Another part of my library that was long cherished, but never finished. It was the first immersive sim (of the 0451 strain) I remember playing, except for perhaps BioShock though my memory of which I started first is fuzzy.
Back then I had been quite surprised by the depth of mechanics and the physicality of it for a first person RPG. With its emphasis on the sandbox and action gameplay skill over stat-mashing, it was a very novel experience for me at the time and it opened me up to the appeal of the genre even more than BioShock did, in a way. Now the genre is one of my favorites.
However, it's apparent upon picking it back up these 10+ years later why I never could finish back in my teen years: the rough edges in the gameplay are many and severe.
Hitboxes are inaccurate and many will activate before their associated animations even start; small bits of geometry can and often will catch the player and cause wonky movement issues; damage itself is all over the place with enemies sometimes taking 30 normal attacks to down and sometimes (sometimes on the exact same character after a reload) take one or two charged attacks and its over.
One of my favorite and surprisingly mild bits of jank involves the many climbable ropes in the game. You eventually get the ability to place them wherever you can shoot into a wooden ceiling and.... well they swing but they don't collide and you can come along for the ride.
Despite all this jank and all the frustration it can occasionally bring, the game is still polished enough that it's really quite enjoyable and even quite visceral when it's working as intended. As it's perhaps most infamous for, kicking enemies to make them ragdoll into spikes or off cliffs really is just a wonderful mechanic. It's effectiveness might have been considered overtuned, but in context it serves as a great release valve for when all the other systems are getting a bit too frustrating.
Story-wise, there's no profound writing here to enthrall you but it isn't quite generic or offensive either. There's just enough complexity to the delightfully edgy plot to make it intriguing and some of the setpiece moments are fairly memorable, especially for their time. I mean, I was still thinking about the game over 10 years later, so the proof is there even if the pieces don't seem to add up.
It's a story that takes itself seriously but not too seriously. And so, instead of getting hung up on the parts that don't work quite so well, I spent more time thinking about the bits that were better than expected.
Visually, despite definitively looking "aged" at this point, the game did so with a surprising amount of grace for a 2006 title. It even supports modern display resolutions and refresh rates thanks to it being based on the Source Engine and despite it not being nearly as well maintained as the rest of the source catalogue.
One major sticking issue with the game technically is that it has a tendency to crash to desktop somewhat randomly. You can consult the PC Gaming Wiki for a fix that resolves most of it: a "large memory address aware" patch that makes it not explode everytime its memory usage nears 2-3GB.
It's not a total fix, but I only crashed maybe a total of 8-10 times over the 10 hour campaign with that patch on which is a much, much lower rate than in the 15 minutes I tried without it. 😂
So, with all that said I'd readily recommend this to any fans of the immersive sim genre, espcially anyone who enjoys the original Deus Ex because the combat is still better than that (that's not a jab at Deus Ex, its just truth). For everyone else, you're better off picking up Dishonored, their fabulous followup title.
It would be nice to see another swords & sorcery immersive sim outing in the near future, though. Or maybe there's one I missed.....
Back then I had been quite surprised by the depth of mechanics and the physicality of it for a first person RPG. With its emphasis on the sandbox and action gameplay skill over stat-mashing, it was a very novel experience for me at the time and it opened me up to the appeal of the genre even more than BioShock did, in a way. Now the genre is one of my favorites.
However, it's apparent upon picking it back up these 10+ years later why I never could finish back in my teen years: the rough edges in the gameplay are many and severe.
Hitboxes are inaccurate and many will activate before their associated animations even start; small bits of geometry can and often will catch the player and cause wonky movement issues; damage itself is all over the place with enemies sometimes taking 30 normal attacks to down and sometimes (sometimes on the exact same character after a reload) take one or two charged attacks and its over.
One of my favorite and surprisingly mild bits of jank involves the many climbable ropes in the game. You eventually get the ability to place them wherever you can shoot into a wooden ceiling and.... well they swing but they don't collide and you can come along for the ride.
Despite all this jank and all the frustration it can occasionally bring, the game is still polished enough that it's really quite enjoyable and even quite visceral when it's working as intended. As it's perhaps most infamous for, kicking enemies to make them ragdoll into spikes or off cliffs really is just a wonderful mechanic. It's effectiveness might have been considered overtuned, but in context it serves as a great release valve for when all the other systems are getting a bit too frustrating.
Story-wise, there's no profound writing here to enthrall you but it isn't quite generic or offensive either. There's just enough complexity to the delightfully edgy plot to make it intriguing and some of the setpiece moments are fairly memorable, especially for their time. I mean, I was still thinking about the game over 10 years later, so the proof is there even if the pieces don't seem to add up.
It's a story that takes itself seriously but not too seriously. And so, instead of getting hung up on the parts that don't work quite so well, I spent more time thinking about the bits that were better than expected.
Visually, despite definitively looking "aged" at this point, the game did so with a surprising amount of grace for a 2006 title. It even supports modern display resolutions and refresh rates thanks to it being based on the Source Engine and despite it not being nearly as well maintained as the rest of the source catalogue.
One major sticking issue with the game technically is that it has a tendency to crash to desktop somewhat randomly. You can consult the PC Gaming Wiki for a fix that resolves most of it: a "large memory address aware" patch that makes it not explode everytime its memory usage nears 2-3GB.
It's not a total fix, but I only crashed maybe a total of 8-10 times over the 10 hour campaign with that patch on which is a much, much lower rate than in the 15 minutes I tried without it. 😂
So, with all that said I'd readily recommend this to any fans of the immersive sim genre, espcially anyone who enjoys the original Deus Ex because the combat is still better than that (that's not a jab at Deus Ex, its just truth). For everyone else, you're better off picking up Dishonored, their fabulous followup title.
It would be nice to see another swords & sorcery immersive sim outing in the near future, though. Or maybe there's one I missed.....