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Eschalon: Book I Review

What is a retro-RPG? It is not, as one game industry bigwig told me with a condescending smirk several years ago, soon after leaving his last Important Administrative Position in food production, (A game that looks bad.) He was simply doing what VPs have done since time immemorial, accepting superficial talking points of their new corporate culture as the divine truth. If a game hasn't got the latest graphics, as this version of that truth goes, it won't sell, and of course it won't get the latest graphics if the developers haven't got corporate patronage. So what the bigwig in question was really saying, is that (A retro-RPG is a game that doesn't have the latest graphics, because they haven't got the backing of a corporation like the one that hired me, which is the only kind of game creator that matters. And the only reason I'm speaking to you right now is because my fellow VPs won't let me into the conference room since I smell bad.)

Many of us who play retro-RPGs would add that graphics don't tell the whole story, and that a lot depends on the individual game. Planescape: Torment offers arguably the most well-developed and thoughtful plot and party NPCs of any RPG ever made. Ultima VII remains unrivalled for player interactivity with a huge, detailed environment. Betrayal at Krondor had a unique combat system, a world that changed over time, and in its traps and riddles the best system of non-physical game puzzles ever made. There's no reason to belittle these titles, or to scorn playing them years later. What they offer is evergreen.

Then, there is a class of retro-RPGs that don't stand out, but make for good playing sessions, nonetheless. As a group, they present the advantages of inexpensive cost, pain-free installation, and low memory guzzling. Among these, Eschalon: Book I wears its retro-styling with pride.

Starting Out

The game plays in 800 x 600, and launches in windowed or fullscreen mode. You start out by selecting one of five areas of origin, belief systems, and classes. Your origin gives you bonuses to one or more of the eight basic game stats; beliefs trade off spells or specials for disadvantages; and classes.? Classes actually mean very little in the game. Fighters get the Swords skill, while Rangers receive the Bows skill. This means that classes are only mildly differentiated, in a game which puts a premium on the development of stats and 24 skills. I don't have a problem with this, but as so often happens in such games Divine Divinity comes to mind the seeming openness of personal development actually conceals a very small number of effective paths to success. While there are various ways to open chests and get to one's tactical goals, professions as such lack the colorful individuality that aid player-defined replayability in titles like Baldur's Gate II.

As a result, rogues receive no bonus to backstabbing, which considerably weakens the attractions of the class. As for magick users (the term for mages), their spell damage simply doesn't keep pace with the increase in enemy power as the game progresses. Your best bet is to become a melee fighter specializing in a single weapon type, perhaps with sidelines in archery and alchemy: the former to kill things at a distance, the latter to create useful potions (with a nice selection, here) and enchantments.

Once past that point, you're sent out into the world, armed, and not exactly very dangerous. You've possibly got a spell or two, perhaps a weapon hopefully a good starting one, maybe not and a few basic pieces of equipment. Your best bet is to take your gold and supplies to the nearest town.
Out to the World

No 3D realtime graphics, here, but who cares? Eschalon: Book I uses isometric views and representative 2D object visuals that are detailed, realistically stylized, and pleasing. Animations are good. Little touches, like the differences in strength and color of path lighting based on the method the player character uses (a torch, lantern, or one of a couple of spells), show the quality of the product. (Though I found the dungeons too dark, regardless. Thomas Riegsecker, who runs Basilisk Games, tells me that only 1 out of 10 beta testers reported this, but that they're working on a longterm solution.) Sound is handled effectively to indicate nearby activity. Dialog overlay screens are attractively styled, and adorned with NPC faces. Mousing over your inventory screen brings up appropriate information about each item you've got. The music and sound effects are pleasant if not memorable, and the variety of artwork keeps the game graphically fresh and appealing.

When you enter cities, too, each shop is individually designed, and looks good. My only gripe on this score concerns the displayed content in the gameworld's shops, which is just for show. This is an area where I think Divine Divinity's developers had the right idea: create a series of stackable, small objects, and use them in such a way that the player can see them, and interact with them. Note that ring sitting on a countertop? If you click on it, you should be able to pick it up, and it should vanish from view. There are too many objects on view in Eschalon: Book I that don't exist, whatever your eyes may tell you, alongside others that do.

Once you talk to a merchant you can see their true inventories, which are nicely stocked, if not overwhelming in their variety of goods. Prices are high, twice those that merchants will pay for items, but that's to be expected. You can always improve your Mercantile skill to lower the cost, and/or find a wearable that gives you a bonus in it. Alchemy, too, plays into this system. At low levels, ingredients are more expensive to purchase from a magic shop than finished potions, but as you raise your Alchemy skill, the potions you produce increase in quality. Finally, you're able to sell back potions you make at a good price advantage over the cost of their ingredients, but by then, the items you want to buy are more expensive. You still can't afford them outright, and the cash your potions bring in need to be weighed against the value they provide against foes. This offers tradeoffs as there should be in a well-balanced game.

Kudos to the Eschalon: Book I team, as well, for creating a convincingly non-linear RPG that mixes a direct main plot with a goodly number of side quests, and avoids ramping the difficulty up too much, too quickly, if you decide to take The Grand Tour, instead. Not that you won't be killed easily if you travel too far away, at least if you try and fight or box yourself into a corner. I don't like the too restrictive pathways through the linked map sections, but at least there's a great deal of territory to explore. It's worth exploring, too, because Basilisk has created plenty of mini-encounter spots, where minor collections of monsters hang around a body or treasure chest. Sometimes their proximity is well-motivated, but at other times it feels rote, with the monsters obviously placed to furnish the obligatory challenge.

Another annoyance is the burden of long distance travel in the game. You spend a lot of your daytime hours the only period when I, at least, could actually see much of what was going on wandering to and from quest sites, to town shops, and back. The presence of teleportal locations help somewhat, but they were far too few. And invariably, when I left a spot in a complex, winding dungeon, it was difficult to remember exactly my way back, or important features along the way that I wanted to recall, later. The ability to notate via the automap function would have greatly assisted this.
The Writing

This is the area in which Eschalon: Book I does worst. Its plot is both hackneyed and unimaginatively handled. Overused plots can at times be disguised by good characterization, but the NPC comments you read in the game are pedestrian, if competent. The gameworld itself is largely unchanging, so NPCs have nothing new to add once you've exhausted their initial repertoire of comments and worked through their quests. A more important issue is the dialog trees, which are frankly ridiculous. You know the kind:
    (Hello, hero! Will you help me find something valuable?)

    1) Sure, I'll help you. I'm a hero!
    2) No way. I don't want your stinkin' experience points.
    3) Not a chance! You're 10 levels above me and you sell stuff I need, but I'm going to commit suicide by trying to kill you, anyway!
My phrasing is parodistic, and typical of the way dialog trees are handled in many RPGs. It's unfortunately accurate here, too. There is no attempt made to create reasonable dialog choices. You can accept quests which is what you bought the game for anyway, remember? or reject them, or try to kill an NPC that assists and rewards you. I find this inexplicable in an RPG that shows so much effort placed into building a proper visual roleplaying atmosphere. Reasonable dialog trees should have been created that offered complex, hidden loops, checks to NPC attitude, and NPC comments on items or experiences the player had been through to foster a sense of involvement. Or at the very least, these rotten dialog branches should have been removed, and quests simply given without additional embarrassment.

Fighting the Good Fight

Combat in Eschalon: Book I is simple, straightforward, and effective. There are no GURPS-style attacks on individual body parts, or scaled attacks that bring with them various chances of accuracy, damage, and possible defense. You use a weapon (one of two you can keep ready and switch between with a click), and you're told if your attack succeeded, or failed. If it did damage, you find out how much. I don't have any problem with this simplicity, which was the standard back in the days of third person, turn-based RPGs (always allowing for a few exceptions, like Origin Systems' clumsy but fascinating Knights of Legend). Especially as Basilisk has placed some sneakily effective strategic elements that can influence battle such as the occasional portcullis that can be sent crashing down on the bodies of your enemies, or powerful, friendly NPCs that you can lure attackers back to. Too bad there aren't more, because each outside battle area and every dungeon eventually becomes monotonous. Too many attacks are simple, direct combat situations with one type of enemy, in very similar surroundings. You end up killing two, three or four of that creature, sleeping to regain lost health and mana, killing again, and sleeping again, with few physical puzzles and none that require thought.

