Lords of Xulima Review - Old School’s Back

Lords of Xulima is a mythical beast, a Kickstarter game that made three-and-a-half times its goal, albeit its original target was merely $10,000 and when the crowdfunding campaign launched, the game was already close enough to completion to see the end, only asking for funds to pay for improvements. Still, it’s a Kickstarter game that hit it’s target and was released, albeit later than promised; with all that’s happening lately, I’m sure the backers of Lords of Xulima are very happy. Is it worth buying for anyone else, though? Why yes, yes it is.
However, that statement comes with a huge caveat. Xulima is a traditional (read: old-school) RPG in a similar vein to that of the Ultima or Baldur’s Gate series’. What this invariably means is that it is difficult, overwhelmingly so at times. From the very beginning, you are in for a challenge, moreso if you decide to play on one of the higher difficulty settings. The three options given are ‘Normal’, ‘Old-School Veteran’ and ‘Hardcore'; I chose the second.

Numantian Games, the Spanish developers, promised a challenging RPG featuring over a hundred hours of gameplay where players can discover one of the most epic sagas ever told. Now, they are more than honest with the challenging aspect and I can readily believe the hundred hours claim, when including all of the side quests. The one thing I’m skeptical of is the claim of an epic saga.
The lore is thrown at the player like a ton of bricks. Gaulen is the only mandatory character because he was sent by Golot, the smartest of the gods and the master of dreams, from the continent of Xulima to that of Rodina to find out why the many prayers of the people haven’t been answered. The reason they were praying, there’s a huge war going on that has enveloped the whole continent but at the same time the nine gods, disagreeing over whether to intercede and end the conflict, have started a war between each other as well. You would have thought that Golot would have known this, being one of the nine gods.

 

Honestly, the lore is a bit of a jumbled mess at the best of times and isn’t exactly organically fed to you. I had no inherent want or need to stop the war, make peace between the kingdoms or even stop the gods fighting. The reason I carried on is because while the main story may be a bit overwhelming, unless you want to sit down and read the equivalent of War and Peace, the little stories are interesting, be it finding something lost in a dungeon, helping a farmer out or just doing something for the challenge of it. This is simply as a result of the world being quite varied and explorable.

Difficulty may have already been mentioned a few times already, but I’ll do it again - Lords of Xulima is bloody hard. From the very start you are punished for being a fleshy mortal, with corrupt guards taking money from you before they’ll let you into a village - should you refuse, they’ll kill you. Later on, you’ll want to get rid of these guards, which then puts you on every soldiers hit-list. Go into the wilderness, there’s a big monster blocking your path? Good luck, go the long way, which while being ever-so-slightly more possible, is still a grind. You’ve gone the long way, ground your way to success, you can now beat the monster that was blocking your path. Maybe.
That’s because the battle system seems to take a lot of liberty with a little thing I like to call fair play. It reminds me a lot of D&D style games with a little bit of cheating behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that every action results in a virtual set of dice being rolled, but if I get a good roll it is rolled again to make sure. A bad roll? Go right ahead. It just seems to boil down to a lot of unknown factors and the nine gods of Xulima whether you hit, miss, how much damage you do and just about everything else.

Of course the factors that you can directly impact are your attributes and skills. Again, this is something that has been taken right out of the ‘traditional RPG’ book. Each character has six base attributes, only two of which can be increased by one upon leveling up, and a variety of skills, each of which cost a specific number of points to learn or improve, where a limited number is given upon each level up.

However, though this system is a tried and tested method, unless done fairly it can be quite punishing. In the case of specific characters, you can find yourself completely ruining what should be a side aspect of their role, such as a Paladin that you want to act as a support-tank of sorts. However, to give a paladin both the HP and Energy to fill that role, you effectively make it so that speed is never added, meaning he or she never acts, and the accuracy is equivalent to that of a short-sighted bat, in the dark, after being maced in the eyes by another bat after making an unwanted advance. In otherwords, non-existant.

Of course you’ll need to find this balance with all of your characters, for a number of reasons. The first is simply due to how the combat system plays out. Your party of six (Gaulen + five characters of your own creation) isn’t set out in the traditional way of all on a single row and attacking; you actually have a front and back row, and factors such as distance play an impact on who can attack what. For example, a character on the far right of the front row is too far away to attack an enemy on the far left, unless using a ranged weapon. Back row characters or enemies also can’t be attacked normally before those in front of them are killed.

It makes for an interesting system to say the least. Quite inventive actually, adding a little tactical depth to a genre that could have really been declared stale when I was just a toddler. It is this combat system, combined with a decent world, with albeit too much forced exposition, that makes Lords of Xulima into the sort of game that is really worth playing, provided you can get past the visuals, music and voice acting.

Though this isn’t to say it doesn’t look good. When I say dated I do mean it looks like something that could have been made up to ten years ago, though I am greatly pleased that it hasn’t gone full nostalgia through having pixel-art. Everything is bright and colourful, nice and smooth and very nice to look at, much in the same way that Bastion was, albeit less colourful due to the game being ground in a sort of reality. Also, I adore the inclusion of what seems to be a hand-painted world map, it just adds something to the world, though I can’t quite describe it.
The voice acting on the other hand is pretty bad. Okay, really bad. Made only worse due to the fact that it is used selectively and more often than not right when you’d much rather skip due to the quite dense story.

I personally am not a great fan of most of the sound effects either, as they get quite repetitive, and I found that’s true of the music as well. Honestly, past the first ten hours I stopped playing with my headset on, instead choosing to listen to music or a TV show in the background while I read what text I needed to.

Honestly, I do recommend Lords of Xulima. It’s a strong, old-school RPG with quite a lot of challenge and a decent world to explore. It could have done with a little pruning in the story, but that’s the sort of thing a lot of people like. If you’re a fan of in-depth RPG’s and you can get over the isometric view, then Lords of Xulima is both the sort of game you’ll like and also cheap to boot, only £14.99 on Steam.