Hard to Be a God Review

Introduction

We took a close look at the book Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in our preview of the game. In short, Hard to be a God tells of the struggles of Don Rumata of Estor aka Anton, an earth observer sent to the kingdom of Arkanar on a feudal planet to observe and subtly manipulate the progress of the society there. The Kingdom of Arkanar is knee-deep in feudal times, violently religious and harshly oppressing all forms of science and philosophy. Rumata as a God-like being, struggles with his inability to force society forward.

The Strugatsky brothers never really broke through in the West, but are to this day very popular in Russia. Chances are that most of you reading this article have never read Hard to be a God, but suffice to say that even for non-Strugatsky fans, there are aspects of making this book into a game that are interesting.

Hard to be a God as a story doesn’t lend itself well to a book, so it’s clear that the game developers had to focus on the possibilities offered by the setting. The (Noon) universe is pretty interesting; high-technology Earth observers live amongst the less-developed citizens of Arkanar, practically having the powers of gods amongst men but limited in what they can do with this. It offers a good opportunity for a unique game combining science fiction with high fantasy. While not getting a lot of attention in the West, Akella & Burut’s attempt to translate this game into a hack ‘n slash RPG was closely watched in Russia.

So, how well did they do?

The Graphics & Camera

Like so many localized titles from Eastern Europe, the first things you’ll notice about Hard to Be a God are its glaring flaws. We’re going to get them out of the way first in this review.

The graphics are subpar but have some good sides. The character animations are fairly good and realistic, but the model details are low and annoyingly fuzzy. World art is good but repetitive, and varies a bit in quality.

Painful is the definite overkill of bloom, which is just an eye-sore in certain locations. You can turn bloom off wholesale, which helps, but you can’t simply turn it down a notch, which would have been better.

Another thing that’s bound to get on your nerves is bad collision detection. Wearing a cloak can lead to several weird situations, as the cloak bundles up over your head or as your sword sticks straight through the thing.

Other than that, the graphics have a few things going for them. The design of buildings is fairly detailed and well done. Motion capture, especially for humans, was well done and stands out as a positive. Some of the effects are pretty good, like shadows, rain and water effects, though there’s not a lot of water in the game, which might be because your character has such an extreme form of aquaphobia that you can not touch any shallow puddle of it in the game.

Worse than any of this is the annoying camera. The camera is hung at a kind of high over-the-shoulder POV, but tilted at a downward angle, which means your maximum field of vision will be about 30 yards. You can zoom it out, but if you do, it just tilts the camera further downward, keeping your FOV limited. I guess this was all done for reasons of avoiding rendering far-off objects, but it’s still incredibly annoying.

You can circle the camera around the player with the mouse. Now, this is where it gets even more annoying: the mouse sensitivity is pretty high for this, and you have to circle around a lot during fights. Coupled with this the fact that the camera zooms itself in and out to avoid objects that aren’t made transparent (like walls or buildings you can’t enter). What that makes is some of the most nauseating combat imaginable, especially in towns, as the camera runs around in circles while zooming in and out. Long story short: this is not for people who easily get motion sickness.

Bugs & Interface

I’ll be short about this part: the interface is awkward. Other than the awkward combat described later, the inventory interface is pretty hard to overview and not very easy to use. Simple interaction with the game world (like clicking a chest) works, but is a bit frustrating at times because of the odd camera angle.

There are some bugs, the most dangerous of which can be getting stuck behind scenery. As the character can’t jump except on horseback and the game world is full of invisible walls going crisscross through the map floating over objects, the chances of getting stuck are fairly good, which is bad. Another bug occurs when you start dialogue while on horseback. The PC is supposed to dismount as the dialogue starts, but sometimes instead of that, he sinks straight through his horse and into the ground to his waist.

The game crashes sometimes, but fairly infrequently. For some reason, my DVD drive occasionally had problems detecting the DVD and would refuse to start up the game. This game has its bugs and could do with a patch, but it’s not so buggy that it’ll significantly detract from the gameplay.

Sound & Localization

For the most part, the music and sound effects in this game are solid. The music is atmospheric and ambient, switching to faster tracks for combat. It’s not particularly optimistic music, which fits into the game’s world and setting well. Sound effects aren’t always convincing (in particular the sound spiders make when they spot you), but they’re effective.