Enemies are well chosen and varied throughout the game, but exhibit only moderately effective AI. Some will move back and forth one square on the other side of a fence while you fill them full of arrows, until they die. Archers don't scamper away when you approach them with a melee weapon drawn. There are no signs of enemies supporting one another with spells, as happened to such striking effect in Wizardry 8. Each dungeon is logically and cleverly designed according to a specific purpose, with various areas that make sense in context: so you won't expect to find a library in an ordinary mine. All dungeons are also single level, but the fixed rewards you find (as opposed to the randomized ones) are not out of keeping with what you might figure on acquiring, given the level of difficulty.
You kill; they die. That's the way it's supposed to work, if you do it right. And if something dies, depending on the type of creature, you may find items left behind. The selection of items on corpses in Eschalon: Book I is appropriate. I've yet to encounter any flying insects carrying about magic scrolls ,as they did years ago in a deservedly bashed title, Might and Magic IX. On the other hand, some players may raise an eyebrow or two over the great disparity in quantity and quality of items found on many corpses and in chests. Typically, the number of goodies can range between none and four, and between a container that's empty and one filled with items whose worth totals 1500 coins or more. I have seen no evidence that there is any factor balancing out what a character finds over time. This poor treasure distribution begins with character generation, so I've been left with newly created PCs that have ranged from exceptionally poor and quickly dead to those who were comfortably flush, and could afford healing and magical potions.

This is the way Divine Divinity operates, with a broad disparity of item content in goody containers. I don't say it's wrong, but I wish Basilisk had offered players an element of control at game start on the degree of variance, both in numbers and value of what you find. As it is, I'm sure that quite a few people will become annoyed after a series of unsatisfactory hauls, and fall into the easy habit of saving and rechecking chests/corpses to get a better deal. It's only natural even though it's very anti-roleplaying, too.

Conclusions

One other factor needs to be considered, here. Eschalon: Book I is not the product of even a moderately small company, but essentially due to the efforts of one person. As such, my numerous criticisms above need to be considered in light of what is possible under such circumstances. It doesn't make the writing in the game any better, but it does make what has been accomplished in graphics and game flow much more impressive, in my opinion.

In any case, I like Eschalon: Book I. Although at times it comes across as sketchy in content, there's a good deal to enjoy: the artwork, the low resource requirements, the relatively large, open field for gameplay. Combat is handled well, challenges increase gradually but sensibly if you go the fighter route and remain cautious in travel, and dungeons are appropriately varied. If it doesn't require a great deal of thought, that only makes it more of a casual game than some other RPGs, the kind of thing you can pick up for a few minutes to an hour, then put away and play again a day or a week later. It isn't compelling, urging you to see what new challenge or brilliantly devised quest lies around the next corner. But it is fun. And that means a good deal.
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Dawn of Magic Review

Dawn of Magic is another in a long line of action role-playing games. I seem to play a lot of these, and while it's been a while since I've encountered a truly awful one (of, say, Konung 2 (quality)), I haven't seen a good one recently, either. These days when I receive an action role-playing game -- and especially a bargain-priced one, such as with Dawn of Magic -- I just hope for something reasonably entertaining, where the combat has enough going for it that the experience isn't a total bore. Using that weak standard, Dawn of Magic is a success.

Dawn of Magic has a background story -- something about an immortal wizard named Modo who wants to destroy the Earth -- but you can safely ignore it. Dawn of Magic isn't the kind of game that wants to deal with things like plot or dialogue or motivation. It just wants to throw thousands of creatures at you and see how you do. Each of the game's five acts goes about the same: you wade through all sorts of enemies so you can defeat a boss, and then eventually you defeat the end boss. In an interesting twist, that end boss doesn't have to be Modo. If you choose an evil alignment for your character, then you can assist Modo in the campaign and presumably face some champion of good at the end. I played a good character (that whole (let's destroy the planet) spiel didn't make the evil path look so hot), but I'm guessing the campaigns aren't all that different and only the bosses change.

Oddly, Dawn of Magic almost requires that you play as a magician of some sort. You can play as a melee character if you really want to, but melee characters get all of two skills to help them out ((bash) and (weapon mastery)), while casters get 96 spells to play with. The press release I received with the game implies that this is a positive, but I thought it was strange. It made me think of a recent news article I saw where a game was called (innovative) for not supporting a single player mode. Since when did offering less turn into a good thing? Is there such a thing as a diet game? Fortunately, Dawn of Magic makes it expensive to build up spells, and the spells are linked (for example, the (fireball) spell has a chance to trigger the (burn) spell and set enemies on fire), and so you have to make lots of choices when building up your character, and the system works well despite the restrictions.

Also fortunately, the combat system is effective. Dawn of Magic uses a fairly standard point-and-click Diablo-style interface, and while it has a few quirks (for example, you can't map both mouse buttons to spells; you're stuck with one controlling your weapon, even if you never use it), it doesn't really cause any problems or get in the way of the action. Meanwhile, the enemies have a lot of variety -- some summon minions, some raise the dead, some teleport, and more -- and the bosses are challenging. During the course of the campaign, I never found myself having too easy or too difficult of a time, and that's a difficult trick to pull off.

But that's the end of the good news. The bad news is that Dawn of Magic is a bargain-priced action role-playing game that doesn't strive to be anything more. Every so often it does something sort of cool -- like it allows you to insert runes into equipment, and if you use them to spell a special word (like (future)) then you get an extra bonus -- but mostly the title doesn't do anything interesting or memorable, and it's marred by a lot of sloppiness and repetitive gameplay.
As an example, the maps in the game are about as boring as possible, with lots of generic forests and towns, but they're also extremely busy with trees and flowers and butterflies and birds -- to the point where it's difficult to see where the enemies are or to figure out what's blocking your line-of-sight. The only reason I survived at all was because the mini-map showed red dots where enemies were located, and that gave me a general sense about where I should be casting my spells. There are also pathfinding problems (characters get stuck a lot) and useless skills (there isn't any reason to learn half of them), it's almost impossible to hit moving targets, and it's way too easy to damage -- and kill! -- your allies.

Or consider the quests, which I would qualify as (sad.) Dawn of Magic is comprised almost entirely of the clichéd quests that other games make fun of. For example, your first quest in the game isn't to kill rats -- but it's close. You have to kill ten termites, and it doesn't get any more original after that. Most of the quests don't have anything to do with the plot (what little there is) and they often involve dopey or tedious activities, like gathering geese or delivering ore to a forge. Many of the quests are also so generic that you can repeat them as many times as you'd like, or just skip them, since their rewards are about the same as what you'd get just by killing regular monsters, which is what the game wants you to do anyway.

Dawn of Magic also missed an opportunity to improve its replay value. Like most action role-playing games, it has three difficulty settings, where finishing the campaign on one setting unlocks the next, and it also has three alignments, where the campaign changes slightly for each alignment. That's perfect symmetry, and it would allow you to play through three different campaigns while building up your character. But alas, you have to choose your alignment when you create your character, and so if you want to play through all three difficulty settings, you have to do so with the exact same campaign. D'oh.

Obviously, I didn't really like Dawn of Magic, but I didn't hate it, either. The game has a 30+ hour campaign, it looks okay, and it runs pretty well. It doesn't do anything especially new or intriguing, and it's nowhere near the quality of Titan Quest, but it still provides some entertainment. I have some friends who gave their dog a fancy chew toy for Christmas, but the dog ignored it and kept playing with the paper bag it came in. Dawn of Magic is sort of like that paper bag. It doesn't look like anything special, but it can be fun to play.
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Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer Review

Introduction

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is the first of what is likely to be a long list of expansion packs and adventure packs for Neverwinter Nights 2. Since it's an actual expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer includes a whole host of additions: new classes, races, feats and spells, a higher level cap, subtle improvements to the interface, a 20+ hour campaign, and more. Chances are, if you're a fan of the Neverwinter Nights franchise, then you've already decided to buy Mask of the Betrayer -- or you've already bought it -- but if you're sitting on the fence, pondering whether you should wait for a gold / platinum / diamond pack to appear, then maybe my views on the expansion pack will sway you in one direction or the other.


What's New

Mask of the Betrayer basically contains more of everything. Since it raises the level cap from 20 to 30, it includes new epic feats and spells for all of the classes (the epic spells are actually feats; spells still only go up to level 9), and it adds seven new classes and six new races. Since the original Neverwinter Nights 2 came with 28 classes and 16 races, I'm not sure how much of an impact these additional races and classes make, but some of them look fun. For example, the Red Wizard of Thay prestige class allows wizards to become even more specialized than they were before, and the Favored Soul class is sort of like a cleric who isn't required to memorize spells. Meanwhile, the races include four quasi-elemental genasi choices, each with an affinity for one of the elements (air, earth, fire and water). More options are always good, but there is also a limit to how many character types people are likely to play, and I think Obsidian Entertainment, the game's developer, has already moved past that.

