Review of The Last Oricru – a pleasant surprise

The Last Oricru is a role-playing game from the development studio GoldKnights that wants to give players an unforgettable gaming experience. How the creators managed to process their work, what is interesting about the storyline and much more, you will find out in our review, in which, in addition to my point of view, you will find the opinion of my colleague Pavlina, who focused mainly on cooperation.

• Platform: PC (Verified), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
• Publication date: October 13, 2022
• Developer: Golden Knights
  
• Publisher: Prima Matter
• Genre: Role-playing game
• Czech localization: Yes
• Multiplayer: Yes (collaboration)
• Game time: 15-20 hours (if you’re focused on the story first)
• Price: about 1000 CZK (couples)

Do not look for good here

The story of The Last Oricru takes place in a world that is somewhat reminiscent of the Warhammer universe. In fact, there is nothing good here. Instead, we have several dissident peoples who consider their actions to be the right ones, with whom you deal almost from the very beginning of the game, when the main character finds himself in a strange monastery, the bowels of which are inhabited by a racist set. They have as servants the rat-folk, whom they consider an inferior race, while they see fit to slaughter and eat anything that stands in their way. I’m simplifying a little, but these creatures have a really big hunger and a sense of revenge.

The idea of ​​the story is very nice, it also develops over time, which largely depends on your choices, and there are a lot of them. What in other RPGs is just a filler, here clearly defines the direction of the story. This is well shown, for example, in one of the opening moments of The Last Oric, when you are sent to the trainer. At first glance, this situation seems inconspicuous. At the end of the day, in this genre, skill testing is something that you basically only participate in to see how to swing properly. However, here, by deciding to train on an innocent slave, you are actually choosing the path that you and the entire plot will take in the next minutes.

To be honest, I don’t know if there are proper solutions to the problems here. Neutrality has never worked here, as in other projects. After all, no one in The Last Oricr likes half-hearted decisions, and literally everyone wants to know if you are on their side or on the side of the enemy. For example, if you do not kill one of the characters, you will automatically be declared a traitor, even if you have fulfilled most of the original agreement. But, as is sometimes the case, one cannot simply please the strong, and in games this is sometimes doubly applicable. However, I don’t deny that I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few seconds with most decisions, which doesn’t happen to me very often.

The location itself is also interesting. Thanks to him, you can remember the series “Might and Magic” or “Eleks”, in which fantasy is also combined with science fiction. Dialogues are handled very well. However, the protagonist doesn’t shine because he’s a playful idiot who relies on traditional Czech humor. Yes, you read it right. The creator, through Silver, makes one loud announcement after another, which is impossible to be very happy about. In addition, if we take the world itself and its darkness, then it seems to me that it simply does not fit into the general concept. For myself, I wouldn’t defend another protagonist, or even the ability to get more involved in dialogue. Since this is a Czech project, all lyrics of The Last Oric are written in Czech.

The universe of The Last Oricru can absorb

The game world is divided into a number of smaller and medium-sized locations, which for the most part have a well-defined space that you can move around. You definitely won’t find any form of open world here as you know it from other RPGs. However, this does not detract from the beauty and, most importantly, the interesting design of the proposed cards. In each of the places there is also some kind of secret hidden for you next to the enemies, which is hidden either in the heights where you need to jump, or vice versa in the depths of the dungeon, which is guarded on the surface by an ingenious combination of symbols that you have to deal with before entering. As for the locations themselves, they consist of cities, mines and a number of differently designed directions in which you will sometimes get lost due to the lack of a map.

As you travel, you find money that you can use to trade with local merchants. Interestingly, finance can be obtained from the air, or rather, on a special futuristic machine, which serves both to obtain finance and to increase the levels of the main character. Leveling in The Last Oricr is the same as in the Dark Souls series and similar tuned projects. Enemies drop energy here, which you then turn into various stat boosts. You can carry any amount of experience with you, but once you die, they will stay where you dropped them until you come for them, or until you die again and they disappear completely.

You can run around the game world alone or invite a friend, who will be presented here as a hologram. However, unlike in Dark Souls, your companion does not benefit from your overall achievements, which is not a good thing. However, the idea itself is crafted in a very interesting way and definitely has the potential to attract people because it offers alternative solutions for some situations. Thanks to him, you can, for example, make it easier to eliminate some bosses that you cannot defeat by reducing the difficulty.

