So who's going to try the Silverfall demo?

[Voss]

Titan Quest was actually good, <snip>and Titan Quest has a very nice setting.
All of them are nice for some brainless monster-hacking fun. No real RPGs, but good hack and slashers.

Titan Quest... bleh. I found it boring and without any sort of challenge. And the setting would have been nice, if they could have stuck to the source material for more than five minutes. But no. Harpies, satyrs, medusas, and... uh, Spider people! And cat people! and yeah, Fishmen. Gotta have those. And killer giant turtles, for reasons that escape me. Ooo, and generic fantasy skeletons. Boring ass skill trees too.


As for Silverfall... eh. A few minutes with the demo wasn't exactly enthralling. The ground looks groundish enough, I suppose. Though terrain disappears when you walk up to it. Pillars go semi-transparent, but bushes just vanish when you get within a certain radius, which is lame. The character's, however, have the same sprites-completely-disassociated-from-the-background-art look that diablo II did. Which, isn't all that impressive, however many years later. And good luck telling an elf from a human with the quality involved.

Dialogue is bad (just... bad. Standard fantasy game dialogue.), and the main quest is clearly linear. Already hit 'What's in it for me?' 'