Use my brain…

Steve K Peacock wants more life in his games.  He may also be crazy.

DESPITE THEIR nature, videogames are inherently poor at being imaginative. For every genuine step forward we get a swarm of games that take that new and exciting idea and repackage it for their own ends, adding nothing but still getting away with it. I don’t begrudge them this, they’re a business at the end of the day after all and exploiting what has been shown to work is just good sense for them. But when you can boil down the entire industry to more or less a single plot line per genre, there’s only so long I can maintain this position.

The prime offenders are Role Playing Games and First Person Shooters. Both of which will claim engaging and powerful stories but fail to deliver time and time again. FPS games usually degenerate into Space Marine vs Aliens or just Marine vs Nazi/Terrorists. Or Nazi Terrorists. RPGs, on the other hand, are usually more about the mechanics of the game than the plot itself.

But I’m not trying to rant about actual plots of games, not really. It stands to reason that there will be exceptions to these rules that are astoundingly good – Mass Effect 2 immediately jumps to mind for RPGs, if you can even call it one – but even then the story itself is told in the same way. Cutscene after cutscene, taking you out of the game and stripping you of control of your character, making you watch what is – in essence – a film.

I can’t think of any other media that does this, changes itself into another at certain points. The Metal Gear Solid series has come into a mixture of criticism and praise for this, the obscenely long cutscenes being defended by the argument that “if we must have cutscenes they might as well be awesome”.

That, I suppose, is true. That does avoid the question, however, of if we need cutscenes at all. A cursory glance over the Half-Life series would contend that we don’t, that we can tell a story in a way where we don’t need to remove player immersion. While this is a step in the right direction, I don’t think that your ability to walk around while someone is reeling off exposition makes for that much of a change. Ultimately, what you are experiencing is a cutscene. You have no direct input on what is occurring other than the ability to dickishly run around the character in a circle, or stare blithely at Alyx’s arse. You, as the player, have no real interaction with these moments. That said, there’s not much further to travel to find a form of storytelling that I find genuinely intriguing.

Left 4 Dead’s approach to the story was that, while it may have had one, it most certainly wasn’t going to tell you what it was. The in-game moments of conversation between characters were there largely to do little else but establish the characters themselves. The actual plot of the game was left for you to work out. Clues were provided, graffiti on walls for instance, but if you wanted to know then you had to think. Oddly, Left 4 Dead 2 took a step back in this regard, openly stating to you certain facts about the universe and the characters’ journey.

Perhaps this is why I like adventure games so much. I like working for my story in games, the sensation of earning progression that doesn’t really seem present in so many games. And while adventure games give you only a limited way to interact with the conversation, just as RPGs do, the fact that you have got there without the need for stabbing twenty Kobolds or murdering a warehouse full of thugs gives it a slight edge. But it’s still not far enough.

Continues…

…Supposedly Epic RPGs.

Mercurio Silver, gentleman critic and whinge factory, has taken issue with role-playing games that promise a little more than they can deliver. He has decided to tell you just what that is.

IN MY youth, something which has long since left me, I dreamed of being a king. I grew up in the countryside, a beautiful and serene place that knew not the bubbling, stinking footfalls of the modern world. There were no supermarkets, no radio masts, barely even any roads. It was idyllic.

I hated it.

I longed for the invasion of the modern age; whilst my peers were dipping sheep, I was constructing a combine harvester from milk crates, string and a deactivated World War 2 bomb. Anything to lessen my burden when it came to my chores. I admit, the construction of such a device required more work than the chores themselves would have, but I was a child at the time and, as we all are aware, children are stupid.

But I digress. In my sunny little slice of obsolescence, I dreamt of being an all powerful king. I suppose the fashionable reason for doing so would be to ensure the well being of those I knew, my friends and family and the village in which I lived. I’ve never trucked with fashion, and nor did I want to rule the land for the good of its inhabitants. I wanted to be king because, and this is important, I am a dangerous narcissist.

