Review: Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms

Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms required me to cut my usual RPG strings. See, when I play most in-depth RPGs, I usually follow a standard formula. Wander into a quest area, and begin hoovering up the sidequests. Once all the rats are out of the basements, I do a handful of story quests until the next area unlocks. Repeat until credits. But Alaloth isn’t like that. It gives you a single, over-arching story quest and then steps back and folds its arms. Hence the forums being swamped by people asking what they’re supposed to do.

It’s something I came to respect, in the end. The developers have made it very clear that you’re supposed to just break out the hiking boots. After you get over the shock of not having a core path to follow, there’s a lot of fun to be had in poking around the world. It’s a dangerous move, though. Giving the player a big old world to wander in runs the risk of the game being wide but shallow, and Alaloth falls into that trap at points. Still, it clicked for me most when I stopped approaching it as a story-driven RPG, and embraced it as a fragmented dungeon crawler.

Lace Up Your Hiking Boots

Today’s big baddie is the titular Alaloth, an evil God imprisoned in the mortal realm. He keeps popping his head up and causing trouble across the land, so the four remaining non-Alaloth’d kingdoms begin pulling together champions to bring the mallet down on Alaloth’s head. Enter: us. There’s something delightfully old-school about rolling up a champion. You need to pick race (I went with orc), which house you belong to, which God you want to worship and whether you want to be a nice, friendly champion or boot stomp everyone who looks at you funny. Each of these change how characters approach you, as well as certain quests, which is good.

With my good-aligned Orc rolled up, I left my starting stronghold and the world map hit me in the face. It’s huge. There are fighting arenas, cities, smaller points of interest, strongholds, and so on. Interesting places are splattered all over. It’s a little intimidating. I scooped up some quests in a nearby city, then went to a zone labelled with a single skull. I figured that was a good place to start, and I’d used my starting gold to purchase a big old mace. My bravado soon disappeared when I was dogpiled by a horde of scorpions. It was at this point that I slunk off to the Steam forums.

I feel like Alaloth could do with a bit of easing in. I get that it’s going for the hardcore crowd, but a gentle nudge in the right direction would help. After I’d got going by picking up some bounties, and getting some reasonable gear, I found myself getting into it more. Once you conquer these dungeon-like arenas, they get checked off on the map. So a large part of the enjoyment was just strolling around the map, visiting cities and conquering dungeons. It’s a varied map, too, with a decent variety of enemies to keep things interesting. Twenty hours in and I was still seeing new things.

Zooming In

Let’s take a closer look at Alaloth‘s dungeons. These are small fighting arenas, about twenty minutes in length or so. This is where the combat comes in. While the isometric camera might lead to you think it’s turn based, it’s not – it’s real time, with influence from Dark Souls. So we’ve got dodge, light and heavy attacks, blocks and stamina. Problem is, the isometric camera can be a hindrance. It works very well in boss fights, where you can see enemies telegraph their attacks. In mobs, though, you can barely see what’s going on. Is a snake coiling back to strike, or is it reeling from a blow across the chops?

Alaloth’s isometric view doesn’t make it feel too satisfying either. Blows have very little impact. I went with the classic sword’n’board for most of the time, and I mainly just spammed heavy attack until everything fell over. Okay, not true – I did use the skills a fair bit. But the list of skills is a little thin, so every fight was almost identical. It just feels a little shallow, a problem shared by the sidequests. There’s a frankly absurd amount of them, but we have no real input. No choices, or anything. Just go here, do this, get reward. By the end I was taking quests without reading them. They all clustered around dungeons, anyway.

It leads me to make a very strange point. Alaloth might have too much writing. What we’ve got is good stuff, I’ll admit that. My orc is from the ‘Desolation of Baga’, a region that gets renamed constantly as key people come and go. That’s a chef kiss when it comes to concrete details. And yet every NPC will just vomit exposition straight into your codex, without any shred of personality. The writing is so dry. Even companion NPCs just feel like walking Wikipedia pages. When they have fireside chats, it’s great. I need more of that; I need a way into the lore. If I have nothing and no-one to connect with, I just rebound off it.

Alaloth – A Hefty Dungeon(s) Crawler

The strange thing is, once I stopped trying to read everything, I found myself enjoying Alaloth a lot more. I just enjoyed wandering around the world, seeing the sights, fighting bosses and clearing up dungeons. It’s a world that feels alive, as NPCs and enemies stroll around and things change as the days go by. There’s even a mode to add competitive champions, who will scoop up dungeons before you, which is good. Clearing dungeons is how you level up, which I imagine adds a nice slice of tension. I will say that it’s far too easy to hit the level cap in singleplayer, but I didn’t mind. One benefit of real-time combat is that it can still be challenging, even at level cap.

My opinion on Alaloth improved as time went on, and was helped by a nice final boss. I probably fought him a bit too early, but that just made the fight better. Alaloth‘s problem is that it’s just too wide. With the sheer amount of quests and characters, it all just becomes white noise. My orc was just nodding and smiling by the end. It was screaming out for a core group of interesting, changing characters. The world itself may change, but I never did. I started off hitting scorpions, I finished hitting scorpions. Doing so is fun, but I ended up doing it on my terms, and I’m not sure that’s what Alaloth really wanted.

(Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms’ Steam Page)