More likely to interest players is the expansion pack's new 20+ hour campaign. It picks up where the original campaign left off, but it is only marginally connected to it. The new campaign doesn't have anything to do with the King of Shadows or Crossroad Keep or even the city of Neverwinter. Instead, you find yourself in an old barrow with no memory of how you got there -- and worse, with a strange affliction that must be (fed) from time to time -- and you quickly discover that you have to find a cure for this affliction before it destroys you.

As you progress through the campaign, you'll learn the fates of your companions from the original campaign (including meeting a couple of them again), but knowledge of that first campaign isn't really necessary. If you somehow didn't play it, or if you didn't save any of your characters from it, then you can create a brand new character for Mask of the Betrayer, and the game will advance it to level 18 and give it some equipment. The expansion pack also includes an assortment of pre-built level 18 characters, if you'd rather just jump into the action.

The campaign itself is nice -- with all of the connotations, both good and bad, that the word (nice) engenders. Since you're trying to heal yourself, rather than hunting down and ending the reign of an evil wizard or something, the focus of the campaign is skewed a little, and so it plays differently than the other official Neverwinter Nights campaigns. Unfortunately, the companions you pick up during your travels are a little bit on the stodgy and boring side (imagine traveling with three Elanees in the original campaign), but at least they're also unusual, with a spirit bear and a dreamwalker among the possibilities. Companions don't really have side quests this time, but if you gain enough influence with them, then you receive special feats that give you bonuses.

The dialogue and voice acting in the campaign are solid, so it's not troublesome to deal with your companions or listen when people talk to you, but the entire campaign is a little on the dark and dreary side, with frequent forays into the black and white Shadow Realm, and it takes a long time to (officially) learn anything about the affliction that you're trying to cure. I say (officially) because you're given so many hints during the campaign that you'll probably be way ahead of your character about knowing what's going on, and that gets frustrating after a while. I mean, late in the campaign you can actually ask who the Betrayer is -- after seeing the answer to that question maybe a dozen times up to that point.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the campaign is dealing with your affliction. You're sort of like a vampire who needs to (feed) from time to time to keep your energy up, but you're given a choice: you can glorify in the power of your affliction, or you can attempt to suppress it. Suppressing the affliction is actually easier, but using it gives you better rewards, and so the choice is not easy. Also, instead of playing a good or evil character, your decisions have more to do with feeding or not feeding, and that gives a unique spin to the quests. On the down side, your energy dissipates over time, and if it gets too low then you die. That's fine, at least in concept, but it makes it feel like you're being timed in the campaign, and I'm guessing that nobody who plays it will enjoy the feeling very much. I'm one of those players who likes to talk to everybody and explore every corner, and it's sort of disconcerting when the campaign keeps nudging you to hurry, hurry, hurry.
Overall, the campaign gets some good points for being interesting and different and well-written, but it also gets some bad points for its execution and mood -- not to mention its balance, since the combat is pretty easy throughout (think Hordes of the Underdark here) -- and that's why it only gets a (nice) rating from me. But I'll add this: I played a mostly good character who tried to suppress his affliction when I made my way through the campaign, and I'm looking forward to trying it again with an opposing type of character and different companions to see how it goes. For me, intriguing campaigns with a few problems are always better than run-of-the-mill campaigns with no problems, and Mask of the Betrayer has an intriguing campaign.


What's Improved

Besides the additions that you'd expect from an expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer also makes quite a few improvements to the game engine. Some of these improvements are minor -- like a button that sorts your inventory, and the rest command now showing you how safe your surroundings are -- but a couple of them are significant.

The original Neverwinter Nights 2 had about four camera modes, and everything more-or-less worked for all of them. Now in Mask of the Betrayer, there are only two camera modes, and you can set up several options (including your hot keys) for both of them. In strategy mode, you get a (top down) view of your surroundings, and you typically use the mouse to point and click where you want your party to go. In character mode, you get an (over the shoulder) view of your surroundings, and you typically use the WASD keys to drive your characters around. Since the expansion pack allows parties to have up to four characters, I used strategy mode for just about everything, and it worked perfectly for me.

The other major change involves crafting. Neverwinter Nights 2 had sort of a complicated system that required lots of gems and components and workbenches and feats. I never really bothered with crafting at all, and perhaps that was a common reaction because Obsidian significantly simplified it in Mask of the Betrayer. Gone are the workbenches, and gone are all of the odd body parts that you'd receive from killing creatures. Now you simply get essences when enemies die, and all crafting takes place inside of a special bag, which you can carry around with you. Better yet, the description of the essences tells you what you can do with them, hopefully eliminating a lot of confusion, and the system ties in with your affliction in the campaign, which is nice.

On the down side, there are still some things that Obsidian apparently couldn't get to. Most surprising to me is that there still aren't any secret doors. The closest thing you find to a secret door in the campaign is a bookshelf in front of a door, and you have to bash down the bookshelf to get to the door (which, really, barely makes any sense). There is also still a problem with the maps. They're still kind of dark, and they still don't show where the doorways are, and so they're not as useful as they could be. But overall, I'm happy with the changes that Obsidian made, and I remain optimistic that future patches and expansion packs will continue to improve the engine.


Conclusion

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is a quality expansion pack. It includes numerous additions and improvements to the original Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, and while I didn't hugely love the 20+ hour campaign that came with it, it's not because no effort was put into it. The campaign is complicated and intriguing but also flawed and kind of dreary, and so while I can't give it or the expansion pack as a whole a glowing recommendation, it seems easily worth its $30 suggested retail price.
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The Witcher Review

And so, after over four years of waiting, The Witcher has finally stormed retail shelves. Given the fact that I just recently posted an extensive hands-on preview, I'm not going to talk a whole lot about the game's mechanics again. What I will do is give an update on my experiences with the game in the dozens of hours I've played since that article was written. The Witcher is quite long and broad in scope (even by RPG standards), so I wanted to make sure I was able to tell you exactly what type of game you should expect. Therefore, I've been spending almost all of my free time with it, having just finished the game this morning after clocking in well over 60 hours.

While The Witcher kicks off with the somewhat overused "hero with amnesia" bit, you'll quickly realize that Geralt is not your typical hero and that the world you're traveling through is considerably different than what you've seen in previous role-playing games. Temeria is a land plagued with serious social issues and political conflicts, which (for better or worse) makes it a far more believable place than the usual high fantasy settings we've seen in other games. As Geralt, you'll spend a lot more time working with battered prostitutes, power-hungry political figures, and a womanizing bard than, say, a friendly farmer who's tired of wolves killing his livestock. Your primary goals are to recover the witchers' stolen secrets and to seek out another witcher named Berengar, though you'll soon discover that there's a plethora of other contracts, quests, and other loose ends to take care of along the way. Rest assured, you'll never run out of things to do, as you'll usually have access to at least a few different quests at any given time.

As you progress through the game, you'll encounter both trustworthy and seedy characters, many of whom are figureheads for various far-reaching organizations, such as the Salamandra, Scoia'tael, Temerian intelligence service, and Order of the Flaming Rose. At pivotal points of the game, these very same characters will present Geralt with tough decisions with no obvious answer. These decisions usually deal with Geralt's humanity (or lack thereof) toward others or his stance toward an opposing organization. Should you slay the guard captain stricken with lycanthropy or let him continue preying upon Vizima's criminals and other degenerates? Should you "free" the blue-eyed lass from her alleged vampiric keepers, as her brother requests, or keep an open mind to what might really be going on? Do you ally yourself with the Order of the Flaming Rose, take a stance with the non-humans, or pursue a neutral role? The results of such decisions aren't typically made known until much further into the game, so each one requires careful thought. Regardless of which routes you choose, The Witcher's storyline hosts a considerable number of plot twists and angles that will have you speculating all the way up until the final moments of the game.

Without a doubt, The Witcher is a mature-themed game. In addition to dealing with some tough real world issues, sex, violence, and foul language are in abundance. Typically, this adds a considerable amount of realism to the game, but there are times when it does go a little over the top. Most of these instances are for the sake of a little comedy relief, but I couldn't help but shake my head when Princess Adda demanded to see Geralt's "sword" or when the monster-slaying protagonist told the Lady of the Lake that she has a nice ass. If you don't give in to Geralt's apparent promiscuity, however, these moments are few and far between and don't detract from the overall experience.
As I mentioned in my earlier preview, The Witcher sports some of the best graphics ever seen in a role-playing game. In addition to the amazing architecture found in the city of Vizima, there are a number of unique and diversified landscapes that Geralt will explore, including the shores of a massive lake, a desolate swamp cemetery, and a vast plain of ice. Not only are all of these areas pleasing on the eyes, but they're actually believable. CD Projekt has achieved a unique and consistent art style that forms a world that you'll swear could conceivably exist. The only complaints I have are the lack of unique character models, a few obscure character animations during dialogue cutscenes, and a couple of rare but obvious clipping issues with Geralt's weapons. These are small quibbles in an otherwise amazing graphical experience, though.

