Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms Review

Combining classic and modern game design sensitivity and featuring a world created in collaboration with Chris Avellone, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms looked, right from its reveal, as a game that could bring a welcome breath of fresh air for top-down role-playing games. The most intriguing feature of the role-playing game by Gamera Interactive is definitely its combat system inspired by FromSoftware’s Souls series, but labeling the game as a simple isometric Soul would be a disservice, as it has a lot to offer besides its involving combat system which comes together really well, despite some issues here and there that have a slight impact on the experience as a whole.

Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is set on Plamen, a continent where four kingdoms have prospered since ancient times. At some point, however, the harmony of the continent was broken by the demon Alaloth, who managed to defeat the many gods worshipped by the people of the four kingdoms that were constantly at odds with one another and establish his dominion on Plamen with a fifth kingdom. Centuries after Alaloth started sowing chaos on Plamen, the people of the four kingdoms have had enough of the demon and elected their champions to recover the Light of Vaizmil to get access to the fifth kingdom and send back Alaloth from whence it came.

The story overview above barely skims the surface of what Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms offers in terms of story, lore, and worldbuilding. It is one of the very few games I’ve played that makes its world feel as big and alive as it should be, featuring countless locations, including cities, towns, and other points of interest for each kingdom. Inside each of these locations, players can find additional information on the world’s history, its happenings, internal strife, and so on. These are not superficial events that are just skimmed over but feature a certain level of complexity that makes them feel like they belong in a fantasy novel.

The presence of different companions, all with their own plight and dedicated storyline, also adds a touch of more personal involvement that the story at large seems to be lacking a bit at times, but even so, for those who love the fantasy genre, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms has a lot for them to delve into. The world is so big and with so many permutations depending on the race and alignment of the champion, that a single playthrough is not enough to experience everything it has to offer.

While the story is clearly inspired by Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings, the lore of D&D’s Forgotten Realms, and so on, Alaloth: Champion of the Four Kingdoms shows the developer’s attitude of innovation within tradition in the gameplay even before the actual campaign begins. Besides a straightforward main campaign with optional local co-op, the game also features an extremely interesting Competitive Campaign that pits the player’s champion against those of the other kingdoms, challenging the player to reach the fifth kingdom and destroy Alaloth before any other champion does. This mode, needless to say, is not exactly suited for the first playthrough, given the complexity of the experience and the need to be always on point to stay ahead of the competition. Still, it is a very clever way to up the challenge level after the game’s mechanics have been mastered.

As mentioned above, Alaloth: Champion of the Four Kingdom is all about innovating within a traditional framework. After creating your champion in proper RPG fashion, picking the race between human, elf, dwarf, and orc, choosing a god for some additional benefits, and picking a weapon, which in no way restricts what the character can wield during the course of the adventure, you are given your mission to destroy Alaloth, which involves recovering the Light of Vaizmil and complete a few more tasks. How you go on about doing so, it’s all up to you.

You can focus on exploring the game’s many beautiful locations rendered in a visual style that is extremely close to classic cRPGs like the original Baldur’s Gate, help NPCs with their woes and get fully involved in the story of the four kingdoms, or you can play the game as if it were Diablo, focusing only on clearing the Fighting Areas, the game’s actual dungeons, gather loot and enhance your character as it levels up by increasing stats, learning perks and a variety of skills ranging from weapon-specific skills for all weapon types and elemental spells. While playing the game as if it were Diablo may not be the best way to go, as you would miss much of the game’s story and worldbuilding, it is absolutely viable and enjoyable, mostly thanks to the game’s combat system, which takes more than a few pages from the Souls series book.

The combat system of Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is both one of its best features and the one feature that somewhat drags the experience down, depending on how the player tackles the experience. Gamera Interactive undoubtedly did a solid job bringing the mechanics that make Soulslike combat what it is, such as stamina management, positioning, weight, and commitment to performed moves, but, in my opinion, fell into the same trappings most development teams that aren’t FromSoftware do. Right from going into the very first Fighting Area, it’s clear how this combat system doesn’t suit the game’s encounter design very much when playing solo. The Soulslike combat system is mostly meant for duels or fights against small groups of enemies, and not the hordes of mobs that are often encountered all over Plamen, which force the player to learn a crowd control skill as quickly as possible or enlist the help of companions. Even so, the game’s encounter design often forces a hit-and-run fighting style that becomes stale as the adventure proceeds. When fighting single or only a couple of enemies, however, the combat system truly shines, featuring a rewarding parry system and movesets for each weapon type that feels weighty and impactful, forcing players to balance offense and defense to make it out of a Fighting Area alive.

