5punk

Anyone heard anything about this? New action-ish RPG out next Friday, seems to have a solid, dark story based on the official website, and reasonable credentials based on the producer's past efforts.

I've been keeping half an eye on it after reading a pc gamer review on a train journey. It's got whores, and long term consequences of actions, looks quite good. It's shiny, looks to have quite a nice story, also, it's rather unhyped.

Are you sure it's not called The Twitcher - an rpg about bird spotting?

Bought. Published by Atari, uses BioWare's Aurora 2007 Engine.

Seems okay so far, nice looking.

The actiony side is that you have to click who you want to attack, but wait until you click again until the sword icon goes flamy - miss it and your attack sequence starts over. Click-mashing results in fail. Right-click for magics.

Clever bit is you can choose camera view, which quite radically affects gameplay. In normal and zoomed view it acts much like Dungeon Siege, where you click to move, attack and select stuff from around the screen, middle-mouse to rotate the view. However in the third view, which is an over-the-shoulder style one, you use WASD to move around, have mouselook, and have to press a key to free the cursor.

Kind of makes it an all-things-to-all-people control method, but without the fail of previous attempts to blend the FPS and RPG genres. It's not Dark Messiah (FPS with RPG elements) and it's not Hellgate (FPS MMO with RPG elements) but a nicely balanced system that works well. Kind of a blend of what those two games could have been, with more focus on the RPG aspect, which they both seem to gloss over.

Nice choices to be made, had to choose between fighting a big scary monster, or following the girl with big tits. Made the obvious choice and the scary monster was apparently dispatched by someone else, never to be mentioned again. I can really identify with a game that gives you sensible choices like this.

"Shit" and "Babe" pop up in the dialogue, which feel a little anachronistic, even given the fantasy setting, so I feel a little like they're almost cynically targeting "gamer types", which while ordinarily commendable seems a little contrived and "try-hard" but is overlookable.

Have only played an hour, but it's living up to it's creator's credentials so far.

Based on some famous polish writers world no? I'm sweeping this, at 6.6Gb. If this is the one to take my monies, i'll buy it and sweep hellgate for the freeplay.

From what you're saying that it's the first person swords and sorcery rpg/fps style thing I've been looking for in hellgate and other games. I enjoyed dark messiah, just felt it was flaky on the whole character enrichment and progression thing, in fact, it didn't really have any, you levelled, got points, distro'd points through stats. There is that bit with the bird in the church, to get the kick ass weapon, but that doesn't count, it's over in less time than it took me to type this.

Still, tits or destiny? Apparently from what I've read, you may got lucky with the monsters demise at the hands of another. You could have seen that monster rampage through a nearby elven orphanage (or other supposed conscience tweaking event) because you chose tits over destiny.

Well, it's swept. It's a very good looking game, using the aurora engine from nwn2.

Combat starts tricky, no mashing of left button here, timings the key.

Some of it is a bit abrupt, some of it a bit broken, undoubtedly because it's not made by some super big firm. It is a good story, and the fighting ranges from 'pfft,piece of piss' to 'wtf! I'll reload then' all in one difficulty setting, so it never gets boring.

Different stances with different weapons deliver different moves, and each monster/filthy human scum is resistant or vulnerable to different types, so a bit more thought than click...click...click...dead because if you get it wrong, some bit ugly fucker off a ghoul will just eat your face.

It is an unfinished product, with niggles like when you gain a bit of strength, the fist fights break the game, you smack a guy so hard he disappears through the floor if your not careful.

7.5/10

edit/update, the niggles have been forgotten, I'm really enjoying this game. Killed a god, boffed a goddess and got better armour and swords. Also the quests have a bit of originality to the standard fare, like fetching a cat harness so little pixie type men can ride in style.