Ballad of Solar (PC)

Once a genre has been around long enough, it becomes easier to identify the tropes within it. When a lot of successful media is cut from a similar cloth, those trappings can be recycled in new creations to try and take a shortcut to guaranteed popularity. Of course, once something has become recognized enough that it is cliche, it becomes the responsibility of new media to subvert it in interesting ways to stand out, but Ballad of Solar isn’t aiming to do that. It takes the basics of time management games and applies a familiar high fantasy coat of paint over it, not really attempting to innovate in either space.

With barely any self awareness Ballad of Solar takes place in a world of magic and kings, familiar fantasy races and medieval levels of technology present and plain in design. The hero Solar is a muscular knight who looks like a good fit for a romance novel’s cover and he runs into an old wizard and a wood elf who aid him on his quest to save the princess. There is one subversion in the form of an ogre who is more interested in drawing than being a run of the mill monster, but the few other moments where the game nearly gets self-aware are tiny jokes squeezed in between a game that mostly presents the fantasy setting with no imagination or sign it’s meant to be a parody. The game stating the story is “told with a laugh and a wink” mostly seems to exist to deflect criticism away from its generic elements or predispose you to thinking that featuring trite ideas is parody.

Ballad of Solar does begin with a somewhat animated intro where the evil sorcerer Grogan is animated in an almost nostalgic manner, perhaps intentionally evoking the Rankin-Bass Lord of the Rings adaptations despite being a step down in quality. Grogan requires the kiss of a princess to complete his spell of eternal life, but Solar’s path to the sorcerer’s dungeon involves traveling across the land in his footsteps and finding the areas altered by his dark magics. Here is how the time management gameplay comes into picture, the player needing to guide Solar, his workers, and his allies to clear away obstacles, rebuild towns, and overcome enemies or hazards. To do so involves clicking on objects on a static game screen, the characters able to move across set lanes to reach areas of importance to perform a task. Opening up lanes will allow you to reach more important areas and resources that can then allow you to complete the levels goals, the idea being that you need to manage the tasks you assign properly to complete a stage in a reasonable amount of time.

The time part of time management isn’t always a present pressure in Ballad of Solar though depending on your difficulty level. Many stages are made up of multiple areas, the player needing to complete the prescribed objectives in one before moving onto the next. Each of these areas also has a different arbitrary time limit you need to complete all the required actions in, the punishment being losing out on gold stars so you aren’t really harmed if you do fail to complete things in time. However, on the easier difficulty you’ll find that some subareas of a stage don’t have an active timer at all, the player free to complete the task in however long it takes. Perhaps not coincidentally these subareas are often the ones that would be much harder if you had to do things properly to avoid timing out, but the game does understand that its story scenes shouldn’t rob you of time at least. As characters talk either with voice acting or in text bubbles the timer will stop in either mode so you can take in the run of the mill story, one that doesn’t even have much of a climax when you do finally confront Grogan. In the game’s defense though, instructing workers to chop timber or collect berries doesn’t translate to a dramatic battle, but there isn’t even a cutscene to really nail in you’re participating in the final engagement.

While the basic ideas explored in the fantasy story don’t do much, one thing that can be said about cliche gameplay is it is often tried and true. The levels of Ballad of Solar are built to match its unambitious approach to ordering your workers around to clear the way, and there’s just enough variety to it that Ballad of Solar doesn’t overstay its welcome. Solar himself might need to be deployed to recruit people to your cause like trapped workers, your allies like the ogre and wizard bring brute strength and magic spells in where they’ll need the right items or pathways to do their work, and the much more common work done by your generic workers still finds enough ways to mix up how you gather the important resources needed to make progress. Performing a task requires your workers to have enough food to have the energy for it, sticks and stones can help you rebuild damaged buildings or fill in holes, and gold can gain you access to special tools or items. Creating resource generating structures like sawmills, quarries, and gold-producing residences are key to starting to turn your work in a level into a well-oiled process, there being many moments where you can find a decent rhythm of sending workers out as your opportunities for work keep you active and involved in consistently making progress.