The game's music, sound effects, and voice acting ranges from average to excellent, depending on what area you're exploring and who you're talking to. Some high points include the game's appropriate combat theme, the upbeat performances by local bands at the game's various inns, the realistic sounds of Geralt's sword cutting through flesh and bone, and our protagonist's crude but convincing attitude while speaking. Atari and CD Projekt have done a solid job with all of the English voiceovers for the most part, though this is the one aspect of the game's sound that could have used a little extra work. There will be times when an NPC's voice will suddenly rise or lower in volume for no apparent reason. There are even times when it seemed as though a different person might have voiced certain lines for the same NPC, though there's no way of really knowing for sure.

Beyond the storyline, graphics, and sound, it's also worth mentioning that the game features an excellent quest system that automatically updates your journal as you finish each step of a quest. This is a must-have feature, given the sheer number of quests that you'll be participating in. You're also given the option to track the next quest step through the game's automap, which is quite useful when you're not sure where to go next. Despite its user-friendliness, however, I couldn't help but feel like there were way too many fetch quests in The Witcher. While there are several thought-provoking quests as well, I'd wager that half of the game's quests simply have you running back and forth across one or more zones to acquire certain ingredients, deliver a message, or kill a specific creature. This might be standard fare for most RPGs, but the game's many loading screens can make finishing these types of quests a long, drawn out affair. The alchemy system helps alleviate some of the running around you'll do, though, as it makes the hundreds of monsters that you'll wind up slaying along the way that much more rewarding. With nearly 50 potions, oils, and bombs available for Geralt to cook up, you'll have to both harvest herbs from (known) plants and skin useful ingredients from slain monsters.

Minor issues aside, I thoroughly enjoyed The Witcher from beginning to end and feel that the game is triumphant on several different fronts. Not only does it significantly raise the bar in terms of stability and localization for European releases, but it also packs an intriguing story, a distinct art style, several unique character development options, a large number of interesting NPCs, and a good 60-80 hours worth of gameplay. It might not quite compete with the amount of time one could easily spend with a game like Baldur's Gate II, but it's one of the few RPGs that's come relatively close since then, which is testament alone that the team's intentions were in the right place. Despite The Witcher being their first stab at game development, CD Projekt has succeeded in crafting one of the best role-playing games I've played in years. If you've finished Mask of the Betrayer and are looking for another good CRPG fix, then The Witcher comes highly recommended.
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The Chosen: Well of Souls Review

Introduction

The Chosen: Well of Souls (also known as Frater in Europe) is the latest budget action role-playing game from Polish developer Rebelmind, who also created Space Hack (released in 2005) and Grom: Terror in Tibet (released in 2003). I never played Grom, but Space Hack and The Chosen have a lot in common -- perhaps too much in common, given Space Hack's lukewarm reviews -- with both games focusing on combat over everything else, and with both forgetting that things like story and dialogue can help a game along. This sort of thing always makes me wonder: did Rebelmind not receive any feedback with Space Hack, or did they simply decide to ignore it, and create a game with almost exactly the same pros and cons and probably the same mixed reviews?

One place where The Chosen differs from Space Hack is the setting. Instead of using a spaceship, The Chosen takes place in 19th century Europe -- or at least a version of 19th century Europe where magic, zombies, and machine guns all exist. As the game opens up, an evil magician named Marcus Dominus Ingens has captured the Chosen One and the Emerald Tablet, and he has opened up several Wells of Souls to unleash demons and skeletons and a variety of other nasties on an unsuspecting world. You play as a (hunter) working for the Alchemists (the good guys), and your job, naturally, is to kill all of the creatures produced by the Wells, then to close down the Wells, and finally to track down the evil magician himself and set everything to rights.


Character Development

The Chosen includes three different characters for you to play -- Frater (a spellcaster), Elena (an archer), and Tong Wong (a fighter) -- but the character development system is basically classless, and so there is little difference between the three. Each class gets a couple of unique skills (like spellcasters getting the (mana pool) skill, which improves their mana regeneration rate) but otherwise the classes share a bunch of common skills, and so you can develop any of the characters any way you want.

Oddly, all of the skills in the game are passive, and so instead of jumping around and performing special fighting moves, you only get to do things like increase how much damage you do or how fast you run. The skills are divided into three categories (with about nine skills per category), but you can only have one skill per category active at once, meaning that you have to choose a few skills to focus on. You also get four attributes -- strength, dexterity, knowledge, and vitality -- that do about what you'd expect.

You can reach level 40 in the game, and each time you gain a level you also receive points to spend on your attributes and skills. Skills can only be advanced five times, but most skills also have prerequisites, and so the character development system, while basic, also works fairly well. It will take you until the end of the game to maximize a trio of high level skills, and at no point will you find yourself to be way more powerful than your enemies. If nothing else, Rebelmind did a good job in keeping The Chosen balanced, which is nice.


Game Mechanics

The Chosen sits squarely on the Diablo side of the fence as far as look and feel go. The camera typically gives you an overhead view of your surroundings, and you can perform most actions with a single mouse click. You left click to move and you left click to attack, and holding down the left mouse button will cause you to continue to attack (well, at least it should, but sometimes it doesn't). You can also use the right mouse button to cast spells and summon demons, and the mouse wheel to zoom or rotate the camera.
The control scheme is actually a little strange since you can't use the mouse to completely control the camera, which games of this sort usually allow you to do (in Neverwinter Nights 2, for example, you can control all aspects of the camera with the middle mouse button). I didn't like using the mouse wheel to rotate the camera, and that meant I had to rely on the keyboard for camera movement. Since The Chosen doesn't have any sort of (smart) camera system to help you out, that means the game puts a higher emphasis on your non-mouse hand than usual, since you also have to use that hand to do things like quaff potions, summon familiars, teleport to the Alchemist base, and pause the game. I didn't really like this balance between the hands, and I wish Rebelmind had put a little more effort into the interface to provide more options.

As for the actual gameplay, what you do mostly in the game is kill thousands of enemies. There are a handful of side quests and a few story moments, but these are few and far between. The background summary I listed in the introduction is roughly just as detailed as what you see in the game. You never learn who Marcus Dominus Ingens is or why he's trying to take over the world or where the Alchemists came from or how the Chosen One is selected or why there are Wells of Souls or anything like that. Rebelmind just provided the barest of bare-bones histories to support the game, and then stopped there. Anybody who plays role-playing games for the character interactions or for the stories involved will be thoroughly bored by The Chosen.

Luckily, the combat system works pretty well. Rebelmind did a nice job in varying the locations you explore and the enemies you face to keep the combat interesting. Some enemies can turn invisible, some are rooted in the ground, some can resurrect fallen comrades, some lie in wait and try to ambush you, and others are weak but cast nasty spells. That means you have to pay attention to what you're fighting, and you have to adjust your tactics to the situation. You can't just run forward and kill everything that gets in your way (like in, say, Dungeon Siege II). You have to target some creatures right away, or attack and retreat, or simply run away, and it's nice when an action role-playing game makes you think a little.


Followers and Economy

There are two parts of The Chosen that I thought worked very well: the characters who follow you and help you in your adventures, and the economy. Let me start with the followers. In The Chosen, you can gain assistance from three types of characters: people you meet on a map, and who stay with you until they die or until you move on to the next map; (helpers) who you can summon at will, but who are expensive to heal or resurrect; and demons, who you capture each time you close a Well of Souls, and who only stick around for a short period of time.

The three kinds of followers each have their strengths and weaknesses, and have different situations where they're useful. For example, the regular followers can be healed using the (tend) skill / aura, but if they die then they're gone for good. Helpers, meanwhile, can be summoned at any time, but they only heal when they gain a level, and they only earn experience when they do damage, and so you have to get them involved in combat but keep them protected as well. Finally, demons are very powerful, but they require (faith) to be summoned, and they only last for about 10 seconds, and so you have to save them for tough fights. I liked having different options for my followers, including having two types of helpers (a flying ranged attacker and a big bulky melee fighter), and I liked that they changed how I approached battles.

As for the economy, in most role-playing games developers don't even make an attempt to keep money in check. Usually the problem is pretty basic -- you find money but then there isn't really anything you need to spend it on -- but in some games (like Fable and Dungeon Lords), so little work went into the economy that you can actually make money by repeatedly buying and selling an item at a shopkeeper.
Well, to Rebelmind's credit, they're pretty good about giving you places to spend money. In Space Hack, it cost a lot of money to keep your equipment repaired. In The Chosen, the method is a little more fun. You get to combine pieces of equipment to improve them. There are many rules for how these combinations work -- for example, weapons improve the damage or armor rating of an item, at the cost of durability -- but the end result is that for a certain amount of money, you can grow your equipment with you, and it's sometimes more fun to develop your equipment than it is to develop your character.

