4/5 ★ – JudgeDredd35's review of Bound By Flame.

Playtime: 20 Hours Platform: PS3 Score: 8/10 A real hidden gem that I only played through now and was blown away! When I tried this game back in the day I didn't like it at first, but after recently finishing and loving Greedfall from developer Spiders, I decided to give this game a second chance, since this was their first game. What I found was a really compelling RPG at its core and definitely scratched my itch for a new Dragon Age game, as you can see Spiders took a lot of inspiration from those games for this one. In this game you play as Vulcan, a mercenary in this fantasy world that is plagued by war with the Ice Lords. One day, you're character gets merged with a demon and you now have the power to stop the Ice Lords. You can either embrace the demon within you or stay true to your human side. I went evil since, as you get further into the game your character transforms more into a demon if you choose to which I thought was cool. The one thing I loved a lot was the combat, as it has this very hack/slash God of War (PS4) type combat, but the enemies hit hard even on easy so you have to parry a lot and pick when to attack. In contrast, after finishing this I started a playthrough of Dragon Age 2 and the combat in that game doesn't even come close to as good as this game IMO. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story and the characters, as the writing definitely had me hooked and invested. The music as well is also fantastic even though there's only a limited amount of tracks. In terms of complaints, this game was made on a very small budget for a game of this scale so most things like graphics I can look past. The only real complaint I had was some of the enemies in that they hit so hard even on easy and in most encounters they throw some of the toughest enemies at you in big groups, which can be unfair sometimes, especially if you play on the higher difficulties. The final boss is also very unfair to fight even on easy, and I died a lot. Once you figure out how to fight them its easy in a sense, but you essentially have to change how you play completely compared to the rest of the game. Overall though, this game was just chefs kiss for me for the most part. I really love Spiders games, and I hope the continue to make great games like Greedfall and this! Really want to try the Technomancer now!