Boooooooring. Zelda style dungeon crawler with gameplay that I enjoyed more as a kid than I did 2 years ago. It has good replay value sure, and good character customization, but that's about it.

Whether you choose to focus on brawling or magicking, neither pathway is truly enjoyable because the gameplay loop is so one-dimensional. Get quests, try to fit as many of them into the same floor as possible to get the most out of your time, report back to the townspeople who requested said quests to begin with. Rinse and repeat until you get strong enough to fight the final boss.

It's definitely somewhat nostalgic, but it is crazy repetitive. Also the dungeon music sucks so much that it had to be fixed in later entries. The later games aren't that much better either, since Wildtangent thought they had struck gold with this one, and didn't want to change things too much with its sequels.

A fun classic dungeon-crawling RPG that feels similar to Torchlight, Titan Quest, and the Diablo games in several mechanics.

You start as a boy or girl adventurer in a town called Grove, where legends of fame and fortune can be heard about the heroes that delve into the dungeons. There is very little customization; you can only choose from a few faces and hairstyles for your character, but there are still some okay options. You can also choose between a dog or a cat as your pet, and your pet follows you, helps you in combat, and can carry items for you and bring them back to town to sell, which will make them gone temporarily. The duration of their absence is based on how deep in the dungeon you are, but it can be a helpful feature to have them go to town and get rid of unwanted items, and get more money for buying potions and such.

Like Torchlight 1, the game involves a dungeon that you delve deeper and deeper into, and every few levels feature new enemies and threats. Quests can be obtained from the town to grab special items from stronger enemies in the game and bring them back in exchange for skill points. From the dungeon, just like Torchlight, you can use portal scrolls to teleport from the dungeon to town, and then back to the dungeon.

Each level gets progressively more difficult. Some enemies, unfortunately, are quite unbalanced and very powerful, whereas others may be quite weak and easy to defeat. I wish the difficulty weren't so unstable in the game, however, I still find it a fun dungeon-crawler nonetheless. Expect the need to grind, sometimes enemies become strong quite fast as you go down the levels; I especially had a hard time with Yetis, Jackals, and Cursed Sword enemies.

As a fan of Torchlight, I can recommend this as a similar title, however, being a release from 2005, it can occasionally feel a bit dated, and personally, I thought it felt a bit more dated than Torchlight, although both are old games now. However, I still enjoy it and would recommend it to fans of classic RPGs.

I played this game as a kid. For a bit. It is cool. Sadly, I can't recommend it as a game for other people to really enjoy.

- Controls are not updated and clunky. Gotta click on everything - such as to even move in the first place. Barely any keyboard controls that aren't magic/item hotkeys.
- The game is really just a closed loop. Fight enemies, collect loot, see that your bag is already full after like 4 minutes, manage inventory and sell the rest, go back to town to reheal and resume the dungeon. You will be stuck on the same floor for a long time, and for roughly 45 floors.
- The combat kind of sucks. It feels dangerous to commit to anything unique and you can't change your mind later, it's one of those older committal levelling systems. I feel there isn't enough leeway for trying to do something like a summmoner or magic class.
- - In general though, again, the combat sucks. Clicking and holding the enemy while moving sucks and this game has a HUGE emphasis on your attacks missing most of the time. Instead of dealing with good defense and HP, the game seems to revolve around half your attacks missing even if your Dex is super high. Every fight feels slow, and it really sucks cuz hordes appear HEAVILY and frequently. Running away isn't the best tactic in this game but neither is getting swarmed and having all these enemies following you. It would be nice to consistently land hits or at least have a way to do it but the stat calcs in this game are really weird. So again, think about doing the same combat over and over and slowly getting up floors, but...
- ...with progress feeling slow. Getting lots of money is slow, getting EXP is incredibly slow and you're always gonna be underlevelled. I dunno if it has to do with the difficulty I chose, but when I realized things were feeling like a grind and the loot usually sucked and it was taking forever to see progress, I decided to cheat.
- Sadly, the game doesn't end with a bang. Again, the gameplay is the exact same all the time, and even when you go to fight your "Final Boss" it isn't anything special - no non-random map, no unique fight (sorta), just another enemy that blends into all the other ones you've fought so far. Just beat it as usual and go back to "beat" the game. Nothing more to it. So yeah, don't play this for some sort of story or lore or anything like that, it's just a random diablo-like game.

It's too bad because this game actually nails the visuals and feels really well. The celtic music is really really nice, and this game has literally like FIVE SONGS in its entirety and I haven't really gotten sick of it. Very cozy in the village, very ambient in the dungeon. I love the narrator in this game peering over everything you do, his voice is wonderful, and at the very least the intro cutscene was cozy. The game is mostly pretty to look at for 2005 standards.

But sadly, with this port, they couldn't even work in a true widescreen ratio. It exists and the game renders outwards into a 16:9 ratio, but the UI gets stretched out just as wide for whatever reason. It's so wide and I don't wanna move my mouse all over rectangles, so I left it at 4:3.

Get it if it's dirt cheap and you wanted the nostalgia, but I don't think it'd be more more than a handful of hours of your time when you could be playing something else. I say this kindly.