Fights in The Last Orik will not keep you waiting

By itself, the elimination of bosses is not very demanding in nature. The combat system here is a little clunky, but once you get used to it, you get used to it very quickly. On top of that, The Last Oricru gives you a really diverse array of weapons focused primarily on hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, you will not find firearms here. But instead of them there is magic, with which the passage of the game becomes a very simple discipline, because it represents a really strong combat aspect. I bet on it for myself, and I certainly didn’t complain for a minute.

The really interesting idea is that every species that inhabits this world has a different set of resistance to injury. Rats, for example, are very resistant to fire and everything connected with it. The Naboru race handles physical damage relatively well, while the odd-looking Broken can withstand quite a bit of electrical shock. In my opinion, the range of opponents here is diverse, which is the result of several factors. Primary is the fact that we have several races, along with which there are neutral players in the world, fighting with everything that comes their way.

In terms of shortcomings, it is generally close to the Gothic series

However, the main problem with The Last Oricr is not the boring combat system. As mentioned above, you can get used to this relatively quickly. The main disadvantage of this work is errors. There are as many of them as there were when the first part of the Gothic series came out. Some you will encounter as you progress through the game world, while others will interfere with you during battles. I myself had the opportunity to experience a situation where the opponent simply ignored my blows and killed me. And I have come across this situation many times. Sometimes there was also texture failure or collision with juice levitating in the air.

However, I personally have to thank the developers of The Last Oric for how they managed to handle the optimization on PC. The game ran like clockwork on my computer with an Intel Core i7-4790K, GTX 1080 Ti and 16GB of memory. I didn’t experience significant fps drops or game crashes while playing. It’s a bit of a pity that the title doesn’t include the ability to customize the keyboard, because then I could call the optimization of game elements really successful.

Czech gem The Last Oricru knocks bugs off their feet

At the very beginning, The Last Oricru made a very bad impression on me. The game didn’t offer customizable keys, the combat system seemed boring and there were a lot of bugs, but as I got deeper into the game universe, I got more and more immersed in it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a great story in an RPG like The Last Oricru. The lack of an open world is made up for by a really polished storyline that has so many twists and turns that on your first playthrough you’ll only see a fraction of what it really has to offer, which I consider a big plus, at least for me.

As a result, the combat system is also great, that is, if you can get the hang of it. For myself, for example, I fell in love with the format in which magic is handled in The Last Oric. Neither the individual levels nor the collaboration are very poorly designed. Therefore, it is very disappointing that the creators did not have time to debug their project before the release, it is more interesting to develop the idea of ​​silent movement and generally get rid of bugs that affect you both during battles and outside of them. them. Without these shortcomings, it would be one of the most distinctive role-playing games of recent years, but it’s only slightly above average action with a great story. I can recommend it primarily to action fans who don’t mind harder gameplay. If you complete it, you will have an experience similar to the first players in the first part of the Gothic series, only much better presented.

Pavlina Nouzova: second opinion

There aren’t many local co-op games where two people can sit on the same couch. And there are even fewer such RPGs. The main goal of The Last Oricr, according to the developers, is a changing world that adapts to your decisions. And he really succeeds in this: the game offers solutions, after which you feel their influence, but in the end I was most fascinated by the aforementioned collaboration. Just exit the tutorial and you can play split screen with your friends, kids or even partners. One controls the main character, the other his hologram. One makes decisions and leads dialogues, the other is a significant support in setting a more complex complexity. The fights are also made special with collaborative stunts. In addition, you can play The Last Oric as a regular fighter in shiny armor for a while, but then switch roles with a partner, customize your attributes thanks to special rings and continue, for example, as an aggressive mage. All equipment is shared and the pair support each other if one of them falls.

“Death”, re-spawning, assisted hologram and other elements have their own reasons, and the protagonist Silver knows about them. This very refreshing approach is not overtly meta, but part of the world around it. And although I would not have believed in advance, Silver himself grew up on me. Due to the lack of a reboot option, it sometimes happens that you fail at a given task. In my case, this made the potential dude a bit of a poor guy who, while bursting with humor (and sometimes a real slap in the face), realizes that he is not really one of the most capable fighters.

Worse in cases where the budget, team size or time significantly affect it. GoldKnights may seem like they set themselves too high goals in the studio. The facial animation of minor characters is taut at times, combat could be more accurate, and any autosave of the game on the PlayStation 5 version causes minor stuttering. The font on some items in the inventory is tiny (although this will be less of a problem on a computer), and I would appreciate more options in the control settings. As a Czech and more or less short variant game that you can mostly enjoy with two people, The Last Oricru is an enjoyable experience.