Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review

GameSpot reviews Drakensang: The Dark Eye, and as you would expect from a mainstream site, they complain about “too many rules” and give it a 7.0/10.

The game’s mechanics are derivative and cluttered up with extraneous rules taken from Drakensang’s pen-and-paper inspiration, The Dark Eye. Characters are crammed with finicky stats, talents, and attributes that can be hard to come to grips with, especially in the beginning. Each hero comes with eight attributes, nine base values, five talent pools with five separate skills in each, a raft of combat talents dealing with each weapon type, three schools of special abilities, magic talents for spellcasters, and a recipe book for the alchemical, blacksmith, and archery goodies that you can put together on your own. Whew. In addition to all of this, there are a pile of races to choose from, all pulled from standard fantasy folk such as humans, elves, and dwarves, and in turn slotted into about 20 race-exclusive professions. For example, if you choose to play as an elf, you can become a ranger, fighter, or spellweaver. Pick a dwarf, and you’re stuck with a mercenary, sapper, or prospector. And so on.

Documentation and in-game tips are plentiful, leaving you with a lot of reading to do when rolling up a character. You can cut to the chase and select an adventurer with prerolled skills and stats, along with a suitable randomly chosen goofy name such as Gerron Goose or Glombo of Wildfang. But the huge number of talents and stats attached to each adventurer means that doing so just drops you into the game with scarcely an idea of what you’re doing. Any time saved on creating a hero is eaten up by the number of times you get killed due to not understanding what sort of character you’re adventuring with and wrangling with choices whenever you level up later on. To develop a true understanding of abilities, you need to spend a good hour or so creating a character in the expert mode, tweaking the tons of skills and stats until you have an idea what’s going on. Serious role-players will love this attention to detail; more casual fans may be overwhelmed.