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You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve played a good tactical RPG, hell, it’s been a long time since I’ve played any tactical RPG. Well, released on January 20th as a downloadable game for Xbox Live and The PlayStation Network, Hijinx Studios and Konami released Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment for about 10 bucks. Konami was kind enough to give me a free downloadable copy to review for you all and I thought this game was fun as hell. Now, I must be the only one in the world left to enjoy tactical RPGs because all of my friends said this game looked boring or childish, and many of you left comments over at my other channel, ZeitgeistOther, stating that you thought the game looked lame. Well come on guys, you’ve got to expand your horizons a bit and check out some other genres past your typical first person shooters. For those of you who are willing to download this title, let everyone here know what you thought about it by leaving your comments below. Don’t forget to follow me on twitter to stay up to date with all of my upcoming reviews and news.

For the past 20 years, the kingdoms of Urdu and Balastrade have been in a massive war, consuming all of their people and resources. After much damage on both sides, God intervenes and stops the war by shooting huge fireballs into the battlefield killing most of the soldiers. For one reason or another the General of Balastrade can’t let the war end so he hires a bunch of bandits to attack towns in his kingdom to appear as though the Urdu are still attacking and to encourage the king to continue the war.

The game begins with a few friends training in combat and magic when their town comes under attack. Your party rushes to the local garrison to recruit some soldiers for help and acquire a few additional party members along the way. For one reason or another, each of the 6 characters have a reason to try to stop the war, but really, none of it is very interesting. To be honest, I didn’t care about the story at all. It never drew me in and it was really just boring. I tried to skip through as much of the dialog as I could just to get to the action. Basically, we’re just playing Chess with swords and magic here.

From start to finish Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment took me between 12 and 15 hours to complete and is single player throughout. The game itself could actually take you a whole lot longer than this if you wanted to. There are lots secret battles to discover and every time you beat a level, it can be replayed to practice or to give yourself additional battles to level up further. Beyond that, this game is pretty damn hard because besides simply killing all of the enemies, certain characters must survive the battles, and it seems that the bad guys focus fire those characters down. It takes a lot of time to really figure out what’s going on and to figure out your tactics, and each new level provides new challenges to overcome. Just when you feel that you’ve defeated all of the enemies, a new wave will appear forcing you to re-evaluate all of your tactics. While the combat system is identical in every battle, the layouts of the battlefields vary greatly and you’ll often face different foes, so it never feel repetitious.

Like most tactical RPGs, Flames of Judgment has you controlling several characters on a large grid. Each character can wield two weapons and use magic; whether you want to give them one melee and one ranged, or two melee is up to you. Spells are learned by equipping a magical spell book and then simply casting it a few times; so you can rotate the spell books between all of the characters until they all learn the spell. It’s important that you have some characters that focus on advancing their healing spells, some that focus on ranged attacks, and others that are your tanks and fighters. As you fight you’ll level up in a variety of different stats based on how you are playing your characters.

Much of your time will be spent between battles where you use the map to determine where you want to battle next. Lots of preparation needs to occur before each battle including purchasing new weapons, armor, magic and items. Nonetheless, the game-play to me was just fun. You have as long as you want to make your moves, so you can just take your time and enjoy yourself as you play.

Being a downloadable game, you can’t expect top of the line graphics obviously, but I really liked the cartoony style of the presentation. To me, the graphics really looked a lot like World of Warcraft. The cut scenes really just like some oil paintings that kind of move around and are pretty cheesy; they don’t really add anything to the game. On top of that, there are some really long loading times between each mission, which seem pretty odd considering how the graphics aren’t top notch. When you equip new armor, the graphics are not updated on your characters, which if you’ve seen some of my reviews by now, you know really bothers me.

There is very little voice acting in the game so it’s not really worth mentioning, but the music is pretty well done. It compliments the game nicely and really helps you enjoy the battles.

Perhaps the developer made such a short pretty game to test the market; nonetheless, I thought it was really fun to play. Let’s let Hijinx Studios know that there is a market for quality tactical RPGs. They clearly have the formula for a great game, now let’s see a full length title with high res graphics, high quality CG cut-scenes, a great story, quality voice actors, you know, the whole package. I feel that Flames of Judgment is worth the 10 bucks you’ll spend to download it but I’d certainly be willing to fork out 60 bucks for the game I just described. Let me know what you think with your questions and comments below. Check out a ton of blazing HD game-play footage for my reviewed games at my other channel, ZeitgeistOther, and follow me on Twitter to get see what game reviews are coming next!