Eschalon: Book II Review

Introduction

Eschalon: Book II is a turn-based RPG from Basilisk Games.  It’s the middle entry of a planned Eschalon trilogy, and it was released way back in May 2010.  Book II didn’t receive a whole lot of fanfare when it came out — so little, in fact, that we didn’t get around to reviewing it, even though we’re an RPG-specific web site.  But we’ve been expanding our Eschalon coverage lately in preparation for Book III being released later this year (maybe in October), and so in a “better late than never” move, we’re going to review it now.

Fortunately, Book II is still relevant.  Thanks to online retailers like Steam and Good Old Games, it’s easy to purchase Book I (released in 2007) and Book II — and for prices that beat most budget titles.  And so that means the only relevant question is this: Is Book II worth playing?  I’d say the answer is yes, but you should keep reading to see if the game sounds like it would work for you as well.

The Story

Eschalon: Book II takes place two years after the events in Book I.  You’re still playing the same character, technically, but thanks, having your memory wiped in Book I to prevent your enemies from gleaning information about the mysterious Crux of Ages, you now have trouble remembering things, including any skills and spells you might have known, and so now you’re back at Level 1.  That means you’re essentially starting a new character, which means you don’t need a save or anything from Book I to play.  In fact, you don’t need to have played Book I at all.  Book II summarizes everything from that earlier game that’s relevant to the new campaign.

In Book I you protected the Crux of Ages and almost single-handedly prevented the Goblins from taking over Thaermore.  In Book II you learn that while the Goblins didn’t fare very well, the Taurax invaded Thaermore next, and with the region still weakened from the earlier attack, they rolled to an easy victory, and even claimed the Crux of Ages for their own.  Now it’s up to you to teach the Taurax the same lesson you taught the Goblins, and to prevent them from gaining control of the rest of the crux stones, which supposedly can be combined to devastating effect.

Characters

Character creation in Book II is roughly the same as in Book I.  The first thing you do is roll your attributes.  Each attribute can receive a value between 7 and 14, but you’re allowed to roll as many times as you want, and so the more patient you are, the better off your character is.  You’re also given 20 attribute points to spend however you want.  Attributes include Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Speed, Intelligence, Wisdom, Perception, and Concentration, and they control about what you’d expect.  For example, Strength adds damage to your melee attacks and allows you to carry more weight, while Intelligence and Wisdom add to your mana points and allow you to learn more spells.

Next up, you have to pick an origin (a hometown for your character that gives you a bonus to your attributes), an axiom (a religious belief that adds pluses and minuses), and a class (including fighter, rogue, ranger, magick user, and healer).  Combined, your axiom and class give you a starting skill for free, but they don’t restrict you in any way, so you can create a Fighter and end up focusing on Elemental spells if you want to.  Besides your starting skill, you also receive 15 skill points for other skills, including Alchemy, Cartography, Heavy Armor, and Swords.  Learning a new skill costs 3 points, but upgrades after that only cost 1 point each.  New in Book II, you also get to pick a gender for your character.  This choice gives you another bonus to your attributes (males get +1 Strength while females get +1 Dexterity), but it’s otherwise cosmetic.  I didn’t notice any dialogue changes for different genders, and there aren’t any romances in Book II.

The character system in Book II works pretty well.  With 8 attributes, 5 origins, 5 axioms, 5 classes, and 26 skills, you’re given lots of ways to build your character, and, nicely, not every decision is about maximizing damage in combat.  You also have to decide things like how much you want to spot traps, whether you want to pick open locks or bash them or melt them, and how much you want to worry about money.  As an example, there is a Lore skill that (along with Intelligence) helps you to identify objects.  Unlike most RPGs where you just need to identify weapons and armor with magical bonuses, in Book II potentially everything needs to be identified, including silverware and books.  So it’s certainly more convenient to put points into Lore, but there is also a Lore spell, and you can also pay shopkeepers to identify objects for you, which means the Lore skill is not required.  So, do you put points into Lore, and how much?  It’s always good when an RPG forces you to make decisions rather than allowing you to learn everything.