Unfortunately, the combat mechanics don’t get too much time to shine, even not counting enemy groups being too big for Soulslike combat, due to the game’s current balance. A strength dual-wielding build, for example, works so well that there’s, in my opinion, no reason to try other builds if not for variation. Some skills are also way more useful than others, mostly due to the long recovery time of the champion and the short recovery time on hit from enemies, which further limits the viability of several builds. The developer, however, is working on balancing mobs’ stats and other aspects of the combat system for the soon-to-be-released 1.0 version and beyond, so there’s a good chance that all that I talked about above won’t be an issue in the game’s future versions.

Besides combat mechanics, which are still solid enough and will likely get their time to shine with upcoming changes, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms features a lot of interesting mechanics. Character progression, for example, is not tied to experience points like in the vast majority of RPGs, as the champion level increases after completing a Fighting Area. At every level up, it is possible to either increase one of the core stats, invest Legacy points in Proficiencies or Talents, or learn weapon skills and elemental spells, depending on the current level attained. As champions can only level up to level 20 (a clear nod to Dungeons & Dragons) and there are a limited number of Stat, Legacy, and Talent points to allocate, players need to make choices when building their champion. Thankfully, respeccing is pretty easy, so there’s no need to create an entirely new character to test out different builds unless one wants to try out another race.

Traversal is also handheld in a very interesting way. While towns, points of interest, and dungeons, which also feature plenty of varied designs and even simple puzzles that prevent them from becoming stale, are explored in a classic top-down view, traveling over the continent requires the players to move the champion on a huge map complete with roads, rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, and so on that can impact travel speed. On roads, for example, the path to one location may be longer, but travel speed is faster, and there’s less chance of getting attacked by a random enemy. Traveling through forests could save you some time but also exposes your champion to danger and could make you waste precious time to defeat Alaloth as well since getting defeated not only transfers your champion to the nearest shrine but also reduces the durability of all your item and disperses your gathered artifacts in nearby dungeons, forcing you to complete them to recover them even if they have already been cleared.

Speaking about items, Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms features plenty of loot divided into different rarity tiers and a crafting system that allows the Champion to create all sorts of items, from food to potions and gear. In the game’s current version, the November 6th version that is still the latest at the time of writing, it is quite inconvenient to take advantage of crafting since you need need to have the materials for making potions, cooking meals, or creating items in your inventory, which can be a problem at the beginning of the adventure when your carry limit is low, but the developer is addressing this issue, alongside others, with a soon-to-be-released patch, so this won’t be a problem for players who will jump into the game when the game officially launches later this month.

One of the things that Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms does right is its visuals, which were clearly inspired, as much of the rest of the experience, by classic top-down role-playing games. This choice definitely paid off, allowing the developer to create tons of nicely designed locations that have a distinct identity while looking great. Character models are far from great, honestly, but the top-down camera is zoomed out far enough that they look decent enough as they traverse the many locations the game features on the continent.

These undemanding visuals also ensure Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms can run well on any relatively modern system. At 4K resolution, in a benchmarking session featuring exploration and combat of multiple towns and Fighting Areas, the game ran at an average of 310 FPS, 27 FPS 1% Low, which was caused by the menus being capped at 30 FPS. Given the type of visuals, the game doesn’t feature any graphics options outside of resolution and frame rate cap, so there’s not a lot to tweak if the game doesn’t run well, which I don’t expect will happen even on very dated system configurations.

While I may have sounded a little negative when talking about combat and current balancing, I have enjoyed Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms quite a bit for how it blends together rather well mechanics lifted from other RPGs while giving them a personable spin. With just a few tweaks, some of them actually coming in future patches, the experience will become even better, reach a much bigger audience than it had during its Early Access phase, and possibly pay back the development team for all the issues they had to face to get their game out.

Review code provided by the publisher.

Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms

Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms

Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is one of the most intriguing role-playing games released in recent years. While some design choices, such as the Soulslike combat system that doesn’t work too well with Diablolike enemy encounters in the current version of the game, impact the experience, Gamera Interactive blended elements of both traditional and modern RPGs rather well, creating an experience that is more than worthy of any RPG fan’s time.