More importantly, you have to keep making decisions about what to do with the items you find. Do you sell them and make money, or do you try and combine them and spend money? Early in the game this decision is easy, as it doesn't cost a lot of money to improve basic equipment, but the better you develop your items, the more it costs to continue to add to them, and then what do you do? There isn't a lot of money available in the game (demons, it turns out, are fairly chintzy), and so the answer isn't obvious. But, just like with the followers, it's nice when a game forces you to pay attention and to make some decisions.


Conclusion

The Chosen: Well of Souls is what it is. It's a bargain-priced action role-playing game, and it delivers about what you should expect. I mean, if you go to a zombie movie and it features a small band of survivors who get picked off one by one, should you be disappointed? No, because while you can always hope for something more original, that's what you paid to see.

The Chosen delivers all the combat you could want during its 30-hour campaign, but it doesn't even try to do anything more. There is very little dialogue, there is almost no story, and there is nothing in the way of bells and whistles (the voice acting in particular is brutal, which is surprising since it was supposedly re-recorded for the North American release). But the combat works well enough to hold the game together, and it might be enough to entertain people who enjoy grinding through combat without all that bothersome talking getting in the way. For everyone else, as long as you enter with tempered expectations, you might find The Chosen to be a nice enough diversion, but nothing more.
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BioShock Review

Introduction

Before I begin, I should note that possibly the greatest detractor in the experience of playing BioShock is the massive amount of hype surrounding this product. Currently the top-rated game at Metacritic (at 96/100, last top games being Oblivion and Gears of War at 94/100), BioShock is one of those games where you have a hard time identifying your personal playing experience with what you've seen written in previews and reviews.

That's not really a comment on the game itself, but if you raise expectations high enough you'll make it impossible for any game to fulfill them. BioShock suffers a bit from that - without any heightened anticipation, most people would love this excellently crafted hybrid. And most people still do, but they might have done so more without the hype. Still, Ken Levine finally got his blockbuster hit, and there's probably no other developer more deserving of one.

The Game's Body

I won't spoil BioShock's storyline in this review, or even discuss much of it. Essentially, you're thrown into an ex-idyllic dystopia gone mad and have to survive. In order to fight off the hordes of crazed superpowered humans called splicers, you will have to use all means available to you. These include guns, plasmids that give you potent special powers, ammunition upgrades, hacked security bots, and, more often than not, the environment The important resources available to you are ammo, EVE that powers your plasmids, and Adam that can buy you character upgrades from vending machines. Money can get you the ammo and EVE, but Adam is harder to come by as you have to harvest it from the syringe-wielding Little Sisters, who are protected by well-armed Big Daddies.

The game plays mostly like a straight FPS, offering the choice of a handful of weapons, each (except the wrench and research camera) with 3 ammo types. It's certainly possible to run and gun through a lot of the game, but as you go along you'll typically find that using certain types of ammo and planning a certain strategy will help through the tougher bit. This goes for Big Daddy fights, but also for certain hold-down-the-fort events in the game.

Physically, you'll have access to a lot of tonics (combat, engineering, and physical) and plasmids (including the likes of Electro Shock or Telekinesis). You can get and switch them about at certain machines, though you'll need to invest quite a bit of Adam for most upgrades. The choice of tonics and plasmids to use can be pretty straightforward, but will affect your gameplay and chances of survival greatly.

There are a few hints at survival or adventure elements, but slightly more significant is the addition of RPG elements. The plasmids resemble spells, running on the mana-like EVE, and the tonics basically function like character talents or perks. There are a lot of items to pick up in the game, but not a lot that can be equipped or used in difficult situations. Frustration at the lack of an inventory screen coupled with the semi-generic way all of these elements have been implemented means that hardcore RPG fans probably won't find what they're looking for. Sure, there are a lot of similarities to System Shock 2, but the game was clearly aimed at a different audience.
The story is pretty linear. While you're pretty much free to go anywhere you want within constrained areas, you can't actually progress the game much other than in following the set of events Irrational assigned to the player. This means that despite promises to the contrary, every play-through will be basically the same except in the details.

The details themselves aren't half bad, and they do offer some richness of gameplay. Apart from the question of how you approach the Little Sisters, there is a lot to enjoy in experimenting with different combinations of weapons, plasmids and tonics. The (living, breathing world) of Rapture applies to a lot of smaller details, as NPCs wander around living their lives for most of the time. This doesn't apply to key NPCs, meaning the hinges of the storyline are always at exactly the same spot. For the most part, you won't notice much about Rapture's living world unless you go out and search for it.

The Game's Soul

The game's graphics are nothing short of grand. The lighting, textures and models are all superbly crafted. More importantly, the game is very well optimized, breaking a lot of current weak standards by being easily playable on a computer a few years old, albeit with a lot of graphical options turned down.

More importantly, those great graphics are used to support a great atmosphere. Rapture is a visually stunning place, made with great attention to detail and a lot of spirit, with the caveat that it's suspiciously close to Fallout at times. Rapture is a mix of a Victorian world with a retro-50's world; throw in some steampunk elements and you're sure to be visually wowed frequently as you make your way through the game. This tough combination of settings is done extremely well here, with an obviously consistent vision stopping it from feeling too dispersed.

The atmosphere is supported by the amazing voice acting. And you will hear people talk a lot, not just through the radio or old audio recordings, but also in the eerie sound of a splicer talking to himself about various insane topics or a Little Sister innocently frolicking about talking about angels. The music fits in well, complimenting the background noise of bulkheads grinding or the jarring beat of a Big Daddy's heavy feet thumping in the distance.
Critiques: the obvious ones

I've skipped over chances to criticise some gameplay elements previously, so I'll be handling them next. First up are critiques you'd find valid for the game even if it hadn't been hyped.

First, and most obvious, is the hacking minigame. I'll have to admit I'm not fond of minigames to begin with, so it (might just be me,) but the whole experience is frustrating for a number of reasons. First, there's the puzzled initial reaction of (what does plumbing have to do with hacking)? Then, after a couple of times, you might start to think it's slightly frustrating to play this somewhat simple or even childish mini-game every time you hack something (though this is partially avoidable by plentiful use of the research camera). The fact that time apparently freezes as you hack to the point of leaving your character floating in mid-air makes this minigame even more absurd.

Then there's the fact that this game is simply too easy. Now, there's nothing wrong with a game being easy and BioShock does offer various difficulty options at the start of a new game. It's just not enough. The problem with BioShock is that every level is absolutely strewn about with upgrades, medicinals, and ammo. Worse, the free-to-use Vita-Chambers mean that you'll resurrect at no cost, so you can return time and again to any fight, often with the opponent's hostility suddenly disappearing. This means that there's actually no conceivable way to lose this game and, unlike System Shock, no point where you can make it too difficult for yourself to finish (short of not picking up any Adam or shooting all your EVE and ammo into a wall). If there's any textbook definition of a game being too easy, BioShock is it.

Next is the game's extreme linearity. This is kind of one foot in an obvious critique and another in the hype-related ones, but it's not unfair to state that the gameplay of modern shooters, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. somewhat raises the bar. It would be fine that BioShock does not fulfill these demands if it weren't for the many promises that were made that the game isn't linear, such as the oft-reported choice of killing a Little Sister or not. The details are, as said, quite good, but you can't really claim it helps replayability that at the end of the day all of your in-game choices change very little, as you end up completing the same objectives and squashing the same opponents at the exact same trigger points. Isn't it ironic that BioShock, touted to be setting a new standard for FPS titles, is actually a step back in non-linear design? If the game had incorporated more RPG elements, perhaps this wouldn't be such an issue.

Critiques: the oblique ones

BioShock was promised to contain a lot of moral choices and consequences, first and foremost through the harsh moral choice of how to treat the Little Sisters. In a moral sense, this choice is treated in a laughably childish matter. It presents you with a rock-solid dichotomy of choices to (be evil) or (be good), which is kind of an odd representation of reality. And in this case, being evil or being good automatically means you're the personification of that characteristic, (evil made flesh) or (good incarnate). There's no middle way available at all, even if you try to, say, save half the Little Sisters and destroy the other half. The option to avoid all Little Sisters is not only impossible, but even if it were possible, it'd make your time in the game frustrating and practically impossible to play due to lack of Adam. To offer such a limited range of choices and sticking to two extremes is disappointingly narrow.
As a classic example of gaming choice and consequence, BioShock really falls short. The whole point of a moral dilemma should logically be that your choice offers some kind of real consequence. BioShock is one of those games that supposedly (features) such difficult, visceral, and tear-jerking moral decisions to call out the player's humanity. However, the actual meat and bones of the choice is pretty dry, and the consequences are virtually non-existent for the actual duration of the game, right up until the end when it smacks you in the face a bit. But never while playing the game are you subjected to such a thing as, say, all Big Daddies turning hostile to you because of your hostility toward Little Sisters, or significantly different paths that open up simply because you saved a lot of the Adam-hungry orphans.

