Bound By Flame has one huge strength: the harmony between its entertaining combat and role-playing systems. Granted, its weak storytelling does weigh it down, and its performance on PS4 is a bit of a bummer, but the strong core of its gameplay powers it through to transcend these flaws.

Responsive combat; Meaningful progression; Fitting music

Inconsistent writing and voice acting; Meaningless story choices

Bound by Flame isn't the RPG epic that you might think it is, if you saw the game in action for a short stint or if you've read some of our news pieces on it (fooled me!). That said though, it is entertaining and does some very cool things that I haven't seen before in a game.

Bound by Flame has a bigger budget than Spiders recent titles, it doesn't quite manage to pull off a great game, but it does manage to make a decent enough game with a really superb crafting system.

As anyone who struggled through Orphen on the PS2 will tell you, the first RPG of a hardware generation is rarely an impressive experience. The vast amount of content that needs to be created for your average dungeon-crawler also makes them quite rare in the first year of any console.

Its quite hard until you get into it. Collect money find things

For a small studio like Spider, this is a great little game. This game is on the bring of being a great game, but you can see that it has been created by a smaller team with a smaller budget. At times the game looks superb and feels fluid, sometimes it feels like a real drag.

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Bizarre dialogue; Occasionally looks ok; It's short

Bizarre dialogue; Terrible characters; Light on the RPG; Monotonous combat

It looks fantastic, visually pleasing, but it's trying too hard to be The Witcher and it just fails.

Promise burned up by a lack of polish

It takes something special for potential to overtake shortcomings, and that notion holds fast in the gaming industry, where even the smallest of faults can deteriorate the perception of AAA titles.