The First Templar (2011)

This game starts off pretty good but runs out of ideas in the first few hours then rapidly begins to nose dive. The plunge stops briefly towards the end with some interesting co-op focused puzzles that feel like love letters to the Indiana Jones pulpy adventures, but it refuses to end and baits and switches you multiple times (more than the end of LOTR) to pad out the run time. I'm left disappointed that the most entertaining character is benched in favor of a girl for the male audience to ogle over and has less personality than the amount of clothing she wears. A shame because Roland was hilarious in the most unintentional way possible. He's hyper violent and sadistic. Always threatening the local peasants by pounding his fist in front of them while they are just hanging out after a long day of peasanting. He is constantly confrontational and always bored looking for someone to kill. The perfect Knight Templar. It really had an uncanny B movie quality to it that was very entertaining. We needed more Roland!

The co-op experience is the only thing that makes this game potentially worth checking out. It won't be for everyone because this game is VERY bad, but if you like movies that are "so bad it's good" then you likely will find the first 3 hours of this to be entertaining. At that point is when Roland gets benched in favor of the token Waifu character and the game suffers significantly for it. Not only from the lack of personality, but also from how the devs seemed to be constantly running out of ideas and desperately trying to pad out the run time as they seemingly lose all interest in their own game. Excluding the neat puzzle sequences towards the end of the game. Those are actually pretty decent.

The game also has such a schizophrenic plot, following Roland's unquenchable blood thirst as much as the main character's (who has 3 different names and I don't remember any of them now) quest for the Holy Grail. There are multiple stretches of levels without any mention or care for the grail only for us to get railroaded back to the grail quest as the devs seemingly remember what the game was supposed to be about.

My friend and I actually found a lot of entertainment towards the end of the game when we were both fed up and just trying to end it. Where the real fun begun was during a mandatory and super janky stealth sequence. We were tediously learning the patrols and where the game decided we could arbitrarily go when we pulled another alarm again and decided to dodge roll around the map to learn the layout. When we failed from the time limit, we ended up hitting a checkpoint while dodge rolling around and skipped the whole stealth sequence! From that point forward we skipped all combat and just dodged rolled our way through each level then resetting to the checkpoint to wipe away all the enemies we trained after us. There were some cases where we had to kill the massive train of enemies in order to progress. The devs didn't want you skipping combat so they created artificial walls that would pop up and block the way forward when you're in combat, then disappear suddenly the moment combat was dropped...

The funniest moment of this jank was when we had about 70 mobs aggroed on us and we trained them around a spike trap, baiting them over the traps, pulling the lever to instantly kill most of them, then baiting and pilling them back ontop of the trap to do it all over again. It was so ridiculous and the corpses of the mindless AI knights piled high on those spike traps.But we did it fam. We beat the game.

Another funny detail with our dodge roll strat was when we entered a cut scene, the trained mobs would menacingly circle us like a pack of rabid wolves while the cut scene played out. It was hilarious watching an army of dudes sneer at us, but respect the cut scene and not interrupt our conversation! Then the moment the cut scene ended, the chivalry was off and the dog pile of mindless AI began.

This is a janky low budget Bulgaria game. There is some entertainment to be had with a friend if you like laughing at ineptly made media. If you don't have that sort of sense of humor you will likely find nothing of merit here. I don't regret the first 3-4 hours of my time here, but I'm conflicted about finishing the game. The dodge roll skipping did add a ton of janky entertainment though. So I guess it was an overall wash.