Tag: review

Core mechanics

A concept almost as old as Pong, the Godfather of nowadays gaming. You climb up and down little ladders, collecting various forms of loot. And guess what - you’re being chased by blood thirsty (well yeah, sort of) eurhm, red humanoid shaped *things*. On your way through each puzzle, there are multiple ways of dealing with them. From digging a hole and watching earth grow as fast as it can, squashing the enemy, to picking up little and very big bombs. Of course, the objective in each level is to collect all loot displayed and get the hell outta there.

Simple, yet effective and above all: very addictive if served right. And believe me, this one is. Based on the classic “Lode Runner” principle explained above, Lode Runner: the Legend Returns indeed returns to keep you occupied for as long as needed. The game improves and extends the core game mechanics with extra tools to get rid of enemies (and friends by accident when playing cooperatively, whoops!). Every few levels, the big “tileset theme” changes, together with a very nice soundtrack. The area’s differ from jungle to cave and icy mountains. All enemies stay the same though: red and hungry.

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Not many first person action Roleplaying games are well known, except the Ultima Underground series and of course the Elder Scrolls games. FP RPGs date back from Wizardry, Eye of the Beholder and Might & Magic, but none of those games actually enable you to swing with a sword in a real time fashion. The Gothic games utilize the third person camera angle, so the only games which might get remotely close to being Arx Fatalis are Daggerfall/Morrowind and Ultima Underworld.

What does Morrowind share with Arx Fatalis? Arx is a FP RPG, combat is basically hit- and run tactics, eurhm… I guess that’s it! Not quite a lot indeed. It is safe to assume Arx Fatalis was meant to be Ultima Underworld III. As Wikipedia states, Arkane Studios couldn’t get the proper license for the name, but in the end that doesn’t really matter. Arx is a pure dungeon crawler, you will never see big open (and mostly empty) spaces as seen in Morrowind. You will never see more than 5 cities with enourmous amounths of NPCs without any realistic conversations. And that’s good.

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Since the departure of Sir-Tech and their amazing squad-based strategy game, Jagged Alliance 2, turn-based fans have been waiting to get their hands on something decent. A couple of mediocore JA2 spin-offs never made it to the shelves. Until Nival Interactive came up with a fully 3D World War II squad-based mix: Silent Storm - or S². Silent Storm is a true 3D game combining turn-based tactical combats and role-playing set against the background of the WWII. Nival is well-known for their WWII efforts coming from Blitzkrieg. They also handled turn-based games pretty well in the past with Etherlords. Time to combine those efforts!

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Divine Divinity, “The best thing to come out in Belgium after Beer” - At least that’s what the game box says - a quote by PC Zone. Oh and the cover art is stamped “The new dimension of RPG!”. Woah, is this a diamond in the rough? It sure is, according to many reviews, including this brand new one. Divine Divinity - which bears the stupid name thanks to it’s German publisher CDV - is a classic 2D action roleplaying game which tries to combine both elements from Blizzard’s Diablo series and BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate II saga. DivDiv is Larian Studios’ big debut game. Altough I have no idea why the developers chose CDV as their publisher: the game was developed in Belgium - in English of course - and first released in Germany, fully translated? What the…
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Goblin Princes are Ugly

Am I the only one wondering what the heck the lead artist ate the day he created Goblins? Uh oh, did I spell this wrong? Not really. In Gobliiins, the prequel, you can control three Goblin creatures, hence the three ‘i’-s. This game comes with two wacky dudes and the sequel with only one.
Every year an article pops up about Adventure games and the death of the genre and every year a fantastic game gets released to counter this myth. Sadly, only a few of those games are really worth playing trough. That’s why I’d like to take a look at the past with you to games wich are worth mentionning. How did this genre fare in the DOS era, when pixels ruled the world and nobody shouted like hell oh no these graphics suck!. Retro is in.
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In the year 1999 the then-existing company New World Computing released version seven of their honored Might & Magic series, subtitled “For Blood and Honor“. Most Might & Magic (MM) fans were quite happy since VII is by many people marked as (at least one of) the best in the series. Sadly, even New World Computing disappeared in 2003 and Ubisoft the gaint looking evil company bought all NWC rights. The Might & Magic VII Publisher, 3DO also closed their doors. What’s up with that? Is this some kind of bad disease, creating a brilliant game no-one cares about and thus nobody likes to play except hard-core fans? Let’s not try to blame it on EA again.

Anyway, welcome to a world of furious Power, angry Magic, dirty Politics and above all: a big pixel fest!

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Ah, 2D platformers. This genre disappeared after the DOS era on the PC. Also the consoles liked more the 3D platform games like hundreds of Mario 64 clones. There was almost never an attempt to revive the classic 2D sidescrolling action and add a few modern elements to it. Except for Monolith Productions of course! We know Monolith mostly from First Person games like the recent F.E.A.R. and of course the No One Lives Forever series. Claw was one of their first titles wich proved Monolith was quite capable of putting together a complete game package, even including a level editor and multiplayer options, in the PC world. Blood is probably the oldest known game from these devs. Hungry 2D platformes wich refuse to buy a decent handheld system to ease the pain will likely enjoy Captain Claw. Let’s see what the game has to offer. (Or had…)

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Argh, my temple, all messed up! Poseidon likes to destroy all buildings I carefully planted down on the coast line because he’s cranky in the morning. Acually I did not do him a favour in the past few years and instead joined forces with one of the other major Greek Gods. What choice would you make? A couple of free superman-like heroes fighting side by side with your gaint army, or a couple of free boats to roam and rule the sea? Before we move on I should really collect more taxes. Thank you rich people! - oh, I heard a reply: “No, thank you - ruler of this wonderful wealthy city!“

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Simon the Sorcerer II: “The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe” is an adventure game from the British game company Adventure Soft who also produced the prequel, Simon the Sorcerer. The Simon adventure games are well known for their absurd and mostly weird British humor. If you do not like Blackadder and company, don’t bother installing this game. Simon 2 features many references and funny jabs to to popular literature, pop-culture, fantasy and other adventure-games. You can clearly see the subtitle is being borrowed from The Chronicles of Narnia, and there are plenty of references to Lord of the Rings, Monkey Island and even Dungeons & Dragons. However, do not expect this adventure to be over in a couple of hours since Simon the Sorcerer 2 is actually quite hard.

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Hooray hooray for classic urgh-so-bad-graphics-but-so-good-gameplay RPG-games like this! Arcanum is without a doubt the best game Troika ever made, and that deserves something extra. Like a review and a nice collection of screenshots, or something similar. Enough introduction, grab a gun and shoot! Or pick a spell and cast, if you will.

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