Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Developer: Cyanide Studio
System requirements: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP2/Win 7, 2.0 GHz dual-core CPU, 256 MB GeForce 7900 GTX/Radeon HD 2600 XT or better graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, 2 GB RAM, DirectX 9-compatible sound device, 4 GB hard-drive space
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

“Foretold by many prophecies, the Rag’narok is the war of the age of darkness, the battle during which the gods will choose their champions before putting Aarklash to fire and sword.” Yes, the setting of Cyanide Studio’s Confrontation is grim. A strategy RPG with a rather detailed fantasy setting, Confrontation sees you gathering your group of heroes and going deep into the heart of the enemy’s territory, fighting innumerable battles to overcome your foes, using swords, spells and cunning strategies, emphasizing strategy over RPG elements.

Combat is real-time, but can be paused at any point to allow for the issuing of commands. Generally, combat is initiated the moment an enemy sees a member of your party, and continues until one side or the other is dead. Every hero you can recruit has different abilities, and most fights revolve around determining enemy capabilities, how to neutralize them, and how to efficiently kill them off. While gearing and leveling is part of gameplay, in many cases it’s more important to properly apply a stun or healing effect at the right time than it is to worry about whether your strength should be two points higher or not. And while the action is in real-time, I did spend a lot of time pausing to redirect combat to my satisfaction. Tactics, not build optimization, is the key.

The single-player campaign promises around 30 hours of gameplay, divided into a series of missions that tells the story of your squad of Griffin warriors. Environments are wide and varied, and opponents range from the alchemical technomantic warriors of the Scorpions, to the beastfolk of the Wolfen and the ever-maligned Orcs. There are hundreds of small battles to fight, and I can’t say that Cyanide has skipped out on providing content. There’s plenty of fighting to do, and the difficulty is at the level where your warriors will spend a lot of time significantly injured until you learn how to fight new enemies.

With all of the work Cyanide has clearly put into this game and its combat mechanics, it shipped with a disappointing number of annoyances. I’m glad it can be paused, because I had some consistent problems getting members of my squad to move around properly in combat. There are plenty of fights in areas that have limited space. The problem is that the pathfinding AI has bouts of insanity and confusion when you try to move the whole squad at once towards an objective or target. Even individuals sometimes have difficulty moving around; I’ve watched Lanwys stand dumbfounded more times than I care to admit, despite a clear path being open to the target I ordered him to engage. I also found that the lore and narrative elements of the game are poorly done. Confrontation has a rich background (it’s based on a tabletop game), which is only blandly presented to the player. Even as I sit here writing this, I have to alt-tab back to the game just to figure out who is who and why they did that one thing.

There’s no real interaction between members of your squad, which would be fine except that the narration just plods along for minutes at a time when it’s time to bring the player up to speed on current events. When you combine this with the voice acting (if I hear anyone shout “For the temple!” in an artificially gruff voice again, it will be too soon), it becomes hard to rouse yourself to play yet another series of battles. This isn’t just because the focus is on strategic gameplay; it’s also because the RPG elements are poorly done. Cyanide could’ve improved the game (and saved money on the production and development budget) by stripping the RPG aspects out. There’s no point in including RPG elements if you aren’t going to do them right.

Priced at $39.99, Confrontation is another game that could’ve been so much better, but it just missed the mark. Had it been marketed at a lower price, it might’ve been worth checking out. But as it stands, unless you’re a fan of the material upon which it’s based, I’d just skip this one. There are other games out there that do the same things, only better.

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