FIVE: Guardians of David Review

In a place called Canaan where all biblical stories take place, you must help the guardians find their place in the story as they fight against evil and protect the champions – all quests that take place come from the biblical writings of the Old Testament. Use your abilities granted to you to help the other guardians and the champions complete their life missions in order to achieve peace in this dark world.  The main focus of the story is to help David (King David) on his journey from mere man to King David of Israel, you will see where he starts with the fight he has with the Goliath and you will make sure that he will survive any battle that is ahead of him including many references of his stories told in the bible and in history.

On first looks the game has one mode which is single player, when the player starts the game there is a video with someone telling the story of what had happened in Israel and how over time different tribes had tried to take over which each one being successful. After the story is told we I dropped into the game where we play as one of two characters (they are brothers) who notice a sheep that has been devoured and that leads to the first part of this epic tale – when that quest is over the two brothers have to find their sister and fight off a lion in order to save her from being eaten.

The story continues while showing things that appeared in the bible such as David versus Goliath where you as the player with steps into David’s “shoes” and defeat the giant (which is a large character compared to the other characters”. Each quest has some significance in being a reference to a passage from the Old Testament and you as the player are able to step into the “shoes” of those characters and take on foes that have been terrorising villagers and slaves. The game even has missions where the player can sneak past enemies and the only way to guarantee getting passed them is to knock them out by throwing clay pots at their heads, that and rushing pass them if you are quick enough to react to the game.

The game has a couple of features which bring something different to the game: at the end of each quest (almost) there is a comic strip which goes through the story of what you have just done and the parts that occur between quests and these give you a little more detail as well as being a graphical representation of the feats you have undergone. The other extra item is the use of “collectables” which is different from most games in this style (Diablo) where most of these types of games would use lore which is typically mythical information and in this case these “collectables” are things that are straight out of the bible. There are other features that are not unique to the game which are: experience system; the ability to level up when gaining XP from defeating enemies & completing quests, abilities; powers that will give your character a bit of an edge when it comes to combat, equipment; the player will come across a large variety of weapons & armour that can be equipped to each character (one user at a time) and character-switch; the player is able to switch between the various characters that are in the game.

The graphics are good, the soundtrack works well, the gear system is useful and the fluidity of switching between characters is good. The downsides are that the character customisation is limited; when the characters level up they are automatically given new abilities and there is no way of changing the character’s statistics other than using gear. The game relies too much on the mouse which can make things difficult when you are trying to switch between movement and combat. There are some things that can be improved mainly that of the equipment not serving too much of a point and fixing the lack of control that the players have when it comes to levelling up their characters and choosing their own abilities. However, the game has done well with the references that have been made as well as the interaction between the different characters throughout the story. Go forth and protect David at any cost.

Overall, FIVE: Guardians of David is good; it has some unique features like the comic strip which makes it a little better than some of the games from the same genre and the combat is definitely something that people need to get used to as it is not the type of game that people can just jump in to which is good when the player gets used to it.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.