Unfortunately, my monarchistic fantasies are on hold, stalled by the decline of a suitably manipulatable social class. Instead I have to make do with computer games, like a fat man eating a Kendall’s Acid Pie and pretending that the amount of vowels in the name directly corresponds with the vitamin content of the food. I abide these outlets, but only barely.

It is in RPGs that I draw the most satisfaction, and conversely the most irritation, because of their illusion of choice. The more choice you are apparently presented with, the more painful the realisation of linearity becomes when you reach it. You will be given the choice to be merciful or to extort, threaten, bludgeon, stab, rend, molest and otherwise persuade your way through the game, and every time it will clap its proverbial hands and say “Well done, sir! Doesn’t this just feel as though your actions make a difference to this world?”

At moments like this, my character’s stylish plate-mail a few inches thicker from the blood iron of one thousand mewling peasants splattered across the breast, that I agree. I have murdered an entire village/robbed a shop/assisted an upstanding member of the secondary financial industries in collecting monies owned, and at the bottom of the screen, above my quickbar of eternal torment, a small message pops up.

+2 Chaotic Evil

Then the game goes on. I introduce the Deathly Felbeast of The Underpain’s brain to the outside world via a hastily constructed sun-roof, save the kingdom, and then I realise that, despite my cutting a bloody swath through the lesser classes of Ye Olde Cornwallion, I’m a hero.

Continues…

Format: PS3 / PC | Genre: Platformer/RPG | Publisher: Nobilis | Developer: FrozenByte | Release date: 03/07/09 | RRP: £19.99-£29.99

By Lewis Denby
Within seconds of Trine, you know you’re in for a visual feast.  Rarely has so much care been put into creating a distinctive, tangible aesthetic.  Trine’s world is a marvellous twist on traditional fantasy, with cogs and wheels and gritty steampunk merging seamlessly with the rolling hills and towering castles of this universe.

A three-dimensional yet side-scrolling adventure, Trine also masterfully combines a variety of genres to create a thoroughly satisfying experience.  Cosmetically, it’s a platformer: you jump and bash your way from left to right, across a series of levels that slowly unravel a competent yet sadly uninspiring story of wizardry and terrible curses.  But it’s also part-RPG, with collectable experience vials allowing you to boost your characters’ abilities in a variety of individual manners.  And it’s also, significantly, an excellent physics-puzzler.

//Come together
Bound together by the eponymous magical orb, your trio of characters – a wizard, a thief and a knight – must work together out of a single physical body.  You can switch between each character freely, but only one can present in the world at once.  Each character’s abilities are crucial to certain sections of the game, and they must regularly work together to bypass gargantuan obstacles along the way.

The thief carries a bow and arrow, as well as a grappling hook for latching onto and mantling high ledges, or swinging across gaping chasms.  The knight is tough, covered in armour and holding a sword and shield.  The wizard can’t fight directly, but he has the power to summon and manipulate objects around the world.

Trine’s finest moments are those which encourage you to experiment with the characters’ abilities, in order to overcome some of the more elaborate environmental problems you’ll face on your journey.  It’s an incredibly tactile game, with plenty of object-levitation, box-stacking and rope-swinging to occupy your stay in this evil land.  Experimentation is key, and you’re almost never punished for your ingenious ideas.  Indeed, most puzzles have a number of possible solutions, and a multitude of routes around them.

Levelling up provides you with new skills to utilise in such situations, and although the role-playing is fairly lightweight, it’s an invaluable addition that contributes to Trine’s surprising depth and malleability. There are also a number of treasure chests to be chanced upon – some in plain view, others obstructed or hidden away – which provide new items for your trio of characters to utilise.

//Hacked to pieces
It’s all surprisingly action-heavy, and this is where it begins to irritate.  Only slightly – much of the combat is meaty and satisfying, with gloriously animated skeletons crumbling under the weight of your knight’s attack.  But the bats, introduced after a couple of hours, are an unimpressive idea – as flying enemies generally are in games.  They get in the way and acutely annoy, particularly as they’re so hard to hit.  The result, invariably, is taking unnecessary damage, and hotfooting it back to the last checkpoint to heal up.

