The First Templar, an action adventure game set in the bygone times of crusades, inquisitions & generally all around wholesome family fun. You follow Templars Celian & Roland on their quest for the Holy Grail & everything that happens in between, as it is the cliché Templar way. Plenty of locales to visit ranging from Acre, a city under siege by Mamluks to France’s city streets in search of help meanwhile dodging capture by an anti-Templar movement & even trap filled dungeons & sewers.
I wish I could say the plot was engaging or interesting in play, because on paper it sounded interesting. Its main fault being how it is told. It is abrupt as all sin & most all conversation being mostly dry one-liners coupled with awkward animation. I wish I was joking, nothing like seeing Celian a.k.a “Discount-perpetually-ridden-with-an-allergic-reaction Bruce Wayne” STARE at the camera with his ‘seen some deep shit’ eyes while his buddy stands about & delivers his one-liner, usually involving killing things. There’s games with bad animations that you can pass off because they are funny but this game is not it.
Combat is no different. It is better than the cutscenes & story but by no means worth the hassle of playing the game. It is average hack & slash combat, rarely changing at all. Oftentimes shielded enemies show up & force you to switch it up for a second with a Power Attack to break their shield. You have a skill tree, EXP gained from fights are just a currency to unlock skills, but problem with the skill tree is that all the things are hidden until you pay for them so any chase of pretending to enjoy the game with a character build is lost. Ultimately, you have more than enough EXP by the endgame to unlock most skills, not that it matters.
Enemies, much like the rest of the game are not at all interesting. They mob you & slowly take turns beating at you, which they display much like the Arkham series. Sometimes they ‘Power Attack’ you & drop you to the floor forcing you to take a few seconds to get up or suffer further punishment. Enemy skins might change but all their attacks & types stay the same save for a specific one in the middle chapters which loved wasting your time flipping about & abusing its i-frames to extend the pain of playing the game.
Level design is linear unless you spend the time searching out chest filled with bonus EXP, Health, pieces of outfits for your characters which are purely cosmetic or tablets, which provide some backstory relating to the Templar Order. At face value, I found them to be interesting locales but going through them was just a chore. All of this will display the disparity in textures & graphics. While as a whole, the game doesn’t have amazing textures, some did stand out as pretty nicely done but then on the other hand, you look at the character models, both NPCs & the main characters, & seeing how ugly they were was plain confusing to me. Sounds & music were equally average, nothing really standing out.
All throughout your adventure you will be paired up with an AI buddy, be it Celian, Roland or another one later in the game. You can freely switch between the 2 characters to perform tasks or you can go about the game in offline splitscreen or with another online. Sadly, I wish I would’ve done so because it would had solved the headache of watching the AI completely ignore a enemy mobs because I got a little bit too far from it or watching it somehow near flawlessly go through the BS traps (these have weird hitboxes & high tendency to stunlock . Fun.) scattered in a fair few areas only to arrive near you & go brain-dead yet again. Of course, this being a buddy co-op game, there will be plenty of duo type levers you will have to pull to progress, needless to say, the AI doesn’t have the context of pulling their lever when you do your own, so you have to switch to them & set them up. Sigh.
Ultimately, The First Templar, was a painfully average game with an interesting plot & plot twist ruined by abrupt storytelling, dull combat & if solo, stupid AI. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it solo, maybe with another person with which to share the pain with, probably through online means so as to not turn a simple gaming night into a homicide out of pure rage & frustration.
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