You’ve probably never heard of The Dark Eye. It’s not really your fault--that particular tabletop RPG isn’t meant for you. It was made by Germans for other Germans, and it found a lot of success by focusing on that particular niche. But you may have heard of Blackguards, Daedalic Entertainment’s turn-based tactics gam🎀e set in The Dark Eye’s universe. And much like its parent, Blackguards is designed for a specific audience, and diehard strategy fans will get a lot of value out of Blackguards’ lengthy, varied campaign. It’s just a shame that a few nagging bugs and design choices keep the rest of us from enjoying it, too.

At its core, Blackguards is a turn-based tactical RPG. Baಌttles occur in rounds, wherein your party and their adversaries jockey for the chance to slice, stab, and burn each other into oblivion. Each character in your party has their own role, and the interactions between character types create fascinating strategic challenges. 🌼Do you move your wounded spearman to attack an enemy, even though it blocks your archer’s line of fire? Do you spend you mage’s limited mana to deal damage to one enemy, or to debuff the entire enemy party? Answering these questions properly will be the difference between life and death for your party.

That’s what you’d like to think, anyway. In reality, your expert plans are foiled by the lousy user interface. The minimalist screen overlay shows a series of portraits and health bars but no commands, which are assigned from a right-click menu. The unintuitive menu system means y🍌ou’ll end up with a lot of unintentional movements or mistargeted spells--I lost count of the number of times my healer healed herself rather than the character who actually needed it. In a game where proper strategic planning is so vital, these mistakes can--and will--force you to restart levels. Diehard fans of the tactics genre can struggle through, but it gets annoying very quickly.

Taken individually, 𒁃these turn-based skirmishes are fun enough (when the UI isn’t ruining it), but Daedalic works hard to ensure that the formula never grows old. Whether you’re traversing a booby-trapped warehouse or dropping an ಌimmense iron cage on a rampaging gorilla, most battles have a unique twist to them. It’s these wrinkles that keep the core gameplay fresh for Blackguard’s surprisingly long campaign.