Blightbound Review: Tainted Experiences Infect Solid Gameplay

Sometimes, a game can be frustrating because the player sees glimpses at what it could be but never sees it find that potential hidden in the fog of issues that surround it. Blightbound, a game made by Ronimo Games and published by Devolver Digital, is, unfortunately, a member of that particular category of frustration as, despite a solid core of gameplay and art direction, the game is marred by technical problems.

Part of the potential of Blightbound comes in the form of its story, setting and art. The setup that the game uses is very much grimdark in tone, and gives it a unique feel that’s similar in some respects to the Warhammer 40K universe. The world of Blightbound is a husk and home only to undeath thanks to a miasma called the Blight which seeps from the body of the long-slain Shadow Titan, a monstrosity that shattered the sun before its death. Players take up the roles of heroes living in a mountaintop settlement who must journey into the Blighted wastes below to fight against the tide of horrors lurking there and rescue some of the last remaining humans. The game’s art accentuates this tone with a very muted aesthetic for all of the locations, along with some genuinely horrible creature designs, both in concept and execution.

The moment-to-moment gameplay of Blightbound is another point in its favor, though this is where it also begins to slip up as time goes on. Blightbound is a multiplayer hack-and-slash dungeon crawler where three players form a party of one each of the Warrior, Assassin, and Mage classes, who take the roles of Tank, DPS, and Healer respectively. The team uses their complementary abilities to blast their way through Blight-ridden areas in order to accomplish missions, kill monsters, and gather resources for crafting and selling back at the hub base.

A downside to this setup, however, is that there is no room for a group of players to determine their own party composition, though the rigidity of this composition means it functions well. It isn’t perfect, though, and an issue related to this does arise with single-player gameplay. Since the party must have all three roles filled, single player is just playing the normal game with bots instead of people controlling the companion characters. The bots are not very bright outside of combat, and, in fact, they can soft-lock progression in a level thanks to the existence some puzzles that their poor AI can’t understand.

Each class has several characters for players to choose from, but only one from each class are available from the start with the others needing to be rescued during dungeon crawls before becoming available. Most of the characters play nearly identically, however, since they all must fit the same role in overall gameplay. Only a couple of abilities differ between any two characters, which makes them all feel more like glorified palette-swaps then fully fledged characters. This problem is somewhat alleviated with each character having a personal story that they can explore during their various trips through the Blight, but these tend to lack much substance other than being a way for the game to offer players more lore.

Blightbound’s greatest flaws come in its technical aspects. In addition to its poor AI, the game has many other annoying shortcomings. The most egregious issue was repeated crashes, specifically during the game’s tutorial. A total of five were experienced in total, across multiple players, which were all the more annoying given the unskippable cutscene at the tutorial’s beginning. Fortunately, once the tutorial was completed no more crashes occurred for the rest of the playtime. Menu navigation issues and glitches were also experienced both consistently and plentifully, but, as with all technical issues, these can be alleviated in the future with updates. For now, though, these technical issues repeatedly worsen the Blightbound experience.

To say that Blightbound has a lot of potential is an understatement, but to say that it squanders that potential is even more of one. For all its faults, the game is still worth playing thanks to the nuggets of concentrated fun that can be had while playing it with friends. In the end, the frustrating aspects of Blightbound are likely to be far more transient than its appeal, but what’s a good game now could be an excellent one with some patches and a smoother experience on the technical side of things.

Blightbound is currently available on Steam in Early Access with its 1.0 version releasing today, July 27^th, 2021. Screen Rant was provided digital Steam codes for the purposes of this review.

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