The Relic: First Guardian Review — Broken Ambition That Wastes Its Own Combat

The Relic: First Guardian wants to be a scrappy FromSoftware-adjacent action game that earns its place among the better B-tier releases. It doesn't get there. Despite some genuinely engaging combat, nearly everything else — visuals, world design, technical stability, and storytelling — ranges from underwhelming to outright broken.

Visually, the game struggles from the first screen to the last. Character models are generic or weirdly unfinished, faces lack detail, and a low-res bloom fuzz coats everything like a bad Fable flashback. The three main regions — a minty green Faded Mist Forest, a yellow-tinted Hillsbrad, and its vomit-green swamps — are told apart mostly by oppressive color filters rather than distinct design. Burning village sections push that orange-red glow so hard that pathways become hard to read, and caves artificially darken screen edges to squeeze your field of view. Technically, the game is a mess: geometry gets you stuck, checkpoints load you waist-deep into the ground, and fast travel points can end up embedded inside walls, completely inaccessible.

Exploration has occasional sparks — a promising cave mouth, a mysterious tower — but the world itself is a string of near-identical crumbling settlements. Environmental storytelling leans on the familiar "conveniently placed notes left right before death" approach, with the protagonist making Batman-style deductions from broken carts and scattered objects. It works often enough to pull you off the main path, but the surrounding systems don't hold up their end of the deal.

The Relic: First Guardian is the kind of game that makes its inspirations obvious while falling well short of them — and then stumbles over its own execution on top of that. The combat may give dedicated action fans a reason to push through, but the broken, visually muddy package around it makes that a hard sell.