Another promised intellectual approach of this game involves its philosophical underpinnings, based primarily on the works of Ayn Rand. And there are indeed a lot of stabs at the philosophy of individual strength and übermensch-like tendencies throughout the game. I'll put my personal dislike of Rand aside for a second and note that having philosophical underpinnings to a game is always a breath of relief for gaming in general, and helps it take steps towards being taken more seriously as an art form.

With that said, if I criticise BioShock's approach not from a gamer's viewpoint (since the average gamer might justly be impressed) but from a literary intellectual viewpoint, it falls 20 yards short of the 10-yard marker. Not only are Rand's ideas not the most fascinating to use as the epic focus of a game, the biggest problem here is not so much the way the world is structured around the idea of the power of individuals, it's the way this idea is delivered to you. And when I say delivered, I mean screamed. BioShock doesn't beat about the bush, practically pushing your face into their philosophical pie while shouting (get it, get it!) The approach is ham-fisted, to say the least, which turns the personifications of freedom, willpower, and slavery dotted in the game into exclamation points, or even rather disappointing unsubtle parodies of a point that might well have been stated more clearly via a more subtle manner.

Conclusion

Don't be too put off at my caveats above - BioShock is clearly a 2007 Game of the Year contender and an FPS hybrid that is well above normal standards in production values, design, and originality. The fact that BioShock is such an easy favourite says more on the state of gaming today than it does of the game itself, but don't let that distract you from a solid gaming experience.

While BioShock ends up being more of a shooter than an RPG, it is a cut above the rest in atmosphere and gameplay. Don't buy it expecting everything you've heard about it to be true (an advice that holds true for most games these days), but don't fret about buying it if you're looking for a cleverly crafted shooter and a visually stunning experience.
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Two Worlds Review

Introduction

Usually when I play a role-playing game, the title of the game makes perfect sense. For example, when I played Titan Quest and World of Warcraft, the titles were pretty indicative of what I was going to get, at least thematically. But then there are some games where the title is a head-scratcher. Consider Sacred. When I played that game a couple years ago, I couldn't figure out where the title came from, and I always wondered if the title made sense at some point in the game's development, or if the developer just liked the word and thought it would look good on a game box, sort of like when George Eastman came up with the name Kodak for his new camera (he simply liked the letter (k)).

Add to the latter list the game Two Worlds from developer Reality Pump. As far as I can tell, the title of the game doesn't have anything to do with anything. There aren't two worlds in the game, and the single-player campaign deals with Aziraal, the dead god of war. Some people in the (one) world want to bring him back to life, but you're not with them. You think the (one) world is a better place with him dead. However, a shady group of individuals manages to gain some leverage over you by kidnapping your sister, and they force you to hunt for the five pieces of an ancient relic that can bring the dead god back to life. The campaign then deals with you exploring the (one) world and tracking down the pieces of the relic, before finally confronting the shady group and their evil god. So how do you get Two Worlds from that? I have no idea.


Character Development

Despite Two Worlds not having much in the way of a storyline, in the single-player campaign you're forced to play a human male character whose skill set doesn't match any of the game's 12 official classes (in multiplayer, you can also be a female or an elf, and you have to pick a class). Your character is sort of an (everyman) character, with an assortment of skills for melee combat, ranged combat, and magic. Later, as you visit towns during your travels, you can learn new skills to make your character even more versatile.

Skills include abilities like (strong hand,) which increases the amount of melee damage you do, and (disarming arrow,) which disarms opponents from afar (and which is really a pain when it's done to you). There are also thief skills for sneaking, stealing, and picking locks, and a (riding) skill for riding horses and other mounts. Magic is also considered to be a skill. There are five schools of magic, and as you put more skill points into each school, you're allowed to cast the higher level spells in the school. The damage done by spells isn't controlled by your skill level, though. Instead, the magic system uses (cards,) where the more cards you play, the more damage you do. There are also booster cards that you can use to reduce the mana cost of a spell, increase the duration of a spell, and more.

Each time your character gains a level, you receive five attribute points to spend on your attributes (strength, dexterity, vitality and willpower) and one skill point to spend on your skills. You also get skill points for passing certain thresholds (for example, by killing enough enemies or by picking open enough locks), and some quests reward you with skill points as well. Moreover, there is an alchemy component to the game, where you can brew potions for your character, and it's pretty easy to brew potions that add permanent bonuses to your attributes. As a result, while your character starts out weak (boars in particular killed me easily), by the end of the game you're way more powerful than anything else, and combat is pretty much a joke. When I got to the final boss, I killed him in two hits, and the spell he cast didn't damage me at all.


Mechanics

In Two Worlds you control a single character. The game uses a third person perspective (the camera sits over your shoulder), and you use the WASD keys to move and the mouse to steer. Left clicking the mouse causes you to attack with your weapon, and right clicking the mouse causes you to use a designated special attack or spell. Whenever you reach an interactive item (such as an NPC to talk to or a chest to open), the spacebar is what you use to start the interaction. The control system is pretty standard, but if you don't like the way something works, you can always configure the keys to your liking.

There is a certain amount of dialogue in Two Worlds, but mostly what you do in the game is fight things. Enemies start out as forest creatures, like wolves and boars, but then they eventually progress to orcs and demons and even dragons. Unfortunately, the combat system doesn't work very well. You can't strafe or block, and the (s) key causes you to turn around and walk away rather than walk backwards, and so once you enter into combat (usually against three or more opponents at once) there isn't a lot you can do other than swing away and hope for the best. Worse, developer Reality Pump apparently had no idea what an end-game character might look like, and so the healing potions available in the game aren't nearly powerful enough. My character ended up with 30,000 hit points, but the best healing potion only heals 1000 hit points, and so potions were basically useless in combat.
As a result, you're probably going to die a lot in Two Worlds, but, luckily, there isn't really any penalty for death. Each time you die, you simply appear at a health shrine. You don't leave a corpse, you don't drop any gold, and you don't lose any experience. And since there are health shrines all over the place, death only means that you have to waste a little time running back to where you were, and it means that you can win any fight, just by repeatedly throwing yourself at it. You might die ten times, but so what? (Note: There's a little bit of sarcasm there. Any system that allows you to defeat an enemy by dying multiple times yourself seems silly to me, and dying over 100 times in a game takes some of the realism out of it.)


The Campaign

Two Worlds has sort of an odd campaign. What makes it odd is that the required components are short and sort of unfulfilling. Early in the game you're told to collect five pieces of an ancient relic, but the pieces aren't particularly hard to reach. The first time I acquired one of the pieces there was so little fanfare that I didn't even realize what I had done. Then after you've acquired the five pieces, it's off to the final battle. In other words, the main storyline only updates twice -- once at the beginning and once at the end -- and the rest of the game involves spending 30-50 hours building up your character by completing side quests. I can't think of another game where the ratio of main quests to side quests was so lopsided in favor of the side quests.

Fortunately, the side quests are pretty well done. As an example, at one point you're walking by a cave, and you see a man out front. When you talk to him, he tells you that a thief stole his ring and ran into the cave. The cave is full of skeletons, and when you reach the thief, he tells you that the skeletons were put there to protect him from intruders, but that they've started attacking him now as well. The thief will then make you a deal: if you can find the necromancer who raised the skeletons and convince him to fix the problem, he'll give you the ring. The necromancer, of course, will also have a task for you, and so on. The side quests are often nicely linked in this way, and they do a good enough job of bringing the world and its conflicts to life.

What doesn't really work in the campaign is the prestige system. There are seven factions in the game (including the merchant's guild and the necromancers), and by completing side quests for them, you gain prestige with them. The problem is, the system doesn't really do anything or go anywhere. The merchant's guild gives you better prices if they like you, but most factions don't give you any sort of reward, and if you destroy one faction at the request of another, the world doesn't change. When I went to the necromancer town and killed the head necromancer, not only did the other necromancers in the town not attack me, they didn't even act like anything had happened. This part of the game seems unfinished at best.


Conclusion

There are more good things and bad things about the game, but they tend to balance each other out. For example, I liked the graphics engine and how Reality Pump added some nice visual touches, like slightly blurring objects in the distance to give the world a better sense of depth. But then I hated everything about horse riding, and I have no idea why Reality Pump didn't just use the same WASD system for moving horses that they used for moving people. Instead, you have to (guide) your horse, but every time I tried to do that, I ended up galloping off nowhere near where I wanted to go, and I had absolutely no luck in trying to fight while mounted, and so I ended up walking everywhere.