Elsewhere, boss encounters fail to impress, amounting mainly to a few goes at button-mashing your way to victory.  There are also a few odd moments in which skeletal foes get stuck on scenery or half-disappear through the ground, removing some of the visual shine.  More awkward than anything is the tendency for Trine to throw wave upon wave of enemies at you when, really, you just want to get on with the puzzle solving.  It’s primarily a game about the environment, and cluttering it with incessant combat scenarios comes across as an unfortunate misstep.

Still, it’s telling that – despite these problems – Trine remains so marvellously enjoyable.  It’s clever without pretension, quietly confident, and brimming with visual flair.  The bizarrely hidden co-op mode, in which three players can work together simultaneously in the world, adds yet another dimension to the fun.  And while the price tag is relatively high (and, oddly, considerably more on the PC than the PS3), it’s a game that charms, excites and invigorates at nearly every turn.  A whimsical, valiant effort.

8/10

What does this score mean?

Format: Xbox360 | Genre: RPG | Publisher: Square Enix | Developer: Tri-Ace | Release Date: 05/06/09 | RRP: £44.99

JRPGs are a rarity in our current console generation in the UK. The reason for this remains unclear, but there certainly seems to only be a few big players in the market at present. Perhaps this lack of competition is why the few we have witnessed have been so mediocre – and unfortunately, though Star Ocean: The Last Hope is certainly one of the better JRPGs for some time, it still falls some way short of the true genre classics.

//A thing of the past
A prequel (and therefore accessible addition) to the series, The Last Hope follows the fall of Earth after World War 3, which made the surface inhospitable due to the launch of nuclear weapons. The remaining governments of the world united to save the human race by researching and developing advanced technology. Only decades later, humanity became a space-faring race with faster-than-light travel, and so began the search for a new home world through the endless ocean of stars.

Our hero character is Edge Maverick, supported by his female counterpart Reimi Saionji. After setting off towards a possible new home, their fleet suffers a problem during warp due to an unknown anomaly. Several of the ships are badly damaged, and two have gone missing. A rescue effort is mounted, and before long Edge and Reimi learn of a threat far more pressing than the search for a new home world.

While the story is interesting, the pace is troublesome. Often you’ll find yourself exploring a dungeon for a good hour or so, and then having to sit back and watch a half-hour scripted sequence. None of these sequences are overtly bad, but they do drag on and have a horrible tendency to reiterate the same plot development over and over again. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s a flaw that distracts from an otherwise engaging story, and if everything were broken up a little more the overall experience would certainly benefit. And the introduction of a new character around four hours in will split opinion. Without spoiling the surprise, let’s just say you will either accept or reject this character, and if the latter, you won’t take the rest of the game seriously and may lose interest entirely.

These issues aside, Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an intriguing adventure in a sci-fi setting. It’s not a perfect pairing of traditional JRPG with science-fiction, but it’s delivered fairly well without compromising either side too badly. You will find the occasional items that ruin the sci-fi immersion, and the reasoning behind the use of swords and bows is a little weak, but generally it works and maintains its integrity. The story is driven along mainly by voiced dialogue rather than text, although there is a fair amount of reading to be done when speaking with NPCs. Initially the dialogue seems unnatural, but after a few more hours it occurred to me that the “problems” were in fact down to cultural differences and not due to poor acting or writing. Star Ocean: The Last Hope has themes of camaraderie, cultural growth, and a strong moral standing. The dialogue really brings that across, and although Western audiences may struggle to accept the narrative style, anime fans and Eastern audiences will not.

[Continues...]

Format: PC | Genre: RPG | Publisher: n/a | Developer: Composite Studios | Out now: £10.38 (www.compositestudios.com)

By Lewis Denby

You certainly couldn’t accuse Ancient Galaxy of a lack of ambition.  This is a true space-age epic, no matter what the production values might initially suggest.  Ultimately, that’s a mixed blessing.  It’s too rough and ready to whole-heartedly recommend, no doubt a symptom of sights set high, but its complexity is nothing short of impressive.

