Posted December 16, 2012
high rated
Just finished this one, thank (god / flying spaghetti monster) it was short. There's little in the way of commentary in this forum so thought I'd share my experience fwiw.
PROS
Short.
Graphics are sorta okay, when the camera actually lets you see them.
Worked "out of the box" with my Xbox360 controller, no need to fudge with joy2key or the like.
Pseudo-stealth play with the elf character is kinda fun in that when the game lets you do it, you actually feel a bit powerful.
CONS
Horrible shitty camera. You can't control it manually and it constantly gives you awkard angles and/or hides the enemy from your sight.
Absolutely no exploration - you just run from one room crowded with baddies to another, trailed by the above shitty camera. It almost feels like you're on rails.
No loot to find in-game, except the occasional health potion or bit of gold. Instead, you buy upgraded versions of what you've already got between levels. All you see is text descriptions of the stuff you're buying.
UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES.
No quicksave, and autosaves are too infrequent. Every time you die and go back to the last checkpoint, the unskippable cutscenes play again. And again. And again.
This game is a melee brawler, but it commits the cardinal sin of never making you feel powerful. At each level the grunts get an HP boost so even though you're upgrading your gear and levelling up, there's no sense of progression. Even routine enemies take between 6-8 hits each with the most powerful character. The game is just one long button-mash.
This game is a melee brawler, but there's basically no blood/gore at all. Landing hits is totally unsatisfying because there's no sense of physical or aural impact; it's plainly obvious you're just swinging away at a hitbox. You have combos but there's no point in using them because there's too many enemies to make it practical, and just spamming your attack button is far more efficient than trying to actually use the moves you're provided. In short, the combat isn't fun, and this game has nothing but combat in it.
The game is somehow both far too easy on normal difficulty and way too difficult at certain points, especially on certain bosses. You only control one character at a time, with the AI controlling the other two, and in theory the other two could die, ending the game. But somehow they (almost) never do, so all you have to do is keep whatever character you're controlling alive, which is basically a cakewalk until you get to a boss - just mash your attack button until everything is dead. Once you get to the boss, the game will throw endless waves of grunts against you while requiring you to take certain actions to make the boss vulnerable, and many bosses regenerate health if you can't button-mash fast enough, making the boss-fights an interminable grind since the bosses tend to have way too much health. And if you die fighting the boss after button-mashing for twenty minutes, guess what, you go back to the last checkpoint which in some cases is one or two fights before you even get to the boss, with an unskippable cutscene or two waiting to be sat through yet again. Epic fail by the devs, I haven't raged so hard at a video game in years.
Ranged combat is just as bad as the melee combat. The fighter and the assassin character have extremely limited ammo, but it doesn't matter because their ranged attacks do almost no damage even to the most basic enemies, and so aren't worth using. The mage's ranged attack does good damage but only if you manage to find a window in which to charge it up, which takes forever and is basically impractical since 90 percent of the time you're swarmed under with grunts. He has other spells like "hold monster" that might be useful in another game, but which are totally useless here because they take too long to fire off and it's far more practical to just control the fighter and kill enemies directly.
I could go on, but the bottom line is that of the 100 or so GoG's I've purchased since joining this site, this game is by far the worst, topping Beyond Divinity for that honor. I forced myself to finish it because it was short and I'm stupid that way. Just a lousy, lousy game.
PROS
Short.
Graphics are sorta okay, when the camera actually lets you see them.
Worked "out of the box" with my Xbox360 controller, no need to fudge with joy2key or the like.
Pseudo-stealth play with the elf character is kinda fun in that when the game lets you do it, you actually feel a bit powerful.
CONS
Horrible shitty camera. You can't control it manually and it constantly gives you awkard angles and/or hides the enemy from your sight.
Absolutely no exploration - you just run from one room crowded with baddies to another, trailed by the above shitty camera. It almost feels like you're on rails.
No loot to find in-game, except the occasional health potion or bit of gold. Instead, you buy upgraded versions of what you've already got between levels. All you see is text descriptions of the stuff you're buying.
UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES.
No quicksave, and autosaves are too infrequent. Every time you die and go back to the last checkpoint, the unskippable cutscenes play again. And again. And again.
This game is a melee brawler, but it commits the cardinal sin of never making you feel powerful. At each level the grunts get an HP boost so even though you're upgrading your gear and levelling up, there's no sense of progression. Even routine enemies take between 6-8 hits each with the most powerful character. The game is just one long button-mash.
This game is a melee brawler, but there's basically no blood/gore at all. Landing hits is totally unsatisfying because there's no sense of physical or aural impact; it's plainly obvious you're just swinging away at a hitbox. You have combos but there's no point in using them because there's too many enemies to make it practical, and just spamming your attack button is far more efficient than trying to actually use the moves you're provided. In short, the combat isn't fun, and this game has nothing but combat in it.
The game is somehow both far too easy on normal difficulty and way too difficult at certain points, especially on certain bosses. You only control one character at a time, with the AI controlling the other two, and in theory the other two could die, ending the game. But somehow they (almost) never do, so all you have to do is keep whatever character you're controlling alive, which is basically a cakewalk until you get to a boss - just mash your attack button until everything is dead. Once you get to the boss, the game will throw endless waves of grunts against you while requiring you to take certain actions to make the boss vulnerable, and many bosses regenerate health if you can't button-mash fast enough, making the boss-fights an interminable grind since the bosses tend to have way too much health. And if you die fighting the boss after button-mashing for twenty minutes, guess what, you go back to the last checkpoint which in some cases is one or two fights before you even get to the boss, with an unskippable cutscene or two waiting to be sat through yet again. Epic fail by the devs, I haven't raged so hard at a video game in years.
Ranged combat is just as bad as the melee combat. The fighter and the assassin character have extremely limited ammo, but it doesn't matter because their ranged attacks do almost no damage even to the most basic enemies, and so aren't worth using. The mage's ranged attack does good damage but only if you manage to find a window in which to charge it up, which takes forever and is basically impractical since 90 percent of the time you're swarmed under with grunts. He has other spells like "hold monster" that might be useful in another game, but which are totally useless here because they take too long to fire off and it's far more practical to just control the fighter and kill enemies directly.
I could go on, but the bottom line is that of the 100 or so GoG's I've purchased since joining this site, this game is by far the worst, topping Beyond Divinity for that honor. I forced myself to finish it because it was short and I'm stupid that way. Just a lousy, lousy game.
