A hex-based tactical RPG set in the Dark Eye universe, buried under bad RNG and a progression system that never adds up to much.
Official art · via Steam
Blackguards drops you into the Dark Eye tabletop universe as a convicted criminal turned mercenary, fighting hex-based tactical battles across a dark, unglamorous fantasy setting. Daedalic built real texture into individual encounters: chandeliers you can drop on enemies, terrain that punishes bad positioning, environmental hazards that turn a fight into a puzzle before the first hit lands. Those battles became the studio's biggest commercial success at the time, and the ability-point character system underneath them gives real room to specialize.
The battles don't stay imaginative for long once the dice start working against you. Miss chances in the 70-80 percent range fail in strings players have documented and screenshotted on Steam's forums, five misses in a row at 75 percent showing up often enough that PC Gamer called out the "random chance attack rolls" by name in its review. Combat runs slow enough that repeated misses compound the frustration rather than passing quickly, and IGN's review, generally positive elsewhere, still landed on a "muddled progression system" as the game's core weakness: fights vary, but the RPG holding them together stays thin.
The story fares worse. RPGamer flagged the ending specifically as sub-standard, calling the whole experience less complete than it could have been, and Multiplayer.it's review named the plot boring and the cast uninspiring outright. GamesRadar+ piled on a clumsy, imprecise UI that led to real misclicks, healers healing themselves instead of allies, and loading screens between nearly every encounter. Each problem alone might be survivable. Stacked together across a forty-plus-hour campaign, they wear players down instead of hooking them.
Metacritic's aggregate lands at 68, "Mixed or Average," and Steam users track close behind at 59 to 62 percent depending on language filter, also labeled Mixed. The individual scores spread wide: Hooked Gamers gave it an 87, DarkStation gave it a 40 and called it "a rage inducing time waster" dressed up as a hardcore RPG. That spread says less about disagreement over quality than about how differently reviewers weighed the same flaws: strong battles for players who could tolerate the RNG, a thin RPG shell for players who couldn't.
Skip it, or go in knowing what you're signing up for: a tactics game with real ideas, buried under a miss chance that will cost you runs and a story that won't make up for it.