Reseñas de Bastard Bonds

Bastard Bonds is a vast world with a huge number of characters, and I wish I could interact with them much more, as it feels quite limited, and the only existing romance is with Nazar. Building relationships with the other characters takes too long, in my opinion. It should be shorter. The quality of the game is surprising. The pixel art is fantastic, the scenarios are incredibly detailed, everything is in its place, and it’s visually pleasing. You can tell there’s a lot of work and love put into this, and that’s admirable. Beautiful artwork, good dungeons, stunning interiors for the houses, appealing characters, and pleasant designs. Everything is great, and it makes me want to be able to design houses using the game’s engine. Honestly, it has inspired me to create pixel art with designs like these—it’s really enjoyable. The gameplay is quite simple: turn-based combat with short and long-range attacks. Abilities like spells, protection, and healing are all quite powerful but very confusing when you’re just starting the game. Fortunately, there’s a place where they teach you all of them, and it’s almost at the beginning of the game. Personally, I read them but didn’t understand much, and the game doesn’t encourage you to learn or use them at all. It fails quite a bit at making you feel like these abilities are necessary, either because of the rarity of being able to use those different types of magic (since they’re based on magical items with a specific type of magic) or because enemies weak or strong against a certain type of magic aren’t very common. It’s always better to face enemies head-on. Honestly, I mainly had a mage to complete the Weave challenges, and even those are pretty rare. I don’t remember seeing more than 10 in the entire game. The game falls short in many aspects of combat, but at least it's simple. Otherwise, the game is pretty straightforward. It gets difficult halfway through, but once your characters reach the max level, battles become trivial. Personally, I played as an Orc Rogue, and with that stealth build, you can attack enemies without them noticing, saving a MASSIVE amount of time. Instead of having to do turn-based battles and move each character you have, you just kill enemies quickly with unlimited turns. You don’t even have to try hard, and the surrounding enemies can’t see you either. It’s absurd, but honestly, I’m not complaining because there came a point where I just wanted to finish the story and get all the achievements. The game stops being a challenge once all your characters are level 100. The enemies don’t even deal enough damage, and the characters’ abilities are too powerful to lose. The game is poorly balanced in a good way, as you’re invincible, and the only way to lose is by making very silly mistakes. Only the final fight was a challenge. That’s where you finally feel the level you’re at, but honestly, it’s more annoying than challenging because of a very frustrating game mechanic: enemies can disarm you of your protective or attack items. The PUZZLES to beat to game are tremendous. It's really hard to get to the end of the game, the way you'll feel a big dissconection about everything that's going on makes them really hard. It feels like the author just cared about the narrative that he forgot how to implement then correctly in the game. For example, once you get a cinematic, you have to remember everything that was said and you can't repeat the info again cause it's one time only. If you, for example, play a week or month later after you've given an info important to complete the game, you're done. There's no way to discover what you have to do later, where to go, what to seek for. There's nothing. No clues, no table where you can read hints, no missions to get the info back, everything plain text that there's no way you can get back. I used a guide to complete the game, because I waited a month before playing the game, and I forgot every location, every mission and every info that was necessary to complete the game. The map is too big to remember everything useful to finish the same, it doesn't feel right and friendly considering the big amount of places, a lot of them don't even hint that is necesarry to X puzzle. You just have to guess or read a guide. Finally the game is decent, mediocre in several aspects, but at least it's not annoying or bad. It’s quite nice to have a homoerotic game with attractive male characters for other men, and not have to put up with 90% half-naked women and the other 10% being men who barely show anything appealing. I hope there were more games like this. I think I only picked it for that reason, the character creator is pretty good. I would enjoy playing another game like this.