Reviews from

in the past


I was interested in this game since my childhood, as my father owned a physical copy of the game and I used to look through the manual of the game and read the lore of characters and monsters. I tried to play the game several times over the last 10 years or so, but always bounced off as the game would not run properly at native resolution. Yesterday I managed to fix that with the PureHD mod and dgvoodoo2. I immediately liked that there are so many classes to choose from and that they start in different locations. After quite some trouble with defeating the first few enemies as a Seraphim (I died like 8 times in 5 minutes or so on silver difficulty), I started to get the hang of it. Over the next few hours, I was rather charmed by the atmosphere, world and kind of relatable quests. Sadly, I am now at a point where I do not want to continue playing the game, as I simply have too many issues with it. The skill system is just weird, as you can only cast skills using the right mouse button. That means you can only ever have one skill equipped. You can have multiple skills available in the slots at the bottom of the screen, but you need to click (or press the equivalent number key) those first to equip them to the right mouse button, which is super clunky. You can build combos using those skills, so that you can trigger them in an order of your choosing with only a single click, but the recharge time is high and if you use the same skills in multiple combos, the other combos go on cooldown too if you use one. This leads to the majority of attacks being the simple left click. This starts to get old quickly. It does not help, that the combat relies heavily on hit or miss chances. Sometimes my character would miss 10 times in a row and thus deal no damage at all. The skills (right click) can miss too. The targeting is wonky as well, as it is nigh impossible to always target the enemy you want to eliminate first. There are even more problems with the combat, but I stop myself here. All of the aforementioned leads to the combat feeling more like work than anything else. What made me drop the game now is the enemy placement and the world design in combination with the combat feeling. There are areas that are basically just plains with dozens of enemies walking in random directions, but in a density, that makes it impossible to avoid combat. This leads to sluggish traversal through the world as you are constantly fighting against goblins, orcs, bandits and wolves. This kind of nonsensical and random enemy placement is a big pet peeve of mine. There are settlements in this game that are surrounded by hundreds of goblins, right outside the fences and they even get into those settlements regularly. How is any villager able to live in a world like this? Very immersion breaking for me.

This was so great back in the day! It's a mix between Diablo 2 and Baldurs Gate and I loved it!