It’s shamelessly single-minded.  Clearly crafted with a love of 90s adventures and traditional PC RPGs, it often feels as ancient as its name suggests.  But there’s an audience for that, and it’s a game that understands its own appeal.  This is slow, meticulous role-playing: Mass Effect with the cinematics stripped back and exploration brought to the fore.  It’ll be tedious to many – but a certain breed of gamer will find a lot to like.

//History lesson
As an archaeologist caught up in intergalactic conflict, you’ll work your way around a series of environments with a gun in one hand and a scanning device in the other. This dual focus provides the backbone of Ancient Galaxy: combat is frequent, and scanning various items fills in the background of the story.  Scanning fallen enemies eventually allows you to morph into their alien forms, and scanning your own corpse after respawning lets you reclaim your lost equipment.  It’s all about careful exploration. Combined with the regular environmental hazards, it’s a high-tech Indiana Jones in space.

Most of your character and inventory tweaking is performed back on board your space craft between missions.  As well as a traditional yet basic skill tree, the ship comes equipped with tools for analysing and upgrading the equipment you’ve found.  But it’s the shape-shifting mechanic that proves the most exciting.  Each of the nine aliens you can become is equipped with different skill-sets, some more appropriate than others for a given situation.  The ability to change race almost on the fly leads to a highly dynamic experience, and it would be interesting to see this incorporated into a more accomplished title.  As it stands, it often feels somewhat lost on a game that isn’t quite strong enough to make it shine.

The developer’s limited resources cut through the mix a little too clearly.  It’s often rather glitchy, with camera troubles, stutters and crashes standing in the way of a fluid journey through the game.  Much of the story is told through ugly, intrusive text-boxes – though that’s rather agreeable after hearing the abysmal voice work that crops up every now and then.  It seems the work went into Ancient Galaxy’s design, rather than its execution.

Yet despite the rudimentary technology, it’s occasionally oddly beautiful.  A mountainous region stands out early in the game, glistening orange in the late-evening sun.  It’s less about inch-perfect texturing and complex geometry, and more about establishing a mood.  Often, it’s startlingly effective.

//Still alive?
Ultimately, the enjoyment you draw from Ancient Galaxy will come down to your patience.  It’s a terrifically slow game – from the walking speed, to the scale of the landscapes, to the sluggish crawl of the plot.  The action is functional – with a particularly nice laser-aiming, lock-on feature at play – but AI is haphazard at the best of times.  And the engine simply isn’t strong enough to excuse the freezes and chugging frame-rates.

If you can see past this, you’ll still have to deal with a galaxy that doesn’t feel quite alive enough.  Though there’s a huge culture to explore, it’s only in evidence through the scanned history of the regions.  In the few areas where non-hostile life dwells, it’s never teeming enough to be particularly convincing.  Above all the technical mishaps, this is Ancient Galaxy’s major sticking point, and the reason it struggles to remain interesting for extended stretches of time.

There are plenty of ideas here, ones that are well worth exploring in the future.  Purely as a self-assured exercise in traditionalist mechanics, there’s a lot to commend.  The alien-stomping escapades should provide fun for all, but this is a game aggressively set in its ways.  It’ll appeal to many but repulse many more.  An interesting game, then, rather than a particularly good one.

4/10

What does this score mean?

When I first decided to write about Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, I had only played the game once before, back when it first came out almost five years ago. And I’d never actually finished it. It’s testament to how good the first three-quarters are that I could remember it so clearly in my head so many years after, but for the sake of the article and for a bit of good old nostalgia I decided to return to the world of Bloodlines and finish it once and for all.

Vampire: Bloodlines was developed by Troika and released prematurely in late 2004, the exact same day as Half-Life 2. Not exactly marketing genius, Valve being one of the most successful developers of all time and Troika… well, Troika went bust shortly after. As usual, it was a case of a greedy, money-grabbing publisher who couldn’t wait any longer to get a few more gold coins on the pile of wealth in their Scrooge Mc Duck-style vaults. As such, the game was released unfinished, and this becomes tragically apparent as you attempt to endure the final third.