In other words, Two Worlds is a mediocre game. Nothing about it is awful, but nothing about it works particularly well, either. I knew I was in some trouble when I watched the opening movie, and I had no idea that the guy featured there was supposed to be my character, since they didn't look anything alike (this despite the fact that you can't do a lot during character creation to change your appearance). Two Worlds is just riddled with problems like that, where a little more polish and a little more effort would have gone a long way.

As it stands now, Two Worlds is a badly balanced, awkwardly controlled, but nice looking game. If you enjoyed the Gothic games or even the post-patch version of Dungeon Lords, then you might want to give it a try, but for most people I'd recommend that you skip it or wait for the price to come down. Two Worlds feels a lot more like a $20 game to me than it does a $50 game.
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Dungeon Siege II: Broken World Review

Introduction

In Dungeon Siege II (released in August of 2005), you led a group of adventurers on a quest to stop the evil prince Valdis from taking over Aranna. However, at the end of the campaign, just when it looked like you were about to prevail, an ally of yours revealed himself to be something else, and he caused a great cataclysm to usher in a new age. Valdis died in the encounter, but the pretend ally escaped, and the world changed -- but not for the better.

In Dungeon Siege II: Broken World (released in August of 2006), you're on the hunt for that former ally of yours, who you now know as the Overmage. It's a year later, but the world is still in a certain amount of chaos. The elves were almost completely decimated in the cataclysm, the humans are in disarray, and the dryads are keeping to themselves. Worse, many familiar enemies from the first game have become twisted and have gained new powers. But all is not lost. Your companions have survived, and new allies have emerged, and with them you'll need to hunt down the Overmage and put a stop to his evil plan, whatever it might be.


The New Campaign

Among the many additions in the Broken World expansion pack, the most important is the new campaign. The campaign adds a final act to the story with a definitive ending for you and the Overmage -- you won't have to worry about onion rings and a fade-out here. The new campaign is much shorter than the original campaign, but it should provide you with 10-20 hours of gameplay.

Unfortunately, the campaign isn't very exciting. It's like developer Gas Powered Games knew that they had to create an expansion pack, but they didn't have any good ideas for it, and so they just plopped down a bunch of monsters for you to kill. As a result, there is plenty of violence, but there isn't much interaction with your companions, there is only one puzzle sequence (with a joke -- literally and figuratively -- as a reward), there are few books and no chants to find, only one chest turned out to be a mimic, there weren't many secret doors, and so on.

Or consider the quests. Most of the quests involve you hunting down and killing creatures, including new (surgeon) enemies, but very few of them add anything to the story, and about half of them end badly, so you don't feel good about completing them. One of the quests takes place in the Aman'lu Arena, and it works exactly the same as the Aman'lu Arena quest in the original game, just with tougher enemies and better rewards. How unoriginal and unexciting is that?

Worse, while the focus of the campaign is on combat, the combat is pretty easy. I started a new party and played through the Dungeon Siege II campaign before playing the Broken World campaign. I struggled quite a bit at the start of Dungeon Siege II (most of the skills were (rebalanced) to make them less powerful at early levels), but I cruised through Broken World without a single party wipe. The end battle in particular was sad. Fighting Valdis at the end of Dungeon Siege II was interesting because he was a tough boss and there were some puzzle elements to the fight, but the final boss in Broken World is boring. He has a lot of hit points and does a lot of damage, but defeating him is just a matter of beating on him for a long time until he finally keels over dead. Ho hum.


Other Additions

Besides the new campaign, the Broken World expansion pack also adds an assortment of other new things to see: a skill trainer who can reset your skill points (for a price), enchantment recipes that can create unique items, new pets and companions, a new race and new classes, and more. Some of these changes aren't especially meaningful -- your starting race, for example, makes almost no difference in your character development, and so adding a dwarf race doesn't do a whole lot -- but a couple of them, the recipes and classes, are significant.
Enchantment recipes are sort of fun things. There are about 45 of them in the game, and they drop like books (and are stored as such in your journal). Each recipe lists an item and a group of reagents, and if you enchant the item with the reagents, then you end up with a new, unique item. If you've played the original campaign then you know that unique items are usually pretty good, and the recipe items are no exception.

The problem with recipes is that it's sort of a pain to track down the item to be enchanted plus all of the necessary reagents. Gas Powered Games didn't change in any way how shops work, and so it's tedious to an extreme to visit a shop, exit your game, load your game, and then repeat until you find everything you need for a recipe. I have no idea why they didn't modify shops to improve their selection (especially the reagent shops) to make recipes easier to manage. As a result, recipes are nice but also annoying.

The two new classes work a little better. The new Fist of Stone class is a combination of the Melee and Nature Magic classes. It's basically a tough fighter who can do some healing, and who can also inflict some area-effect earthquake damage. The new Blood Assassin class is a combination of the Ranged and Combat Magic classes. This class can (mark) its enemies and then (execute) the mark for additional damage and other benefits.

It's sort of funny; if you play the original Dungeon Siege II campaign, part of the tutorial cautions you against multi-classing, but the two new multi-classes provide a nice mix. They get to use the skills and powers of their core classes, and they also get skills and powers of their own, and so they can be pretty powerful. They also get special (weapon enhancements,) which are buffing spells that give a nice bonus to the character, and which also automatically split experience (using a 70/30 split) to the core classes, so you don't have to micromanage the experience on your own. I tried out both new classes when I made my way through the campaigns, and I thought they were fun to play.


Conclusion

Overall, I wasn't exactly thrilled with the Broken World expansion pack. I liked some of the changes, which you can use during the original campaign as well as the new campaign, but mostly the expansion pack left me underwhelmed, especially in comparison to the Titan Quest expansion pack, which did a lot to revitalize the game.

Nothing in Broken World is overly creative or exciting, and it seems like the expansion pack was created because everyone expected it to be there, rather than because there was any compelling reason for it to be made (sort of like Shrek 3). So be wary if you're thinking about buying it, even at this late date. Broken World isn't horrendously awful or anything, but there are probably better ways out there for you to be spending your time.
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Silverfall Review

When Blizzard released Diablo way back in 1996, it took years for the copycats to start showing up, but now point-and-click action role-playing games seem to be coming out every couple of months. Sometimes the developers of these games put a lot of effort into the title, like with Titan Quest, and sometimes we get B-grade games like Space Hack and Restricted Area. Silverfall, from developer Monte Cristo Games, falls pretty squarely into the latter category.

Silverfall uses a standard (bad guys are trying to take over the world) background story. You start out in the city of Silverfall -- just in time for undead trolls and other unlikely creatures to sack it. You escape with a childhood friend (who is always conveniently the opposite gender of your character) and some other refugees to a nearby swamp. Some undead creatures follow you there, but fortuitously they only appear in small groups, which allows your level 1 character to kill them and build up some experience. Eventually, you gain a couple of companions, and you convince some other cities to help you take back Silverfall, but that only ends up being the first step in foiling an Evil Plot. As you play the rest of the campaign, you have to figure out what's going on and then of course put a stop to it.

The plot to the campaign works well enough, although Monte Cristo doesn't really do anything to develop it. For the most part, the first time you hear about a city is when you have to complete a quest there, and the first time you learn about a boss is when you have to kill it. That makes the events in the game feel like hoops to jump through rather than chapters in a compelling story. You also get some companions in the game, and their background stories are developed in small, subtle ways, but in general Silverfall isn't worried about story or dialogue. It's all about combat.

Silverfall uses a classless character system. When you create your character, you simply pick a name, a gender and a race. Then each time you gain a level, you receive 4 attribute points to allocate between strength, agility, constitution and intelligence (which affect about what you'd expect), and you receive 4 skill points to spend on the game's 100+ skills. Skills are divided into areas like melee combat and healing magic, and there is even a special page just for your race. Silverfall also has a dichotomy between nature and technology, where your actions might push your leanings to one way or the other, and you can gain skills in those areas as well. Unfortunately, Silverfall is a little too much like Fable in regards to character development. By the time my gunslinger character reached the end of the campaign (at level 52), he'd already maxed out all of the skills he cared about -- and then some. Silverfall isn't a game where you have to carefully consider where you spend your points. You get so many points it's overkill.

