The Great Tournament

The great tournament is a choice of game set in a low fantasy-medieval setting.

The writing, which is the most essential part of the game can be considered somewhat solid. The story has no real twist or any other kind of element that would stand out. The choices given to the player are medium in quantity and mostly do not posses the quality to make the decision a moral challenge for the player. I only relay had to think about what to do in 2 or 3 situations. The problem is that the players gets the feeling that no matter what choice he makes the story does generally continue on the same path. Many times it is also possible to play down all choices and see what happen which further increases the feeling that the choices are only partly influencal. Best example for this is the training before the tournament when you can train on all 4 fields instead of choosing only one or two.



The choice of game setting especially pays of in the battle scenes as it makes the written word more exciting when you are waiting to see what your actions result in. There fore the Wagon fight scene and the fight on the pass are considerably the best parts of the game.
The whole world could have been better with no magic at all, as it does not hold a significant part in the story and shows only once or twice in the game. But that is just a personal opinion or preference.
The game does not poses any replayability, which is sad as the different choices could lead to interesting different options the player could be motivated to try out. However the overall feeling of choices not effecting the story very much and the texted based parts of the story lower this initial convenient environment for multiple play throughs.
Kind of interesting are the possible development areas and additional content and mechanics for the game. A more choice and less text based version could be a interesting thing to try out. Further more a character screen and better visualization of connection to the characters and the characters between each other could also be tested out. This would also give depth to the rather shallow characters created by the writing. But a I am rather new to this kind of game I can not fully evaluate how much of it is doable or how much of this ideas are already made.
All together the game is a solid experience if you have about 5 hours to spare and like stories in a medieval setting.