Shadow Realms Hands-On: Fun, But Rough

Among the behind closed doors at Electronic Arts‘ booth, Shadow Realms certainly stood out. This is the new IP made in BioWare that was teased just before Gamescom, and it’s been inspired by Neverwinter Nights and Pen&Paper RPGs.

Shadow Realms presents itself as an online action-RPG in which five players are divided into two teams. The news is that Shadow Realms follows the growing trend (Evolve, Fable Legends) of 4v1 asymettical multiplayer: the lone player becomes the Shadowlord, who is basically like a Dungeon Master in that he’s able to lay down traps and even possess NPCs to harm the other team. The other four players form a party of adventurers who must get out alive from the dungeon; perhaps the biggest departure from any previous Bioware game is the setting: this is neither fantasy nor sci-fi, but rather the popular modern fantasy, which is a first for Bioware.

 

After a brief introduction to the game and its mechanics, a colleague was chosen to take the role of Shadowlord, while I and Alessio (along with two others) took the role of Heroes, which led us to a choice between six classes. I played as a smartly dressed wizard: loafers, white shirt & tie, black pants. He looked like a normal person, but with the wand he was able to throw darts and some magical wizardry such as the fire wall or a powerful telekinetic thrust.

 

Shadow Realms is in pre-alpha state, far from being complete and finished, and it shows. The game’s graphics is far from stunning, and it looks remarkably inferior to Dragon Age Inquisition at this point; it doesn’t look like it’s powered by Frostbite 3, at a glance.

That said, our session was still quite fun, which ultimately is the most important thing that can be said about a game; combat reminded me of Neverwinter (the MMORPG made ​​by Cryptic). Controls are quite similar, as you’ll have to use WASD to move your character, while the left and right mouse buttons will do attacks and/or moves depending on your class (for example, the Assassin dodges with the right button); number keys from 1 to 4 will again have special attacks based on your class, and one of these is an “Ultimate” skill of sorts which needs to be charged.

The match was fairly short, but very intense. From the beginning the group has sought to cooperate, with each character trying to use its own perks to overcome the hordes of enemies led by the evil Shadowlord against us. He could also lay down traps that, in addition to physical damage, slowed the affected characters. Whenever a character is downed, he/she needs to be rescued in a matter of seconds, which Alessio was often quick to do.

 

Progression in the level was quite linear, with the age-old requirement of defeating every monster before being able to advance – in this case, by lowering the so called Shadow Barrier.

At the end of the level we had to face the most powerful minion of the Shadow Master, a fearsome infernal beast with powerful attacks. At the same time, he summoned enemies to distract us and keep us busy. The outcome of the battle saw myself in the spotlight, landing the final blow just when it seemed like the Shadowlord had prevailed.

Oddly enough, the dungeon we were able to try didn’t feel like “modern fantasy” at all, but that’s because it was set into the parallel world of Embra, which is where magic (and monsters) roams freely. Also, there wasn’t really any story in what we played and given that Bioware always produced story-heavy games, you might be puzzled about Shadow Realms; however, it seems like story will be delivered episodically and mostly relegated to “solo instances”.

This is quite perplexing, as most games are now trying to weave story into gameplay as much as possible, while Bioware appears to be doing the exact opposite with Shadow Realms.

 

As you probably have deduced by now, we already have a few doubts about Shadow Realms as a whole, but ultimately we had fun playing, which is very good news for a game still in Pre-Alpha. Bioware told us that a few lucky gamers will be entering the Closed Alpha later this year, and hopefully the developer will listening carefully to their feedback in order to polish and tweak the game wherever needed.

 

Shadow Realms will release on PC some time in 2015, and I reckon there’s a good chance we’ll see it on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One too at some point (Bioware already said that there’s no reason why it couldn’t be on consoles later).