It’s probably no big surprise when I note the localization is pretty bad. They opted to leave the PC unvoiced (except in cutscenes), which is a bit jarring because of the way dialogue is set up (in the Russian version, the PC is voiced), and a number of anonymous NPCs are unvoiced too. The voice-over work of the other NPCs varies in quality, there are not many really annoying voices, and some are pretty well done, but the overall quality is not high.

The text translations are actually significantly worse than the voice-overs (since the voice actors will sometimes correct the mistakes in the written translation). While not impossible to understand, the translations are bad enough that a lot of context is completely lost. Since the plot gets fairly complex at points, you shouldn’t be surprised if you hit points where you simply have no idea what the other person is talking about anymore. For me, the high point of this was when my character triumphantly declared, “Aha! That’s another pair of shoes!”

There are a few typos as well. Most embarrassing is the inexplicable tendency of the game to misname characters. Look for Phat? You’ll find his name in the game is “Phat’s servant”. Looking for the priest? You’ll find his name reads “priest’s cloak”.

Combat & Skills

Combat is simple and easy, but it can be very challenging due to the frustrating design. Whatever weapon you choose, you can block with spacebar, attack with the left-mouse button for up to three-hit combinations (depending on your timing), do a special move with the right mouse button, and finish off knocked-down opponents with the third mouse button. The differences between the 3 different weapon skills play out very well, for example, in the fact that heavier weapons have a better chance of knocking someone down, but finishing off someone with a heavy weapon also takes a longer time, leaving you exposed to attacks for a longer time. Blocking arrows is impossible unless you have a shield.

The problem with combat is not in the concept but, like so many things in this game, in the execution. Combat happens with an awkward combination of WASD and mouse, in which several fighters all step forward and form a straight line while attacking. A number of the monster creatures do this, but human fighters, especially those armed with light weapons (including the PC), also step forward a lot. This means that if you want to keep attacking, you’ll end up swinging the camera around quite a lot in a very disorienting manner.

This leads to a certain rinse-and-repeat strategy regardless of what weapon set you have: do a special move to start, block, do another special move, run away or block until your special moves recharge. This prevents disorienting circling combat while allowing you to do maximum damage while taking minimum damage.

Thankfully, the game’s enemies do have some variation. Nothing impressive, but enough to make you adapt your tactic slightly every now and again. Fighting a mass of wolves is different from fighting 2 or 3 high-level bandits (especially since bandits often have bows or crossbows), not to mention the game’s weirder monsters like the giant leeches or forest guardians.

Speaking of damage, what makes combat particularly easy once you get a hang of it is the fact that it pauses when you open up your inventory. You can just dine on 20–25 pumpkins to heal up fully prior to restarting combat, and you can buy such healing fruits & veggies fairly cheap. I finished the game without having to resort to the use of health potions, right until the final area.

The game also features stamina- and stamina-restoring potions. You’ll rarely run out of stamina, as it regenerates while you block or run away (blocking takes some stamina, but not much). However, if you keep on pressing your attacks, you’ll run out of stamina pretty quick, and if it runs out, your character can’t move or block. It’s pretty important to keep an eye on this statistic, especially early on.

The character system is mostly about your combat skills. There are 3 sets of combat skills, each of which contains two sets of weapon types: light weapons, which include one-handed and dual-wielded weapons; medium weapons, which include staves and double-bladed weapons; and heavy weapons, which include two-handed heavy weapons and one-handed weapons with shield combinations. Each set has two special moves assigned to it, which unlock as you increase the combat skill from a range of 0 to 10.

The other skills, which all have a range of 0 to 15, are ranged weapons, diplomacy, stamina, health and medicine. Stamina and health are self-explanatory, and medicine increases the usefulness of healing items. Diplomacy is used very rarely, but when it’s used, it is often the only way to avoid combat. Ranged weapons look odd in this group, but it’s not actually a full-fledged combat skill like the above 3. It doesn’t have special moves, and I doubt you could survive the entire game using only ranged weapons.

The last thing of note here is horseback combat. I’d like to call it horseback combat (appropriately awkward). There’s just no way you’re going to be able to do well in fighting off 3 guards with pikes from horseback or wheeling your horse around quickly in a narrow alley at full speed. And that makes sense. Horseback fighting gives you an edge very early on in the game as the horse absorbs some of the blows, but around the time your weapon skill reaches 5 or 6 points, you’ll find using a special move (which you can only do when unmounted) makes a lot more sense than attacking from horseback. Circling enemies to fight them can remain a good opener in fights, but generally you’ll find that you want to stick with your trusted horse for transportation only.

