, or clunky targeting mechanisms mean that your fighters that you just moved out of an area of effect will move straight back into it. I guess clunky is the best word to describe this mess. UI is clunky. Leveling is clunky. Combat is clunky. The animation is clunky. The story and plot is clunky. Controls are clunky. Best thing about this game is that it was only $12, and I guess that was worth the 6ish hours I actually spent playing this.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. If you play RPGs strictly for deep, groundbreaking narratives, look elsewhere. The story is so generic, clichéd, and corny that it feels like they just copy-pasted a checklist of basic fantasy tropes. Honestly, the game would have been better if they scrapped the dialogue entirely. A few narrated cutscenes and some scattered in-game lore would have done the job without making me roll my eyes. BUT... the gameplay completely redeems it. The slow-mo tactical combat is genuinely great and incredibly satisfying to pull off. It carries the entire experience. The class system leans heavily on the good old "holy trinity" (Tank/Healer/DPS), but the skill trees are complex enough that you won't get bored. The itemization is where it really shines; it perfectly scratches that loot variety and build-crafting itch. Combining the class mechanics with the right gear lets you put together some really solid, fun builds. On the technical and design side, you'll need to manage your expectations. You are going to encounter some bugs and glitches along the way. Also, the so-called "random procedural dungeons" are about as random as a rigged deck of cards. They have a very limited pool of layouts and biomes, so you'll be experiencing a lot of déjà vu while grinding through them. TL;DR: You can skip most of the dialogue, embrace the slow-mo combat, and enjoy the tactical loot-fest despite the occasional bug and repetitive dungeons. It’s a solid game if you value mechanics and gameplay over melodrama.

Do not get this game if you need to use a controller. The store page says it has partial controller support, but it's so poorly implemented that it effectively has none. The bindings menu ignored my attempts to map buttons, buttons for skills on the toolbar were absent, and I couldn't figure out how to access most of the things I needed in combat. Attempting to switch between mouse and controller on the fly seemed to confuse the game, disabling certain functions. The combat seems like it might be alright if you only need to use a mouse and keyboard.

Play Tower of Time from the same devs instead. Dark Envoy is downgrade from that.

Basically an very early access Baldurs gate 3 style game with an interesting spin where you fight in slow mo instead of turn based. clunky and feels like it needs another year of work to be actually playable

It is an interesting game. The combat is more fun than expected, scratching that same itch as Icewind Dale or old-school tactical RTS titles like Commandos. I especially liked the "bullet-time" pause, which allowed me to precisely micro-manage the characters. The character builds seem permissive enough for some fun experimentation. One nitpick that I have is that the dialogues can feel a bit wooden at times, but the game is definitely worth a look if you’re in for a fun indie title.

What a terrible game! The writing is awful, and the story makes no sense and always progresses in the same way: 'Trust me, bro. I'm your big sister, i know everything". This game promises deep tactical combat with choices and consequences. It lies. Your choices don't matter at all, and you have no control over combat. Characters spam their abilities at will, you just click on mobs and watch the show. Most of the time, when you click on an ability, it does not register, or your character has already used all of the mana on something else. Every mission is the same, and it feels like everything in this game is randomly generated. The animations are poor, the graphics are bad and the game's performance is ridiculously poor. There's definitely a memory leak somewhere because the longer you play, the worse it gets. Once, after a few hours of gameplay, my game dropped to 20 fps and started using 16 GB of RAM. Restarting the game always helps. Overall, avoid this game. It's hardly an CRPG genre, for me, it's a poorly made single-player MOBA game with broken combat and terrible class balance. I quit after the third chapter when I realised I was doing the same reskinned mission for the fiftieth time.

Very buggy. Repeated issues with the menus locking up and being unable to open chests unless I save and reload. Happens both with controller and keyboard/mouse.