Bound by Flame review: cold as ice

Those were the good times.

Bound by Flame's dark fantasy draws clear inspiration from the adult themes of popular franchises like Game of Thrones and The Witcher. But its approach to that supposed maturity quickly proves itself just as shallow as its approach to gameplay.

A great RPG gets deeper as it progresses. Though it has the individual pieces — character development, relationship building with party members, tactical combat — Bound by Flame never expands on these elements past their surface-level introduction. It's less an epic hero's journey and more a foul-mouthed kid playing make-believe with wooden swords.

The story of Bound by Flame follows the seemingly hopeless plight of a group of mercenaries trying to survive in a dying world. You play as a grunt with the codename Vulcan, and your mission is to protect a group of mages attempting to save the world from the evil Ice Lords. In the midst of a summoning ritual gone wrong, Vulcan is possessed by a flame demon and becomes humanity's last best hope against its captors.

While this may sound like pretty generic fantasy fare, Bound by Flame attempts to spice things up with swear words. Lots of swear words. And jokes about how silly it is to believe dwarves or dragons are real. Not in this realm! The game desperately wants players to think it is a serious world.

Those fights aren't worth the flawed logic that leads to them, either. Bound by Flame allows Vulcan to go down three primary paths of character development: a powerful two-handed sword, stealthy dual-wielded daggers and destructive flame magic opened up by Vulcan's new demon buddy. Rather than specializing in one path, the game encourages putting skill points into each and jumping between them at will during fights.

While the freedom to change fighting styles whenever I wanted was welcome, none of the three paths feel natural or powerful or, well, fun. Sword-swinging is slow and clumsy, but the daggers swing too far in the opposite direction, making it hard to keep track of the action as Vulcan bounces between enemies.

That repetition is fine at first, but as Vulcan's max hitpoints remain largely the same, enemy health pools balloon and fights stretch on for ages. By the end of Bound by Flame — when boss creatures from earlier on show up as regular encounters — each fight became a test of endurance. The only challenge was trying to stay awake while tapping out the same couple of buttons and downing health potions whenever I made a mistake.

Bound by Flame tries to add some depth in the form of (laughably ineffective) explosive traps and the choice of how much you want to invest in magic at the risk of losing your humanity, but it struggles to make that latter dilemma meaningful. At various points in the story, you have to make choices to either embrace your human side or push you closer to the demon within. Beyond a somewhat intriguing first chapter, all of these decisions are obvious, good-or-evil judgments. I made a choice on which direction to take my character in early on and never felt even a bit challenged to change paths based on the situations the game presented.