What helps you in all of the above is that combat AI isn’t very good; it’s easy to trick enemy combatants. It’s also a bit too easy to trick people into doing your dirty work for you and then attack them in the back.

Story & Setting

The Noon universe as a setting is sure to turn some heads. There’s a lot of potential in its particular combination of science fiction and high fantasy. The possibilities it offers are fairly well utilized in the novel, which takes the perspective of how hard it is to do good for lesser beings as a “god,” but how well does the game do this?

Well, the game’s plot is pretty good, but this is mostly nullified by the fact that it’s pretty hard to understand what’s going on. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, the game doesn’t both to introduce you to the backstory or setting, on the other hand, bad localization means you won’t understand much of the longer expositions.

The first is obviously caused by the fact that this game was made in Russia for Strugatsky fans, and the game makers assumed you’d be familiar with the backstory, kind of the same way BioWare assumes that for Knights of the Old Republic here. Working on that assumption, you’re offered no backstory or much of an explanation about who is to start the game.

And that’s fine for Russia, but it is the task of the publisher abroad to ensure that people who haven’t read the book — the vast majority here  —  can still understand what’s going on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t, which leads to a feeling of being tossed into the world with no clue. Partially, this makes sense, because you’re supposed to flounder about a bit while unraveling the plot, but a part of this is just a bad set-up.

The second is typical of bad translating. The plot is delivered through long expositions from the key NPCs including Stranger (see more about him and why I hate him later on). While you should be able to get the gist of what they’re talking about in those expositions, the plot is pretty sensitive to nuances and details that haven’t carried over well. It’s a plot full of intrigue, backstabbing, and political power play, but it’ll take added effort to unravel because of these flaws.

But it is complex, and it will take you right until the end to figure out what’s going on, who was doing what all this time, and, of course, that the world is a terrible place. The bleak vision of humanity carries over well, even into the endings, none of which are very positive or heroic (I could find 3, not sure if there are more).

The game follows the events of the book, and you arrive at Arkanar shortly after the book’s ending. I’m not a huge Noon fan, but even I can tell the game makers took some daring liberties with the story. I’m not that surprised that fans reacted “they raped the book’s story,” but it’s not really all that bad. The story is good, even with elements that will annoy Noon fans.

As for the setting, most of the game is really just medieval-style fantasy. If you’re really expecting a complex mix of science fiction and medieval fiction, don’t look here. Science fiction replaces some of the standard functions of magical items: there are magical (temporary booster) potions and high-powered armor and weapons, like an armor that slowly heals you, weapons that add points to your skill or stamina, and a gun that is functionally a really powerful crossbow (though with sparse ammo). These will make your character significantly stronger, but they’re functionally the same as (sword +1) in a D&D game.

The combination of leveling up and these items does stack up to make you feel like a (god) amongst these mortals, as you should hardly break a sweat in the end if you single-handedly storm a fortified castle held by a contingent of guards and slaughter them all. But the world does become stronger as you progress (not through level scaling, but through story progression), meaning you do have to keep your wits on you during combat.

One positive note here is the world design. Particularly, the design of cities is very detailed. The city layout is very real. They are delightfully hard to navigate without a map in a way that feels pretty natural instead of frustrating.

Dialogue & Gameplay

Here we come to a really mixed bag. Dialogue is plentiful, and if you try to see past the bad translations, they are not all that bad. But it’s so one-sided that it hardly deserves the name (dialogue). The only player input is pressing enter at set intervals to select the one and only option available to you, where the game determines for you that you’re feeling angry or that you changed your mind about killing someone.

About 90–95% of dialogue is like this, the rest are options like (convince or fight) or spots where you can ask a handful of questions. Situations where you have real choices in dialogue are pretty rare, which reduces some quests to (follow the quest marker, click on the relevant NPC, and press enter a few times). You don’t even have to understand what you’re doing to finish such quests.

And that ties in to what probably bugged me the most in this game: the linearity combined with some intrusive handholding.

The game gives you some illusion of freedom, and to be fair you do have some choices in how you finish quests. But that’s just the thing: you have a choice about finishing side quests, but the main quest line is extremely linear. You have to finish the quests in a set order, going through the same set of locations and only having an option in how to finish them for the minority of quests. Because if the game wants to keep an NPC alive, he’ll make him immortal (most innocent civilians are immortal), if the game doesn’t want you to go elsewhere, it’ll tell you (I’m not done here yet) if you try to leave the area.