It’s a unique RPG in that you play a vampire in present-day Los Angeles – an incredibly refreshing change to goblins, swords and magic. You choose which vampire clan you’d like to belong to and which skills you’d like to start with. There are seven different clans, each of which gives you a different physical look – from the debonair, Gucci model look of the Toreador, to the hideous visage of the Nosferatu. While all the clans have different blood magic abilities, some clans play very differently indeed – such as the Nosferatu, who generally have to hide in the shadows and get around town using the sewers, lest they be seen and break the Masquerade; or the Malkavians, who due to their unique blood heritage are completely insane, with dialogue choices that reflect this madness and the ability to have conversations with signposts and TVs.

The Malkavian dialogue is particularly amusing…

The Masquerade is the rule of the vampire society, about keeping the veil of secrecy over the community and fooling the human population into believing that there’s no such thing as vampires. You can break this only a certain number of times before you start attracting the attention of vampire hunters who make travelling around town very difficult indeed. Break the masquerade six times and you’ll be judged by the vampire prince and executed, bringing the game to an end.

Fortunately, there are ways to redeem your current Masquerade level by completing certain quests and resolving certain situations. One such situation is where you are recognised in the street by an old friend before you were ‘turned’; she insists on getting you help and wants to phone your other friends to come pick you up. You can either kill her to keep the secret, or if you have a high enough persuasion skill you can talk her into believing everything is okay so she leaves you alone. Either way, you’ll regain one Masquerade point, but if you kill her you will lose humanity – vital in retaining some sense of connection to the human you once were. The lower your humanity, the more chance you have of going into a bloodlust frenzy.

It’s a system of rules that works very well, and is like nothing I’ve ever played before. You’re a real vampire, living in a world of eternal night, stalking people down dark alleyways so you can drink their blood. Not too much, though – you don’t want to kill them and lose any more of your humanity.

Anyway – blah, blah, blah, enough of the technicalities. Let’s talk about the Ocean House.

Ocean House Hotel – one of gaming’s scariest levels…

Very early in the game, you’re given a mission in which you have to deal with a haunting of an old hotel, which is holding up its redevelopment and therefore putting your client out of pocket. It’s one of the most frightening gaming experiences around. Are you ever in the house on your own, watching something on telly about ghosts and hauntings, or reading a book about them, and you really wind yourself up to the point where going upstairs to the toilet becomes scary? Where you end up running back downstairs because you think there’s something following you? Well that’s the Ocean House. Troika’s stroke of brilliance here is that nothing can really kill you. There are no bad guys to attack you or spikes falling from the ceiling, yet it’s terrifying. The hotel itself becomes the enemy, an enemy that you just want to get as far away from as possible. A story unfolds which bears a resemblance to The Shining and turns out to be a tragic tale in the end, one that stays with you long after you leave the cursed place.

There’s a ton of interesting little stories as you make your way through the various districts of L.A. – Santa Monica, Downtown, Hollywood and Chinatown – all with various ways to resolve them, some negative and some positive, all interesting. Personally I love the quests that give you difficult choices to make, such as one I mentioned earlier with the friend from the past. There’s a quest in Hollywood where you come across a man living in a house in the middle of a graveyard, who’s been given the task of stopping the undead from rising up and breaking down the gates every night – although quite why this is happening is never explained. Anyway, this guy asks you if you’ll watch the place for five minutes while he pops out to grab a hooker to bring back and have his way with. There are three ways to deal with this. You can grab a gun and make sure none of the risen dead escape from either gate in the cemetery (this is nigh on impossible); you can go grab a hooker for the guy and bring her back so he doesn’t have to leave the graveyard unattended; or, if you are playing a female character, you can seduce and have sex with him. A great deal of quests in the game have multiple solutions like this, and real depth to the fiction, and creating a story you’ll want to return to again and again.

