Hard to Be a God is one of the few games I decided to look at some reviews of before playing. I was intrigued that there were a lot of good reviews along with some really bad ones. It seemed that all the reviewers conflicted on what parts they thought were good and what weren’t. So I gave the game a shot, and I’m here to set the record straight.

Hard to Be a God is an action role-playing game, but it is often labeled as a hack ’n’ slash. I found there is way too much story and far too many quests and decisions to make this a real hack ’n’ slash. On the other hand, the character leveling system is pretty limited and lacks a lot of the standard attributes you’ll be accustomed to. You can increase your health, stamina, diplomacy and medicine along with weapon skills of light, medium, heavy and ranged weapons, but that is about it.

The story of Hard to Be a God is definitely one of the potential strong points in the game, but it really falls flat. The game is actually based off an old Russian sci-fi novel of the same name, and the general premise is that the both the worlds Arkanar and Earth were similar until the middle ages. Around that time, Earth decided to pursue science and advanced while Arkanar stayed with religion and became stuck in a feudal society, technologically limited.

In the game, you start on your final exam for the Imperial Intelligence Academy; after you pass this, you’ll receive your first mission from the emperor. The story is messy, and it really does a bad job initially at explaining that you are actually a secret agent from Earth and are looking into the progress of Arkanar. Your mission is to meet up with someone in a nearby city and eliminate what they deem to be a troublemaker. However, at the moment, this troublemaker is far more powerful than you. From here on in is a ridiculously confusing story that probably would make sense if it weren’t for the never-ending spelling mistakes, translation errors, poor grammar and instances of words just being flat out wrong. There must be nearly a book of text in Hard to Be a God, and it is nearly all unreadable. Even at best it feels like you are reading something translated by an amateur just learning English.

Honestly, I couldn’t follow the majority of the story. I felt increasingly stupid sitting spending my time reading utter crap that someone didn’t put any real effort into. Now, in some games this might not be such a big deal, but in Hard to Be a God, there are a huge number of quests. A single conversation can be more than a page in text alone to read, and most of this stuff is not avoidable as the main quest line is extensive. There are also some rather bland side quests available if you want to roam towns looking for opportunities. Initially, I spent time doing so, but it gets a bit boring after a while and serves little purpose.

For an action RPG, Hard to Be a God is heavy in combat. Every major quest you get (and there must be a hundred) spawns your direct path to the next objective full of enemies, luckily for you ... oh, wait; there is only a direct path to where you want to go. Even if you get on your horse and fly through them, those enemies will still be there on the way back. It’s a rather boring and repetitive affair to wipe out all the enemies.

There are basically three types of enemies. Animals will run up and attack you as will human melee opponents, though they may have shields. Archers have the most advanced AI; they will diabolically run short distances if you whack at them too much! However, they can’t fire arrows over a three-foot-high stick fence, so that balances out their awesomeness. Enemies spawn from levels one to four, despite you getting up to level 20; the entire system is extremely inconsistent. A level one bandit is pathetically weak, and a level one (random name) soldier can be quite strong. Combat on foot feels slow. You can play defensive behind a shield or use the sluggish controls to maneuver around the enemies; both are pretty boring. Left click will attack, right click will perform a powerful special attack (with a cool down timer), and the middle button will finish off any enemies knocked to the ground. It is far, far too easy to run out of stamina and have your character huffing and standing there defenseless.

Combat on horseback is even more limiting but quite a bit safer as enemies (except for archers) aren’t capable of timing a successful hit if you keep moving. Being able to take on 15 or so enemies at a time has advantages. The main advantage is getting this dreadful combat over with much faster. While moving on horseback, you also do double the damage, but the horrible controls persist. After a battle, you can dismount and watch your horse heal — something your character can’t do in the whole game without consuming items.

No matter if you are on foot or on horse, the targeting system is beyond horrible. It is just uncontrollable. Equipment for combat is basic: You have a standard mix of one-handed and two-handed clubs, and dual-welding weapons, ranged weapons are slow and pretty useless, so don’t even bother. Armor pieces contain armor values, and I’m still not sure what they do, but they can make you avoid fighting all together. Many pieces of armor contain a costume designation. If you wear enough pieces designated for say a thief, then thieves and their allies won’t attack, you but some soldiers might.

Hard to Be a God feels like a game made 10 years ago. The graphics make you think you aren’t seeing clearly all the time. The textures are blurry, and the camera hangs at this high angle, so it feels like you are walking while looking at your feet. The music is quite generic and doesn’t fit in at all with the feel of the story or the action of the game, and the sound effects tend to be basic and crude. The voice acting has some ups and downs, but many of the characters sound quite dull. Luckily the majority of the actors fix the really poor grammar of the text. Unfortunately, the sound is so ridiculously buggy you won’t hear most of the voices or even sound effects as they just sort of glitch out and only reappear when a new map is reloaded; soon after that, they glitch out again.

There are also a huge number of gameplay errors that frustrated the hell out of me. Where to start? The game has to be run in admin mode. I’ve never seen a game that required that before when I’m already an admin. There are invisible barriers to stop you from going places. You get caught on them and have to reload the game or, if lucky, have to walk around them. In the late stages of the game, I encountered quite a few of the side quests that just couldn’t be completed. Also, one of the main quests has an invisible barrier at the entrance to the house you have to get into! It took some searching before I found the way to beat the game is to run into the side of the house and magically pop up through one even more glitched spot on the floor and talk to the guy you need to; getting back is equally tricky.

Seriously, did anyone test this game? I guess they figured the rest of Hard to Be a God was so bad nobody was going to make it that far anyway. I encountered errors when loading into new areas. Sometimes my horse would be pretty much crippled and lose all its statistics. Each time you talk with someone or move areas, you are forced to dismount. The game doesn’t seem to be able to let you stay on your horse; the big problem with this is when you auto-dismount, sometimes you fall through the floor and get stuck. I hope you save often; I know I didn’t! While on the subject of horses, while riding your horse, it can jump but can’t seem to actually jump OVER anything. What the hell is that? Every object in the game is infinitely and invisibly tall. Oh, and there are more.

Hard to Be a God has the displeasure of being one of the worst games I have ever played. Combine a story that is so badly mangled by horrible English with repetitive, boring combat, sluggish controls and a slew of bugs, and there is just no reason to want to play this game. Your character also feels a bit like a simpleton, and that is something that really doesn’t appeal to my role-playing senses. If I were you, I would avoid Hard to Be a God unless you are in the torture business; however, if you are in the business of torture, feel free to use this as a new diabolical method that gets around many legal issues. But I want the credit for it.