Review: The Bearer & The Last Flame

Developer – Dark Reaper Studio

Publisher –  Meirdiem Games

Platforms – PC

Review copy given by publisher

I knew it would happen eventually and honestly I am surprised it took this long, but I have received my first ever “broken” game for review. I would love to give a full fledge review of The Bearer & The Last Flame, but to be honest I will only be able to discuss the first few hours of my time with it. There are a lot of issues with this one and I hate reviewing a game in this state and a solo project, but I feel like I have to warn people of this one because it’s not an early access game and is now a full fledge release for both console and PC.

The Bearer & The Last Flame start out with a pretty decent cinematic and honestly I was a bit hype for the game at the start because it seemed like it would be a call back to Demon’s Souls. Unfortunately, even from this first cinematics the issues begin to creep in. You can barely hear a word coming being said in the cinematic and it is spoken in what I can only assume a non-English speaking man trying to speak English. Now actually, outside of trying to understand what is being said, the voice-actor’s dialect is actually pretty interesting. It almost feels like this is an native dialect to the game’s world, but you basically have to read the subtitles to get a sense of what is being said to understand anything going on.

Initially you are given options for your character’s origin, which basically has all different unique armor and a brief text explanation of their background and alligence. I choose what I thought would be the coolest looking armor set which was a classic looking medieval knight, unfortunately that excitement was also short lived because when you start the game you have only a few pieces of armor on and your character looks like Spawn beneath his necroplasm. I don’t know what the point was of showing anything about these different character selections or what they mean for you in the long term because nothing is explained.

The game starts off and the mouse controls on PC are almost unbearably janky, so basically you have to use an controller to play the game. The combat is very floating and nothing holds real impact, you will often miss or swing over enemies with certain weapons and they seem to have trouble tracking on to you as well with a few of the move sets, but others will basically hone in on you and thrust like a missile. After a few deaths, I seemed to get used to the combat which basically boiled down to 2 handing my weapon and just beating the pulp out of the enemy as fast as possible, not even worrying about dodging or blocking because it seemed so hit or miss that it wasn’t worth it. After sometime, I ended up giving up on most of the combat all together and kept running until I found the next “bonfire” to rest. The enemies would follow you for a few seconds and then often go right back to their pathing.

After the tutorial section and finding new weapons and armor, you eventually get teleported to a village which will serve as the game’s hub of vendors and NPCs that will assist you in your journey. During my play time, which was before the full launch of the game, leveling was completely broken. You need to spend the game’s equivelent to “souls” to level up your character, but unfortunately when I tried my character’s level would de-level to -48 and all my stats would drastically fall. I did not let this stop my run because I was determine to make it to the first boss and see what that was like. So I pressed on.

I kept running past enemies left and right because all of the souls were worthless and found a few shortcuts which included pulling levers to open gates that would lead to a more straight forward approach to the zone I was in prior. The enemies variety is actually pretty decent, I think by the first boss I ended up seeing like 10 different enemy types including knights, spiders, mages, skeletons, archers, ogres, and a few more.

Within 2 hours I had come across caves, tombs, a fort, and a graveyard which was also interesting environmentally but filling those different areas was a lot of repetitive decorations. Even after the first boss I looked around a bit and that area seems to be a copy of itself with the same stairs and corners and enemy placement around 7 times before coming to a tower with ladders, rafters, and what I assumed was a very dark cavern. I walked towards the cavern entrance thinking that it would change light variance to allow me to see when walking in, but actually no it was a completely black abyss and I fell down and died. I’m not sure if that is just a piece of the level that actually didn’t make it in the game, if it bugged out and doesn’t exist, or if that was just a trap for people wanting to explore and was made to cause your death.

The first boss fight was fun, being level 1. I tried to kill it with my sword, but the attack animations were super quick in some cases and comically slow in others, but everything was a one-hit kill. I then thought, why don’t I try to use a bow and arrows, so I used all the in-game items I found along the way in chests to get some “souls” from the consumables and gathered about 5 or 6 thousand. I went back to town and bought a bow and 100 arrows then came back to the boss and killed it simply by using the bow because every arrow caused a stagger to where he couldn’t get to me. There were some close calls because for whatever reason, the bow wouldn’t fire and would just go back to the resting position. After about 70 arrows the first boss was dead, and the achievement failed to register that I killed him.

This was my experience with The Bearer & The Last Flame, with about 2.5 hours of time spent with the game, I highly recommend you wait for a patch to fix all of the issues with the game before investing any of your own time or money into it. I apologize to the developer of the game and I really hope you are able to turn the game around, but I would urge you to put the game into early access on Steam instead of fully releasing this game at this time.