Garshasp: The Temple of the Dragon is a stand-alone prequel expansion to the 2011 game Garshasp: The Monster Slayer. It was released on Steam September 24, 2012.
Let me just say from the outset that I appreciate what this game is trying to do. It takes a mythology that westerners are probably not familiar with and presents it in a third person action setting that most audiences can understand. The game is ambitious for a studio of Dead Mage’s size. Trying to recreate the magic of the first God of War is a lofty goal for a small studio on a limited budget. Unfortunately, the end product just doesn’t get the job done.
The game controls fairly well, even though it defaults to having the analog sticks reversed. This meant that for the first 30 minutes or so of my playthrough, I had to hold the controller like an N64 stick, with my left hand on the right analog. Once I realized I could fix this in the out of game option menu, I was able to play it correctly.
The attack animations are fairly smooth and the combat is pretty intuitive. Chaining attacks while fending off waves of enemies was not difficult at all. It actually was almost too easy even on the higher difficulty settings.
The only real difficulty comes from fighting the god awful camera angles. Instead of allowing for a rotating, free moving camera like a modern game, the developers decided on using fixed cameras for each zone that automatically go from one angle to another. This wouldn’t be so bad if the switches weren’t so poorly timed. In one sequence, for example, I was expected to do a platforming sequence with the camera facing my character and with no view of any of the platforms.
Combining the shoddy camera with the strange layout of the game, I found myself getting lost with no visual cues to set me back on the right track. I was stuck at a dead end for 30 minutes with no clue on how to advance the story. This isn’t an open world game, so each scene should have some sort of transition in place to move me along the correct path.
The voice acting is so bad that it goes from being awful to hilariously endearing. The main character spouts off badass clichés in broken English while the narrator tells the nonsensical story unenthusiastically through journal entries scattered throughout the game.
The biggest problem with this game is the bugs. There are lighting bugs, where the game goes completely dark. There are places where you can get stuck. Sometimes the checkpoints will drop you into locked areas outside of objectives meaning you can’t progress. Sometimes a white screen will pop up in the middle of the game window. Sometimes the game will just crash to desktop because you jumped on the wrong platform or just looked at your monitor wrong.
I understand that bugs can happen. Indie studios do not have full QA teams to fish out these problems. However, some of the bugs are obvious and should have been found by anyone on the development team just playing through the finished product. You cannot ship a game and expect people to spend money on it (even 5 dollars) if it doesn’t work.
With all that said, I cannot recommend buying this game until it is patched. There are too many game breaking bugs that will make the game nearly impossible to play. Maybe after these things are fixed I would say that the 5 bucks are worth it.