Bloodlines presents some truly memorable characters…

So, five years after my first play-through, I was back in L.A. Everything was going well – apart from the myriad of graphical and audio bugs which really ruin some of the more dramatic scenes. How can you take dramatic cut scenes seriously when your character is running along with both legs akimbo as if he is doing the splits but still running all the same? A security guard calls for backup with a walkie-talkie, which disappears one minute and reappears the next. Nearly every cut-scene is ruined in some way due to shoddy animation and timing. You can forgive it for this, though, because the core game is so entertaining. What cannot be forgiven, ever, is the entire final third of the game.

As soon as you arrive in Chinatown, the whole game turns to complete shit. It’s like a different team of developers took over at that point, a team of developers that only know how to make bland first-person shooters… back in 1998. Some of the environments look so ropey you could be convinced it was using the Quake 2 engine. Every one of these awful missions overstays its welcome to an infuriating degree. I played a character that specialised in firearms – big bloody mistake. It doesn’t tell you that towards the end of the game normal human enemies can take about six shots to the head with a .44 magnum – the most powerful handgun in the world, one that would blow your head clean off. That’s a full clip, and each clip costs a fair whack. On one level I had to actually cheat. I had to put in the code for full ammo twice. On one single level. That’s more ammo than what you would use for entire first-person shooter games. So how are you supposed to do this without the cheats? Maybe I could forgive it if the combat was actually fun, but quite frankly that’s shit as well. Oh, it’s bad, so very, very bad. And I’m not even going to start talking about the Hollywood sewers. The doctors told me I need to keep my blood pressure down.

The sewer levels aren’t as interesting as this makes them look…

It’s so upsetting that the game ends this way. It’s like God creating the most beautiful woman in the world and then splashing acid in her face, and laughing, while frolicking in a pit of money. I blame Activision. If they’d just left Troika alone to develop Bloodlines properly, this could have been that elusive “Citizen Kane of videogames”.

I don’t think I’ll ever play Bloodlines again. It made me too angry. And my advice to you, if you are intending a revisit or to play it for the first time, is to skip the whole last third of the game with a cheat as soon as you hear the word ‘Chinatown’ – for you cannot un-see what you have seen, and you cannot un-play what you have played.

What you really play this game for are the subtle characterisations and the clever, interesting dialogue; the choices and consequences; the many tales that bring this nocturnal L.A. to life. Delving into the world of vampires and the macabre has never been so meaningful and interesting in videogames before or since.

This article resulted in a nostalgia fatality.

Oh dear. I really didn’t get on with Geneforge 5: Overthrow at all. Or maybe it didn’t get on with me. Who knows – but the divorce papers came through the other day and I said my final goodbye to it.

This is the fifth and apparently last instalment in the Geneforge series by Spiderweb Software, none of which really appeared on our radar before this unsuccessful foray into the world of Terrestria – although it clearly states on the Geneforge 5 website that no previous experience is necessary at all, as this is a self-contained story. The premise is one of high fantasy on a world at war, with several factions struggling for control. The strongest of these, it would seem, are the Shapers, magic users who can literally create life forms and objects out of thin air. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the game itself doesn’t live up to the epic storyline it alludes to.

Looking at some info on the game and doing the relevant research beforehand, I had really started to look forward to playing Geneforge 5. The series has quite a large fan base, which was promising. So I start the game, choose what my character looks like and what his skills are, and it’s all systems go. The game is isometric in viewpoint, as you can see from the screenshots, and I start off in a mountain village where I am kept as a kind of servant with amnesia. So far, so good. Then I decide to look around, and the spell is broken as I click to move and my character trundles off at the speed of light, walking like John Wayne had just shit himself.

I laughed. A lot.

Now I’m not some graphics whore. I don’t need brilliant technology to enjoy a game – look at the screenshots for my Dwarf Fortress diary article and you will see that – but there’s just something wrong about Geneforge 5’s visual design. It really destroys what is actually an interesting concept for a RPG. Most characters hover around aimlessly at ridiculous speeds like they have just entered a club, dropped two Es and headed straight for the dance floor. Continuing the rave theme, so many characters are just coloured in one fantastically bright hue. Supposedly intimidating guards wear hot pink armour with hot pink faces and hot pink hands and legs, as entirely blue men wander around them. They might as well all have glow sticks for weapons. The concept of “epic” was hovering so far away in my subconscious that it nearly lost all meaning to me.

