When this game was offered to me to write a review, at first I thought it was a tipfeler, because I used to play a game called Paladins. But I was wrong. Baladins was released on Playstation two years ago, and now it is finally on Nintendo Switch.
What is this about? Baladins is an RPG adventure played like a board game, and all decisions are made by rolling dice.
You can choose one of five classes: Cook, Luxomancer, Dancer, Pyro or Bard. Each of them has different starting values in the categories of physique, finesse, knowledge, creativity and destruction. These values are added to the result obtained by throwing 3d6 dice and they decide whether an action is successful or not.
The story is as follows:
In the country of Gatherac, in the peaceful village of Mouliac, the Peace Festival starts in 6 weeks and preparations are in full swing. Your task is to go to the city and bring groceries for the festival. Suddenly, a geyser emerges from the well, and the ominous dragon Colobra emerges from it. He gets angry at the villagers for forgetting the true meaning of the festival and to punish you he eats all the things you carry and then eats time. Yes, you heard right. Time. Because Colobra is also known as the Time-Eating Dragon. Before you know what's happening, you're sent back in time exactly 6 weeks, but you're the only one who remembers everything. First, you must go to Hortegarde Castle and seek help from the sages who live there. And that's where the game starts.
You move freely around the board and in each location you can meet numerous characters who will have various missions for you, and some of them may have multiple outcomes. Each turn (or here, week) you have a certain number of moves on the board and activities you can do. After 6 weeks, Colobra appears, devours your items and takes you back 6 weeks in the past and you start over. But now with increasing knowledge of everything that is happening. And so again and again.
I admit, I was confused by all this. And since I'm introducing my eight-year-old son to the D&D world, so we played together, so did he.
How can you accomplish anything if everything resets every 6 weeks? But after we realized that after the reset you don't have to go through the whole mission, but you can go directly to request or find something that you know in advance that you will need, we accelerated the progress. Even if the dice are not on your side, a bad outcome of the mission does not necessarily mean failure, but opens up new possibilities and the story.
Each time Colobra appears, it allows each player (if you are playing in multiplayer) to save one of the items after the reset if you think it is crucial for a mission. Everything else counts as items you've fed him, and there are 154 different items in total - unfortunately you can't check what you've already given him.
The game is obviously meant to be played in multiplayer because, apart from each item saving one item after the reset, you can exchange them, and you can also teleport directly to another player, which greatly speeds up movement around the board.
Difficulty wise, the game is equally hard/easy no matter how many of you are playing, it just takes longer if you're playing alone because you're limited in movement.
Nicely drawn 2D characters combined with 3D environments look great, and it all looks like a picture book you're just making.
Baladins is a great game if you want to play sometimes for fifteen minutes and then not at all for a few days or weeks, and when you come back you won't feel like you have no idea what to do next. If the repetitiveness around which the game mechanics are formulated in advance does not repel you, after the initial period of adaptation and when you understand how the game works, considering that the missions have more than one outcome depending on your decisions and the result on the dice, this game will keep you glued to the screen much longer than you thought.
A Nintendo Switch copy of the game for review purposes was provided by Armor Games Studios.