Add to this an insulting amount of meta-narrative and handholding. Your journal will blatantly tell you who to trust and not (at least in the short term) and when something is wrong. Map pointers show you where your quest objects are located, even if you have no way of actually knowing that. And, to add some annoyance, at key points in the main storyline, you’re visited by a doppelgänger called Stranger, who will share his thoughts and tell you what you should do whether you want to or not (though thankfully, he’s not infallible). Instead of letting the player figure things out based on the hints and information he got from NPC dialogue, Stranger simply tells you what you should conclude.

Side quests offer some relief here. Situations are often not as simple as they seem, and you’ll find that, in some cases, people are trying to double-cross you. In other cases, including in the main quest line, you can choose to try and solve something with diplomacy or bribery or to immediately grab for your weapon. This is possible in quite a lot of side quests and a few of the main quests.

To flesh this out a bit, the game has a handful of disguises you can wear. There are five different roles you can assume on top of the standard role (which is mercenary), and they will influence you quite a bit (the guide says six roles, but as far as I could figure, thief and robber are the same role). Robbers won’t attack you if you’re dressed up as one of them. But, on the other hand, the baron’s guards will. The Free Republic of Arkanar guards don’t mind mercenaries or even robbers, but will attack you if you look like a noble don. It’s a bit ridiculous that even people who know you will sometimes not recognize you if you’re in the wrong get-up. But other than this it is pretty well-applied and offers some alternatives in quests, such as walking up to robbers dressed as one of them and getting them to flee by warning them the guards are on the way. To assume a role, you have to wear 5 matching pieces in 6 possible slots (heavy armor, light armor, hat, cloak, pants, and shoes). You can’t switch roles if someone is watching you.

What’s a bit weird is that nobody seems to care how you solve the problems you face. In fact, people don’t care much about what you do at all. A good example: at one point, you’ll be stopped by a group of guards and told to see their leader. The first time, I just did what they suggested and talked to their boss. Then I tried the alternative, namely fighting them all off and then storming the city gates to escape. My escape was successful, but I then found that even knowing where to go, I couldn’t progress the main quest without talking to their boss. So I went back and talked to him. Did he mention that I killed two dozen of his men? Did any of the remaining guards care? Heck no. The reactivity of the world is pretty damn low.

Hack ‘n Slash or RPG?

This game is billed as a “hack ‘n slash/RPG”. At first glance, I disagreed with that label. After spending some time with the game, I found myself in agreement. But my final judgment would be that it is as much both as it is neither.

It is a hack ‘n slash in that you’ll spend a lot of time in combat, it’s fairly linear, and it holds your hand quite significantly. But it’s really not a hack ‘n slash in many other ways. The game is quite unforgiving if you make a mistake and won’t think twice about killing you, dialogue is very important and (side-)quests balance dialogue-based and combat-based solutions.

But it’s not much of an RPG either. The dialogue is pretty much non-interactive, and the skills influencing it are limited. Player choice is there, but the game doesn’t offer many consequences for them. I think that if I’d have to give this game a genre tag, it’d probably just be “action RPG,” which it broadly falls under.

A Difficult Game to Get Into

Hard to be a God sets up some hard entry barriers for you to get past. The most significant ones are the awkward combat mechanics, the annoying camera angle, and the shoddy localization. These are bad enough, especially when combined, to make the game simply unplayable for some people, so I would definitely not advise anyone to whom this may sound like a problem to buy the game without trying the demo.

Now what I’d like to say is, “But once you get past all that, there’s a real gem there.” But there isn’t. If you scratch the surface to get deeper into the game, you won’t find a masterpiece hidden under the muck. The RPG hidden under there is solid, if a bit too linear for my tastes, with some really good world building, an intricate plot and a wide variety of RPGs. It’s solid, hell, it’s pretty good, but it’s not great.

So that begs the question, is it worth it? Hard to be a God is actually a bit of a difficult game to answer that question for (and as such, the rating below is not all that meaningful). I really enjoyed it, but for me, the only real issue was the camera, the other flaws didn’t really bother me. And I think that’s the best conclusion for this game: it’s worth a go if its glaring flaws don’t bother you too much, but don’t grit your teeth and try to bear them, hoping the game will get better. It really won’t.

Oh, and for Noon fans: you’ll probably want to try it, but buckle up and prepare for some wild liberties taken with Hard to be a God’s story in this game.