Thank you Fairyship Games for giving us the game code for Testament: the Order of High Human to review.

Testament is a first-person single-player action-adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. It combines mixed combat with different possibilities and combinations of swords, spells and bows and includes platforming and puzzles. Normally people say that a game is available for Windows, but I would say it’s playable on Windows AND Linux, because I have played Testament on both, and actually in my opinion, it plays better on Linux.

First the good.... This game is created using the Unreal Engine 4. So the graphics are amazing with very high details and textures. The setting of the game is very dark and foreboding. The soundtrack for the game is very good quality and adds to the ambiance and atmosphere of the setting. The game has a great many good things going for it, unfortunately the game is frustratingly bad for the buggy combat and sudden game crashes for no reason, and apparently I'm not alone in that opinion as Steam reviews seem to suggest.

The backstory is that the main character you play is called Aran, who was double-crossed by his brother Arva. As the King of the High Humans, Aran falls to the world of Tessara, leading to an invasion by the forces of darkness. The game begins immediately after Aran’s brother, Arva, has taken all of the former’s power, and Aran must proceed thru the story-line and slowly find artifacts that restore his power and increase his health so he can take down his brother. As Aran, you must wield a sword, a bow with limited arrows, and magical spells to defeat the minions of evil and save the realm.

Aran arms himself with a sword and bow, with the bow being far more useful. Aiming is precise and ranged damage is suitably high, so shooting an arrow through the heads of trolls, which are referred to as “halflings”, does quite a bit of damage. However, it usually does not kill the troll, and it raises an alarm to all the other trolls and evil beings in the area to your presence and location. Stealthiness is lost quickly after the first arrow is shot or they see you, and drawing the next arrow from your very limited amount of arrows in your sheath takes an unbearable amount of time, all while dodging and eluding the resulting onslaught of attacks. Aran is much less proficient with a sword, and melee combat feels like you're batting the air rather than attacking the angry trolls or “halflings”. Wielding the sword is painfully slow and does not do as much damage as you would think, causing Aran to strike and retreat, then strike and retreat, again and again ad nauseam, until the troll falls. By the time you swing the sword once, the troll has attacked 2 or 3 times, along with the other creatures in the immediate fighting area, which makes it very hard for even the most proficient gamer to win the fight.

Now the bad.... First let me say that since I am nowhere near a professional gamer, I am unable to progress in the game due to the numerous amount of times I have had to restart from the last checkpoint after being killed off. As a result, I am unable to advance along in the linear story-line that I have only seen in YouTube videos from other players that reviewed Testament within the last year since its release in June of 2023. There are a plethora of reviews of Testament from when it came out, and they all said the same thing, addressing the issues with slow melee combat and tedious fighting, and killing of creatures along the story-line. But in the last few years, there seems to be little change or update to the game that would warrant brand new reviews, other than 2 small patch updates a month after initial release.

Testament: The Order of High Human has a great deal of potential with a very ingenious story-line with superb voice overs, and a great soundtrack with good special effect sounds. But the painfully slow melee fighting, along with the almost non-existent ability to use the bow and arrows as an effective weapon, make Testament an almost impossible game for me to play. The developers say that this game takes 40 hours of game play to finish, but after 4-5 hours of play, it became tedious and unbearable for me. I even, and I hate to say, tried to use a cheat application to see if I could get any farther along in the game, but even with using that program, I could not get past the slow melee fighting and the tiresome use of the bow and arrows as weapons, due to the painfully long time between shooting each arrow, and the very limited amount of arrows in the quiver.

As of this review, the game TESTAMENT: The High Order of Human, which was released in June of 2023, has not been updated by the developers and I do not know if there is any plans to do so. TESTAMENT: The Order of High Human, is a great start to a first person shooter, with great graphics, sound track and voice work, but with the shortcomings in the fighting, I believe the game fell well short of its full potential.