1348 Ex Voto Launches to Disastrous Reviews: Medieval Action Game Faces Technical Woes and Criticism
Today, the medieval action game 1348 Ex Voto was released on PC and PS5.
In marketing materials, the new game from the Italian studio Sedleo looked interesting and ambitious; the authors tried to impress potential players with cool graphics and an engaging story, with the main benchmark being A Plague Tale, which was set in a similar setting and achieved great success.
But the first reviews from critics and gamers leave 1348 Ex Voto with no chance of success.
What's known
The developers hoped that gamers would be interested in a story set in 14th century Italy, ravaged by war. The main character is a young noble warrior named Aeta, who is trying to find and save a loved one and will stop at nothing to do so.
The resemblance to A Plague Tale is visible from the first frames — these are the main game mechanics, puzzles, and the atmosphere of a ruined Europe. There is also an obvious influence on the developers from another conceptual game — Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which is manifested in dynamic sword fights, shown to be brutally maximalist and devoid of the romanticization present in many games.
Everything sounded promising and ambitious, but in reality, 1348 Ex Voto turned out to be a failed game. Concerned gamers requested a delay and more attention to polishing the action game a few weeks before its release, but the developers didn’t listen to them, and only canceled the Xbox Series version.
As a result, 1348 Ex Voto suffers from a huge number of bugs and technical problems; the graphics are terrible, the combat system is boring and becomes tedious quickly, the plot is crumpled and unfinished, and the historical context is not revealed and doesn’t complement the story. The picture is completed by poor optimization, due to which the game lags even on the most powerful PCs.
Critics and gamers were unanimous in their opinion — this is a mediocre game that arouses no interest. 53 points on Metacritic and the same percentage of positive reviews on Steam speak for themselves.
Source: IGN, Metacritic, Steam