The other atmosphere-breakers are the environments. You start off in a mountain village, but you wouldn’t really know it if nobody had told you that. Everything is so square and uniform. Sure, the ground is white, but that’s it. When you go further down the mountain where it’s supposedly a green and pleasant land, it’s the same but with a green floor with some trees and a few twigs on the ground. Towns don’t look like towns; they just look like a random jumble of square areas with doors in them and more technicolour people than usual. I couldn’t get a sense of where I was and what the world around me was like – and that’s essential for me to be able to involve myself and invest time in a sprawling RPG like this.

Our very own Lewis Denby enjoyed playing Geneforge 5, and recently declared that it had dialogue to rival Planescape: Torment – a fact that, in continuing with the rave theme, makes me think he was also on something mind-altering at the time, judging by such an outlandish and unrestrained claim. I have to say I disagree with him wholeheartedly on this aspect. While the dialogue is better than average, it’s certainly not up there with the Black Isle classics. (I’ll hop in at this point and make a slight correction: I said it reminded me of Planescape, not that it was of the same irrefutable quality. Though I did think the writing was rather nice. -Lewis)

Combat is also a negative aspect of Geneforge 5, and when a game is as heavily loaded with scrapping as this one it makes for some rather tedious gameplay. Combat is turn-based and consists of every enemy in sight immediately rushing forwards to surround the nearest character from your party and just laying into them, and that’s it. Imagine two old men in a pub car park in their vests repeatedly taking it in turns punching each other in the face. Got that image? Right, well that’s what combat is like in Geneforge 5, only replace the old men with giant maggots and what I like to call “shit-men”: shaper constructs that look like figures moulded out of excrement. There’s no strategy involved whatsoever, apart from maybe when to use health pods. I didn’t like it. In fact, if it weren’t for the combat I would probably have enjoyed the game a lot more. I could have looked over all the other bizarre oddities that the game throws at you, as long as I didn’t have to punch old men in car parks anymore.

This has all been very negative, but lots of people love these games. Maybe you’ll be one of them. It is admirable that the Geneforge series is mainly the work of one man, but that doesn’t automatically make it a great thing. It seems like this is one of those ‘Marmite’ games, perhaps, with some people being able to overlook its flaws and get a good adventure out of it. If you can do this, then fair play to you. I wish I could.

5/10

The city of Ferdok awaits, but the path is blocked. No drama – all I need to do is gain favour with influential citizens of the village of Avenstrue to grant me passage. Three hours later, I’m ready to proceed to Ferdok. Wait a minute, three hours? I’ve hardly done anything, I don’t even know what the main story is all about – but nonetheless, I’m having fun.

Drakensang: The Dark Eye has an amazing ability to draw you in and not let you go. RPG fans will realise within minutes that they are playing a well designed and engrossing game, with elements we’ve all seen before but implemented in such a way that you can’t help but continue playing. There is something special here: underneath the flaws is a game of high quality and perplexing intrigue. You won’t quite know why or how but I’m willing to bet, like me, you’ll enjoy this one.

Non-RPG fans, however, will find the beginning to feel sluggish to the point of irritation. Depending on how much dialogue you sit through and how many side quests you complete, it can take several hours before the main storyline presents itself, and this is when Drakensang begins to show cracks in the armour. Audiences who are not familiar with The Dark Eye, the German pen and paper role playing game that Drakensang is derived from, will instantly feel a little lost. The background of this world is only partially explained, and if you don’t pay attention, everything can become alien very quickly. The only sure way to understand what’s going on is to talk to everyone and take it all in, but unfortunately not all gamers will have the patience to sit through the overwhelming amount of text dialogue.

The dialogue itself – penned by an experienced team of The Dark Eye writers – is fairly well written, but the voice acting is truly horrible and makes each and every character sound immensely stupid. Thankfully, voice acting – if I were to be so generous as to call it ‘acting’ – is kept to a minimum, with only a handful of characters subjecting you to their oratory “skills”.

