sfsdfd

I noticed this game at Home of the Underdogs, where they gave it the coveted "Top Dog" rating, a 9.07/10 score, and started the review: "Without a doubt one of the best RPGs I have ever played..." It's a first-person dungeon crawl in the same style as Ultima Underworld, a classic and truly awesome game.

So I picked it up and started messing with it yesterday. Holy crap, this game is awful.

First, even fully patched, the game is hella buggy. Crashes are frequent - once during a state save! You sometimes can't target an object right in front of you unless you dance around it for a while (really bad when it's an enemy!) And the 1996-era physics model produces many clipping graphics errors and floating objects (i.e., if you kill something that is standing on an incline, it can drop a weapon that hovers two feet in the air.)

You can even get permanently stuck in certain circumstances. Once I encountered a goblin sleeping on a bed; I stabbed him and he stood up exactly where I was standing. Another time I stepped off of a small bridge, and got trapped in a stream; I couldn't jump back up onto the knee-high bridge in front of me. Ridiculous.

The sound system is particularly horrific. If someone is directly in front of you talking, THEIR VOICE IS VERY LOUD; if you turn 90 degrees, you can barely hear them. Sometimes you can see people talking - jaws moving - but you don't hear any voice for an occasional line of dialogue. This happens sometimes during cutscenes, for a line or two in the middle of a long speech. And the voice acting for the main character is dull, and for everyone else juvenile.

The controls are awful. Walking takes a second to build up forward momentum, and even then it's ssslllooowww. You can jump forward, which goes very quickly, and then kills your momentum. Since you walk miles in this game, the fastest way is to just a bunny-hop approach: walk, jump, stop, walk, jump, stop. It's horrendous.

The level design is a hideous jumble. There's a level with an outpost that has been attacked, and dead bodies are everywhere. Fifty feet away is a tavern, operating in full swing. Is this not very odd? This is an eight-level dungeon, but there's no logical design for connecting piece A to piece B.

The story line is completely predictable and uninspiring. Nothing is compelling me to keep going. It's just one meaningless task after another. Get a message to the human king. Go talk to the troll king. Find a stolen statue. Like I haven't done this before in 500 other games.

The interface looks like the design from a sophomore-year undergrad CS project. One button opens your inventory; one button opens your magic book; one button opens your journal; one button displays your map; one button opens your character screen; one button toggles between select mode and movement mode. And you can't get windows to disappear easily. You end up getting frustrated and hitting buttons in random combinations to see if you can make the windows vanish. Object management is similarly taxing.

This game is horrid. It is a gross parody of the exceptional polish, non-linear fun, and driving story line of Ultima Underworld. Avoid at all costs.

- David Stein

TheMadMonk

I bought it for Xbox, when it became cheap. I really can't argue with anything you've said. I think I put 10 minutes into it, and haven't played it since.