Campaign

The campaign in Book I took place entirely in Thaermore.  In Book II, you get a little more variety.  You start out in the Human lands of Mistfell, and then you visit the Dwarves in Nor’land before finally taking on the Taurax in Amireth.  Each region has a different look, and there are roughly 50% more map zones in Book II than Book I, making the campaign roughly 50% longer as well (30 hours versus 20 hours).

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the world in Book II is far less interesting than in Book I.  In Book I you’d almost always find a quest NPC or an ambush or a secret chest when exploring a map, but in Book II you mostly only encounter creatures to kill — although, continuing with the theme, there are 50% more types of enemies around, so at least you get more variety in what you face off against.  The maps get especially bad at the end of the game when you explore a large frozen lake and some grasslands.  These areas cover about ten maps, but they’re flat and boring, and they have maybe five places of interest between them.  The endgame maps look like they’re just placeholders waiting for the real maps to come in.

Fortunately, the interior dungeons work better than the outside zones.  That’s where you tend to find puzzles and boss fights, and where you learn some background information about the world.  For example, near the starting town of Eastwillow you learn about the lost town of Westwillow, which ended up at the bottom of a lake after a dam was built.  Most of the people of the drowned town moved on to live elsewhere, but some stayed behind, and they now roam the bottom of the lake in undead form.  By the by you get to visit Westwillow, and you’re given a chance to put the inhabitants to rest.  There’s also another mage tower (like in Book I), and in the final patch for the game, Basilisk Games added in the Fathamurk dungeon, which is both tough and interesting, a good mix.

The quests in Book II are of about the same quality as in Book I.  That is, they’re on the simple side where you mostly just need to find an object, talk to somebody, or kill something.  Every so often you have to make a decision for how to complete a quest — like when you meet two people, each of whom claims the other is a lycanthrope — but for most of the quests you just receive experience points or gold at the end.  Surprisingly, despite the 50% theme elsewhere, Book II has roughly the same number of quests as Book I, which helps to explain why some of the map zones feel sort of empty.

There is also — you guessed it — roughly 50% more equipment to find in the game.  Characters can wear helmets, chest armor, gloves, leggings, boots, rings, and amulets, and they can also carry weapons and shields.  Most equipment comes in tiers.  For example, for Heavy Armor you start with copper before making your way up to bronze, iron, steel, and eventually better materials.  There are also some unique items, mostly weapons, but there aren’t any set items.  You can also find some items with random bonuses on them, and the Alchemy skill allows you to add your own bonuses as well.

Finally, the difficulty in Book II is higher than in Book I.  At the end of Book I, instead of giving the Crux of Ages to the leader of Thaermore, you were allowed to attack him and his honor guard.  This wasn’t intended as possible-to-win battle, but not only was it possible, it was pretty easy.  Well, Basilisk Games evidently didn’t like that, and so the combat is tougher in Book II, which is a good thing.

However, there’s more to the difficulty than just combat.  Basilisk Games also added in a lot of nagging difficulties, like having to eat and drink, and having to repair your equipment.  It’s also much tougher to identify objects in Book II than in Book I (among other things, the +6 Lore rings from Book I were replaced by +2 Lore rings), and encumbrance is much more difficult to deal with.  My first time through the game, I played a Strength-based fighter, but even so I couldn’t wear the best and heaviest armor simply because my maximum encumbrance didn’t allow it (or rather, I couldn’t wear the heaviest equipment and still have weight available for the objects I found during my explorations).

I’m all for a tougher game, and I enjoyed the tougher combat, but I wasn’t as enthusiastic about having to return to a town every 20 minutes, so I could sell off my excess loot and free up some weight, especially since Book II like Book I doesn’t have the most convenient teleportation system.  Fortunately, though, you can turn some options on or off when you start your game.  These options include eating and drinking, repairing equipment, and whether objects are fixed or random (which controls whether you can save and load at chests to guarantee good loot).  The options give you some control over how difficult the game is, and they also affect the score you get at the end of the game.

Engine

For the most part, Book II looks and plays a lot like Book I.  The game is still turn-based, but since enemy and neutral creatures act so quickly, it doesn’t feel turn-based.  That is, you don’t take a step and then wait, take a step and then wait, and so forth.  If you just hold the left mouse button down, then your character moves towards the mouse pointer, and Book II seems like a real-time game.  About the only time Book II is obviously turn-based is in combat, but this is a good thing.  You don’t have to worry about clicking like crazy, or somehow target a moving enemy.  You can take your time (or not) and attack how you want, and if the phone rings, you don’t have to worry about a creature wandering over and eating you while you’re otherwise occupied.

