Darkstone

Summary: Solid non-grindy action RPG. Nothing special but 10 times better than Torchlight despite having 10 times worse graphics.

Once you get past the fugly graphics, it's an easy to learn game with fluid and responsive controls, moderate length and a very gentle learning curve. The graphics look like a low polygon game from 1997, considering Darkstone was released in 1999 those kinda graphics were already outdated by then. At least there are colored lighting effects so it does look better than most 3D games from 1996 and earlier. If visuals are very important to you, you can give Darkstone a pass but if you're an action RPG addict and just can't find anything you haven't already played, you might be positively surprised by Darkstone. There's nothing ground braking about it so this isn't mandatory playing.

This game has a select few basic but occasionally clever puzzles which is a welcome change of pace from all the brainless mouse clicking - unless you absolutely hate puzzles, but it's only a minor aspect of the gameplay in Darkstone. The only time the game made me almost want to quit was when I had to search an entire dungeon for eyeball-sized "ocular orbs". You need several of those to complete a main quest puzzle, the puzzle in itself isn't rocket science but Darkstone does -not- have item highlighting and it's rather hard to spot small items on the ground. Sure, the orbs are inside a treasure chest and you usually get a sound effect if you find something important - if you find. When you open a chest, the loot drops on the floor and I often had to zoom in to spot the objects. Going back through the multi-level dungeon just to find one eyeball object wasn't fun at all. It's poor game design when you force the player to sweep a dungeon 100% and open each and every single treasure chest because a main quest item is inside there somewhere. Fortunately, dungeons are fairly compact in this game so you're not going to have any Daggerfall-moments here where you'll be completely lost.

Main quest items aren't marked any different from non-essential side quest items so you often don't know whether to pick up something or not. I ended up laying all my items on the ground in the middle of the village, luckily no one cares and the game saves the location of every item so no worries about losing stuff when you save and reload. No annoying inventory tetris with the town stash, that's a plus. It's a bit of a hassle having to lay out all your stuff on the village ground but it works.
My main complaint with the game is that there are no permanent portals. You can open a magic door anywhere and get to town and back, but if you want to go from the town to the dungeon entrance then you have to walk through the entire map. Outside the village, there are 4 maps so if you're at the bottom of a dungeon in the 4th land and want to go back to the surface, you either walk back up through the entire dungeon or teleport to town and walk through all the surface maps. The latter option is quicker as maps are compact but it does take a couple minutes and if you have no patience for old school game mechanic flaws like that, your patience will be put to the test unnecessarily. Then again, if you can tolerate the crappy graphics to begin with you're surely at least old enough to have played Playstation 1 era games that weren't always user friendly.

Replay value is limited, there are different puzzles every time one starts the game but imho there isn't enough depth to this game to warrant more than one playthrough, unless you're really bored or completion-obsessed. With each playthrough, you are getting one of 3 versions for every main quest so there's a 33% chance for getting the same quests. When I restarted the game in the next difficulty, my first main quest was promptly the same as on my first playthrough.
In terms of difficulty, you start out in normal difficulty just like Diablo 2 and it's comfortable and easy going, even the final boss isn't hard to beat. I did have a very nice vampire sword for my amazon though and haven't compared how the other characters play. In that regard, this isn't a full detailed review as I've only completed the game with one character class. There's a male and female version of each of the classes but they're only different in name, stats are the exact same. The 4 classes include a warrior class (warrior/amazon), a rogue class (assassin/thief), a mage class (wizard/sorceress) and a cleric class (monk/priestess).

If you haven't played NOX yet, I highly recommend picking up NOX instead. Darkstone doesn't quite get the "classic gem" stamp approval from me due to some minor grievances (mainly concerning the backtracking) but if you can look past the non game breaking flaws it has, there's a neat little action RPG that has held up surprisingly well in terms of controls & combat. Don't expect anything that can rival Diablo here, Darkstone beats the competition only in terms of puzzles and puzzles might not be what most action RPG players value as essential so I'm not going to mark this as a must have game in any regard.

PS: Forgive me for the complete lack of structure in this review usually not my style but I have no energy to edit this into a more concise format, I hope it's useful nonetheless.

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EDIT: I didn't complete Darkstone on any of the higher difficulties because item repair costs were starting to grow sky high and there isn't quite enough gold in the game to maintain your economy. Unless you switch to cheaper equipment but then the combat is more tedious so it's going to be a hassle either way. If you don't mind having to loot every monster and sell everything including their grandma's panties in the village shops then the higher difficulties will be fun for you.
On your initial playthrough (in normal mode by default) this isn't so much an issue, you still have to collect and sell loot if you want expensive stuff but you can get by without high end gear, only the final boss requires you to have some decent gear but by that time you should have enough gold anyway unless you've spent too much on upgrading redundant weapons & armor at the blacksmith's.