The Relic: First Guardian Review

The Relic: First Guardian is the first game by Project Cloud Games. The blurb they sent Xbox Tavern said that it is an ambitious team of 12 that have been working on this game for 6 years.

My favourite part was the bit where they called it “…a genre smash of action-heavy RPG gameplay with fast-paced combat and punishing bosses”. Like, is that a real thing? What is the difference between gameplay and combat? What are you trying to say, and did anyone proof read this?

If this seems like a mean way to start this review, buckle up – I’ve only just started.

So, the main character wakes up being called by a mysterious woman to return to life and save the world.

This involves hacking away at mobs of enemies and taking on big bosses (that are called Brutals). The players starts off with a sword and shield, but will later unlock battle axes, daggers, among others. They also quickly unlock a fireball, that can be launched from a distance, and the game gives them a healing item that has a number of charges that will reset whenever they make it to a new save point.

Stop me if this sounds familiar – there is a dodge that has a number of frames of invincibility, a block that can be timed for a parry.

Blocking and dodging cost stamina, while parry not only doesn’t cost stamina, it actually reduces an enemy’s poise and if done enough times the enemy will become stunned and open them up to being hit.

I think the action-heavy RPG gameplay bit comes from how the levelling works – killing enemies nets the game’s equivalent of XP and gold. XP is used to power crystals that provide passive buffs, and also to unlock skills for individual weapons – allowing for more powerful moves to be mapped to face buttons.

The basic mobs are easy to beat with most enemies being staggered quickly and allowing for long strings of combos to be unleashed on them. The bosses, however, are all about blocking and parrying as they seldom leave enough space for more than one hit at a time, and it will be all chip damage without first dragging them to their knees.

This is where the first big problems arise – the stagger meter is invisible to the player, so it is hard to figure out when a Brutal is about to go down, this reduces your tactical choices.

Similarly, it takes a really long time to unlock 2 special moves for your first weapon, and these moves are not shared across the armoury. This means that the player has to grind for XP to unlock moves for weapons, or just lock in to the preferred one. The game provides all these options, but immediately hobbles those possible choices.

It is not all fighting of course, there are a lot of memories and notes for the main character to listen to that lays out the story of the world. People are frequently getting slaughtered, mothers get betrayed, villages destroyed… It is all very Witcher-lite. I say that not because the events aren’t grim and gory but because they have no sense of pacing, or gravitas. It ends making the stories feel comical instead of heart felt.

The rewards are also deeply confusing due to the sheer number of missions spread across this massive open world. For example, in one mission I had to fight 3 different Brutals to confirm that a paladin had succumbed to evil. When I got back and spoke to the warrior who sent me on the quest, he gave me 176 gold and a couple of widgets. This was a pittance considering I regularly find 90-100 gold coins just lying around.

There are a long litany of bugs in The Relic: First Guardian too – from Brutals that get stuck in place and stop attacking, to misplaced collision , major plot providers having busted animations. There are also User Interface decisions that are deeply frustrating, for example you cannot pause the game while anyone is talking, and there is an uncomfortably long delay between pressing the button and the map appearing. This leads to the game feeling like it is barely held together by cardboard and sticky tape.

This is not helped by the utterly atrocious voice acting. I would say that it was a bunch of people that got to deliver tortuously bad translations but when someone pronounced the name of a villain as ‘Clever’ instead of ‘Cleaver’ in a perfect English accent I raised an eyebrow. Now, I am not saying that they used AI, because I have no proof (The director has issued a statement in this regard – Ed) . However, the amount of voice acting in this game in contrast to the size of the team and budget, and I would not be shocked at all to find out that they did it with an assist from Gen AI.

Similarly the loading screens and art for the Brutals have that dappled look that is really popular with generic fantasy art book covers that AI spits out. It is overly complex while somehow looking very bland. Now, I am not saying it is AI, but it very much looks like it.

It is a real shame because I am a lover of scrappy, trashy games that have a lot of heart, even if not a lot of execution. The Relic: First Guardian (god, even the title feels like it was clumsily put together) should be a game that I relish; it is not well made, often unintentionally hilarious, but with the creeping suspicion that a lot of short cuts were made here. However, I find it hard to enjoy something that lacks soul.

Conclusion

The Relic: First Guardian is messy, buggy, with a bad story, bad voice acting, it should be the kind of plucky Z-tier game I fall in love with. Instead it is marred by a lot of (presumed) clanker nonsense. There are better bad games to spend your time with.