Grimshade

Now that the Switch has really put together quite an impressive line-up of RPGs, whether AAA or indie, traditional turn-based or tactical, making a big splash in the space is getting tough...

I admire a fair amount of what developer Talerock and publisher Asterion Games put into Grimshade. It’s a title very much in the style of something using the Infinity Engine, a design choice that’s come back into fashion in recent years. Where it unfortunately needs some improvement is in a few technical details, plus its localization.

Grimshade is a love letter to the JRPGs of the '90s. Trouble is it's one that wasn't as eloquently written as it should. The weak-to-decent presentation cannot be fixed, of course, but there's some hope for this, if the developer ever heavily rebalance the tactical battles.

Grimshade is, in a word, a mess. There are seeds of good ideas that can be seen in the world writing and combat, and the art and side quests are mostly good. However, mountains of dry writing, numerous translation errors, bugs, performance issues, and the overall lack of depth to the combat make the experience drag. What's truly a shame is there is clearly potential in the game, but it's choked out by all of the issues it has.

As a result of my issues with the game, I have to give Grimshade a 6 out of 10. It was meant to be challenging and different, but this isn't a game that frustrated me in a good way. Unlike XCOM 2 where players had to pray that their 98% chance to hit would actually be successful, this game frustrated me in its overall design and not its mechanics. Now, I know that the developers worked hard to create a different type of RPG that would break the norm, but Grimshade isn't enough to appease my personal tastes. That's not to say that the game is bad, because it isn't. I just found that the issues I had with it far exceeded its good points and it got under my skin in a negative way.

Grimshade offers clumsy tactical turn-based combat system and poor character progress. But there are still some amusing moments in the game.

I do not think I have ever played a game available for retail that was as unfinished as Grimshade. Unfinished games on Steam are a dime-a-dozen, but I cannot be certain I have the strength to trudge through to see the rest of a game that, doubtless, bit off more than it could chew. Besides, if this really is as large a world and extensive a narrative as promised, one should never feel obligated to push through hours of also-ran adventure hoping for an uncertain and potentially imaginary catharsis.

Grimshade has stunning visuals for an RPG game. Additionally, it has an easy to play combat system and a wide array of characters with different backgrounds and personalities.

It seems that Grimshade is a product of several teams who worked separately from each other, and in the end just matched they works together. Grimshade is a shallow Role Playing title with weak story, and the only reason that prevents it from a free fall is its visual design and music.

As desperately as I wanted to love Grimshade, it’s a broken game—its mechanics are a mess, popups that explain how things work are either needlessly vague or outright empty, bugs lurk around every corner, and it’s difficult to understand what’s happening at any given point because the dialogue is filtered through a prism of typos and wrong portraits/names that make it impossible to tell who’s speaking during conversations.