The Dark Eye saga shares many similarities with Dungeons and Dragons, and Drakensang in turn shares many similarities with various D&D-based computer RPGs. The control method, the environments, races and classes have all been seen before; the originality comes instead form the story and the levelling system. In Drakensang, each time you gain experience you can spend it on traits to enhance your characters on the fly. You can upgrade your traits at any time and levelling up will raise your base traits automatically as well. This system, to begin with, is rather perplexing, but after a few levels your confidence grows. It allows players to really shape their characters – a micro manager’s dream. Unfortunately, if you fail to get to grips with this system quickly, you will struggle to proceed – but it does help hide the grind of traditional levelling, and is a welcome change from the norm.

You choose your character from several races and classes, consisting of the clichéd characters from every RPG and its dog. The problem is, regardless of what character you end up choosing, the dialogue options will be pretty much the same. There are no evil characters and no individual personalities to choose from, so the only criteria in choosing a race is down to personal preference and which class you wish to be.

The story of Drakensang is centred in and around the city of Ferdok, in the centre of the continent of Aventuria. You start off in a small village, having received a letter from an old friend in Ferdok who has asked you to visit him regarding a yet unexplained concern he has. After no more than four steps you are informed by a village guard that the path to Ferdok is currently blocked due to a series of murders in the city. You are then tasked with finding people of influence to vouch for you so you may proceed, and of course each of these people demands you embark on a number of quests – mainly of the ‘go here, kill that’ variety – in order to prove yourself.

This first area you can explore is basically the tutorial. You’ll see information boxes teaching you about each aspect of the game, and have a good chance to familiarise yourself with the controls, combat, quests, and levelling. The difficulty within this area – and, in fact, the rest of the game – is consistent and fair, so won’t overwhelm new players and won’t become too difficult too quickly. There is also a priest in the village who will patch you up for free, allowing you to experiment with different approaches when in combat, and providing a great opportunity to figure out how you want to customise your character.

The combat is simple but effective. You can tactically control each character from your party of four either individually or in groups, allowing you to use strategy to overcome your foes. The action pauses when you target an enemy or when an enemy targets you, and you can then dish out commands to each character, un-pause and let them deal with the threat. You can also pause in battle to adjust strategies. The only set back is that pausing and un-pausing all the time to dish out commands can get tedious, especially considering that commands don’t stack. Casting spells can be quite awkward too, requiring you to choose the command, wait for the spell to be cast then pause, select the character and choose another spell, rinse and repeat – this can really slow things down in battle, making a fighter class character an easier choice.

When in and out of combat, camera movement is controlled by holding down the right mouse button. Drakensang would have benefited greatly from a more dynamic camera, as this method can prove to be fiddly and takes a little while to get used to. Another strange design choice concerns the act of following quests. You have a journal that gives you a brief explanation of what you’re meant to do, and occasionally a question mark on the map as to where to go, but several quests give you very little information at all, and no waypoint marker, making it difficult to figure out what exactly you need to do – especially after reloading a saved game or after you skipped the quest dialogue in fear of the dreaded voice acting.

If it’s not the gameplay that tells you you’re playing a fantasy RPG, it’ll be the art design. Once your character is picked, you are thrust straight into a beautifully crafted, high-quality environment, with bright, welcoming colours and lighting, making a nice change from the shades of grey and brown we’re used to in more ‘realistic’ games. Drakensang a good-looking game, and the experience is further enhanced by a beautifully composed musical score that fully compliments the atmosphere.

Drakensang: The Dark Eye is a well-designed RPG, and will certainly capture the imagination of players willing to immerse themselves in the world. The story is interesting once it gets going, and while the gameplay is tried and tested with little new on offer, what is here is generally nicely executed. With a little more polish in certain areas, and a faster pace regarding the story, this game would be truly great – and with a prequel already announced, perhaps we’ll see even better things from The Dark Eye universe in the coming years.

7/10