The mechanics in Silverfall are basically the same as in every other action role-playing game out there. You left click for normal commands, such as moving, talking to NPCs, and executing basic attacks (each weapon type has its own basic attack), and you right click for special attacks (such as the (cold ring) spell, which freezes all nearby enemies). The 1-3 keys hotkey basic attacks, and the 4-8 keys hotkey special attacks. The 9 and 0 keys are used for health and power potions.
In some games, a simple control scheme can still result in complex and difficult battles, but not in Silverfall. Attacks can disrupt enemies, and so faster attacks are better than slower attacks, and ranged attacks are better than melee attacks. I played a gunslinger in the campaign, and even though there seemed to be an extreme shortage of guns being dropped, I cruised through everything after the initial swamp area. Part of the problem is that you get two companions to help you with the battles, where the battles seem like they were designed for a single character, and the other part of the problem is that you gain so many skills that you can really pump up your character to the point where nothing can stand in its way. My character was supposedly using shotguns and rifles, but after his skill bonuses kicked in, it was more like he was using a machine gun, and I don't think a single boss battle lasted more than 30 seconds.

On the plus side, while the combat is generally easy, you at least get to control how much massacring you have to do. The world of Silverfall is not completely linear like in Dungeon Siege or Titan Quest, but the interface is friendly about telling you where you're supposed to go. So you can take a direct route to your next quest if you want, or you can wander around for a while if you feel like killing extra creatures. You can also teleport directly to towns and dungeons that you've already visited, and so once again you can skip a certain amount of grinding through enemies if you don't want to do it. This is nice, because it allows you to control the pace of the game. Of course, since I didn't have to explore every inch of the terrain (there didn't seem to be any reason to), I finished the campaign in well under 20 hours.

There are more things I could talk about -- for example, the graphics aren't anything special, but the voice acting is fairly nice when it's used -- but, basically, Silverfall is a second-tier game, and if you know that going in, then you should be happy enough with what it delivers. Silverfall is short and easy, and it probably won't leave much of a lasting impression (right now I can only remember about three of the names used in the campaign, and that includes Silverfall itself), but I found the game to be entertaining enough, and I think it's worthy of a low-level recommendation.
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Titan Quest: Immortal Throne Review

Introduction

Iron Lore Entertainment (developer) and THQ (publisher) teamed up to release Titan Quest last June. The game was an action RPG in the mold of Diablo, where you had to kill thousands of enemies, each with a click or two or five from your mouse. I basically hated the game. It looked nice and it ran smoothly, but it was all killing and no story, and I thought Iron Lore did a terrible job of using the Greek mythology backdrop to bring their game to life.

Now Iron Lore and THQ are back with an expansion pack for Titan Quest called Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. The expansion pack adds a new act to the campaign, complete with new monsters, bosses, and quests. It also adds lots of new features to make the game friendlier to play, including a caravan driver who can transfer items between your characters. But if, like me, you didn't particularly like Titan Quest, or if it was merely an adequate way to kill 30 hours of time, is Immortal Throne something you'd want to buy? Surprisingly, I'd say the answer is yes.


The Campaign

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne picks up where Titan Quest left off. You start out in the city of Rhodes, and you immediately learn that Hades has taken advantage of the strife on the surface to make a grab for power. His plan? To replace Zeus as the top god in the pantheon, and to make the world a darker, less forgiving place. That means you first have to find a way to enter the underworld, and then, once there, you have to defeat an actual god. Now, your character has already killed telkines and titans and thousands of other enemies, but a god is another matter entirely, and so along the way you have to get help from heroes and other figures from Greek mythology, you have to complete numerous quests, and you generally have to gain enough experience to make your character powerful enough to withstand the final battle.

I actually enjoyed this new act to the campaign more than I thought I would. Iron Lore Entertainment did two important things to make it better. First and foremost, they got the characters from Greek mythology more involved in the story. In Titan Quest, a storyteller would tell you about somebody like Herakles, but you'd never actually meet him or go anywhere where he'd had his adventures. In Immortal Throne, you visit all sorts of people and places. Odysseus and Agamemnon send you on quests, you have to duke it out with Charon and Cerberus, and you get to explore the River Styx and Elysium Fields. For me, this made the act much more involving than before.

Secondly, Iron Lore mixed up the quests a little better. In Titan Quest, just about every quest directed you to wander somewhere and kill something, which wasn't very exciting, because that's what you'd do when you weren't on quests, too. But in Immortal Throne there's more variety. There are some escort missions, there are some collection missions, and at one point you even have to find keys and pull levers. These aren't exactly cutting edge concepts, but they go a long way in making the quests feel more like quests, and in breaking up the monotony of the combat. I also think Iron Lore did a nicer job with the ratio of quests to random killings. There are fewer optional caves, and fewer forests filled with nothing but optional creatures to kill, and that's a good thing.

On the downside, there is still a lot of grinding to be done in the new act, and there still isn't a lot of variety in the way enemies attack you. At one point you come across some siege engines, and they're different and cool, but just about everything else fits into being a melee fighter, an archer, or a spellcaster, and only their appearance changes. Worse, enemies are re-used all over the place. It makes sense when the act starts out in a swamp that you'd see troglodytes, hydradons, and bullfrog creatures. But then you see the exact same things in the underworld and other places, and it's boring. The Diablo games in particular did a nice job in varying enemies and tactics to keep combat interesting, but Iron Lore -- and lots of other action RPG developers -- haven't figured out how to do that yet.


Other New Features

Of course, Iron Lore didn't only add a new final act in the expansion pack. They also added a bunch of other new features, both major and minor. For starters, they added a new dream mastery. This mastery involves trances (auras that affect you or your enemies), dreams (to buff yourself), and distortions (to damage enemies). It even allows you to summon a Nightmare creature to help you out. But to me this mastery didn't really add anything to the game. Titan Quest already had a rather complete set of masteries for characters to choose from, including four magical masteries, and so what was the gain of a new one? Still, more options are always good, and the dream mastery gives players extra choices for how to develop their characters.

The Immortal Throne expansion pack also adds two new NPC types: caravan drivers and enchanters. Caravan drivers give you an extra place to store your gear. You can find them in most towns, and you can give them some gold to increase the amount of space you have reserved for you. The original Titan Quest came with set equipment, plus relics and charms that you could insert into your equipment, and Immortal Throne adds arcane formulae to that, and so this extra storage space is very convenient, and it means you won't need to teleport back and forth to towns as often to sell stuff. Caravan drivers also give you a special transfer area that is common to all of your characters. That means if you're playing a spellcaster and you find a great melee weapon, you can put it into the transfer area, and then your fighter character can pick it up from there. And even if you don't have multiple characters, the transfer area provides extra storage, and so it's useful regardless.
Enchanters deal with relics and charms and arcane formulae. In Titan Quest, if you inserted a relic into a piece of equipment, the insertion was permanent. You couldn't take the relic back out or change your mind and insert a different relic instead. Enchanters change that. For a hefty fee, they can remove a relic from a piece of equipment and then return to you either the relic or the piece of equipment (destroying the other). This is a great improvement, because relics are sometimes hard to find, and equipment is all over the place, so this makes it easy to keep your relics as you improve your equipment.

Arcane formulae are used to create artifacts, which are a new type of equipment in Immortal Throne. Each arcane formula requires relics, charms, and/or other artifacts in order to produce an artifact, and you need to bring the ingredients to an enchanter (along with another hefty fee) to have the artifact crafted. Artifacts are kind of fun, but this is another place where I don't know if the addition really adds anything, since characters already had nine equipment slots, and what's the difference between nine and ten? Artifacts also require you to lug around a lot of relics and charms and formulae, and so it's a good thing Iron Lore increased the amount of storage space you get.

Finally, Iron Lore made a bunch of smaller improvements. When you die, your character leaves behind a grave marker, and if you can get back to the marker before you die again, then you'll back get some of your lost experience. You can toggle an option so that you no longer accidentally pick up equipment when you're trying to move around. There are buttons that allow you to auto-sort your inventory. There are expensive scrolls that you can purchase so that you can cast some magic spells. Quest mobs are now labeled with a purple color so that they're easier to identify. And more. Iron Lore touched upon nearly every part of the game.


Conclusion

Overall, I'd say that Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is a great expansion pack for an okay game. Iron Lore Entertainment made all sorts of nice changes, both expected and unexpected, and those changes did a lot to improve some of the problems of the original game. But Titan Quest is still Titan Quest. It's still an action RPG where you have to enjoy killing creatures over and over again, just to gain more experience and to find more equipment.

So if you enjoyed the original Titan Quest, then Immortal Throne is a slam dunk. You should go out and buy it right away. But if you didn't really get into Titan Quest, the answer is a little bit trickier. I played through Titan Quest twice when I wrote my review for it, and I disliked it nearly every step of the way. But when I played the entire campaign again for this review, I liked it a little bit better. It's not going to make me forget Arcanum or Fallout or even Diablo II, but it's now a nice enough diversion, and it's something you might want think about if you're looking for a way to wile away some free time.

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