While there are some ideas like collecting certain items to unlock abilities such as needing an axe to cut trees in a level or needing the materials to forge things at your dwarf’s smithy, there are some odd choices made in your goals. Goblins keep reappearing across the adventure, and sometimes Solar needs to head out to deal with them with a sword you find in a treasure chest but other times they need a bribe to go away instead. You can always see what an object requires by hovering your mouse over it, but even familiar objects or roadblocks can suddenly change the kind of materials or special items they require for interaction. Moreover, there is definitely a stagnation in the variety of objectives, and the objects your workers interact with don’t grow much over the course of the game. Even though food collection is always a key part of keeping your work going, you’ll still be doing the very basic act of plucking food from a berry bush every time it regenerates even in the later levels and whether or not you’re in a mystical forest, underground mine, or plague-addled desert.

Some levels do give you a good amount of resources to get going as soon as you enter them while others withhold it until you’ve built up your resource generators, and while this does mean the gameplay pace shifts around a fair bit, some levels you’re literally just waiting on berry bushes with nothing else to do. This can sometimes play into a subarea intentionally opening up so it goes from that weak opener to a sense of power as there’s almost too many resources to even send your men to collect, but the slow periods would probably be better swapped out for more of a focus on strategic job allocation. There are definitely some rather open levels where you need to pick which buildings to repair first, which lanes to open up to give your workers quicker access to important areas, and when you should grab a one time resource boost like a food cart to give you a temporary but untenable boost, but outside of the rare exceptions its often a bit straightforward. Sloppy or mindless play definitely won’t earn you stars and levels can drag on if you plan poorly so there is an incentive to play smart, but Ballad of Solar doesn’t elevate its time management and instead rests on rearranging the staples of its gameplay just enough that it never gets boring to play, it just doesn’t really engage you beyond casual interaction either.

THE VERDICT: A generic time management game in a generic fantasy setting, Ballad of Solar settles into mediocrity simply because it carries over the basics of what works for other members of the two genres it occupies. The magical world of knights and wizards is inoffensive and has a good joke here or there but is in no way a self-aware parody so it all feels rather bland, but it at least places the time management into a conducive setting so its job can’t be said to be a failure. There’s the required amount of strategy to make ordering around your workers and planning resource acquisition just engaging enough that Ballad of Solar never gets boring, but it settles into a comfortably average formula early on that new items, buildings, and characters slip in without really changing how it plays. Ballad of Solar is unexceptional but not awful, a perfectly tolerable time management game that fits the genre’s basic appeal of whiling away time with something the gently pokes your brain. It’s just a shame that it didn’t try to be anything more than run of the mill.

And so, I give Ballad of Solar for PC…

An OKAY rating. Ballad of Solar brought in the absolute basics found in successful fantasy stories and time management games so that it could slip by without putting in much effort, and it actually succeeded. It doesn’t stand out in any interesting way since its supposed parody elements are barely present and the time management doesn’t aim to break a mold that is decently fun but not all too captivating without something extra placed upon those systems. It’s a cheap casual game that comes bundled with other time management games or as part of a subscription service like Utomik, so it can show up, scratch an itch for the basics of the genres it promises, and fade away from memory since it had very little to offer while also not irritating with its perfectly serviceable gameplay.

I have likely come off much harsher than Ballad of Solar deserves, but I won’t simply declare a game bad just because it’s taken the easy route to mediocrity. It may bother me that it did so, and it is certainly clear that Ballad of Solar had the basics done well enough that it could afford to shake things up, but it earns the middle of the road rating because it practically aimed for that position and I won’t deny it that simply because it could have been more. It could have actually tried to be funny or satirical like it supposedly said it would be, it could have introduced some nifty mechanic to diversify how you tackle time management’s familiar lane-based resource gathering, and it could have even just had a few more levels like the more open ones that chase the idea of challenging designs that require strategy, but it didn’t. It didn’t risk being below the line or try to be a top notch experience that would rise above it, instead sitting comfortably on that line to provide a digestible video game experience that barely leaves an impression on the player.