One of the complaints about Book I was that combat was too simple.  For melee and ranged characters, you pretty much just clicked on an enemy until it was dead, and only magic characters got some variety since they could choose their spells.  In Book II, Basilisk Games tried to make combat more interesting, but I don’t think the changes had much of an effect.  The first change is that you can now choose a combat mode, including normal, power (more damage but less accuracy), finesse (more accuracy but less damage), and parry (which gives a bonus to armor but prevents you from attacking).  These modes have their place — for example, you might switch to parry mode when charging at a ranged enemy — but I pretty much just stayed with the normal mode.

Then there are weapon feats.  Once you advance a weapon skill to rank 10, a special attack becomes available.  For Swords, this attack always hits, and it allows you to parry all attacks during the following turn.  For Bows, the attack deals 3X damage.  When you first get a weapon feat, it takes about 30 turns for it to recharge, but if you keep adding points to the weapon skill, then you can reduce this cooldown to every 4–5 turns.  Weapon feats give you something extra to do in combat, which is good, but some of them are too powerful, which is bad.  When I played a Bows character, I attacked with the feat, and in the rare cases when that didn’t kill my enemy outright, I just retreated for a few turns until I could use the feat again.  My Bows character cruised through the game while my Swords character struggled a little, and my Magick User came in somewhere in the between the two.

Finally, Basilisk Games also made some positive changes in the game interface.  For starters, Book II uses a 1024×768 resolution rather than the 800×600 resolution of Book I, and this gives more space for everything.  The text is bigger and easier to read, the playing window is larger and shows you more of your surroundings, the effects window actually shows you what the effects are (rather than just saying you have Troll Fever and letting you guess what might be wrong), and there are ten quick item slots instead of just eight.  These changes are all presented very well, and they make the game more convenient to play.  It’s always nice when a developer takes the time to create a good interface.

Sound and Graphics

Book II is a budget title, so it’s not going to win any awards for sound or graphics.  Starting with the sound, there isn’t any voice acting at all, and the music and sound effects get the job done without being memorable in a good or bad way.  That is, I didn’t walk around humming the theme music for the game, but I didn’t turn off the sound either.

For the graphics, Book II uses a relatively straightforward 2D engine, where it’s clear what everything is, but which isn’t going to garner any oohs or ahhs for visual effects.  The maps use something like a 200×200 grid, which gives plenty of space for the locations, and since the maps are painstakingly constructed, you never walk around and recognize terrain features or caves that you’ve seen before.  Everything is unique.  Book II also has improved lighting effects.  You can see this when you walk around and notice colored lanterns, which give some locations an added ambiance, and spells like Cat’s Eyes and Gravedigger’s Flame are presented more effectively — and brighten up the dungeons, making them easier to explore.

Conclusion

Eschalon: Book II is definitely a “more” sequel.  It has a bigger world, it has more creatures for you to kill, and it has more equipment for you to find.  The problem is that while “more” is usually a good thing, it can’t be the only thing.  For example, while Basilisk Games made the world about 50% bigger, they didn’t fill it up with interesting things to see and do.  The world is often just a place to grind through enemies, which is fine for an action RPG, but that’s not what Book II is.

Still, Book II has some things going for it.  You’re given lots of ways to build up your character, and the campaign plays differently depending on the weapon that you choose, which means the campaign has good replayability.  The dungeons in the game world are also well-designed, especially the free Fathamurk add-on, and the game is much tougher to play, especially if you want to accumulate a high score (my best score was 393,166 for those of you playing along at home).

I played through Book II three times, once each with a Swords character, a Bows character, and a Magick User.  The game takes about 30 hours to complete, and I generally enjoyed the 90 or so hours I spent with it.  Add to that the fact that you can buy Book II (and Book I) for under $10 each, and it gets an easy recommendation from me.  Book II isn’t perfect; story-wise it’s on the simple side, and combat still isn’t especially complex, but the campaign is reasonably fun, and the game should work well for anybody out there who likes it when RPGs have numbers, and where you don’t just run around killing everything in sight.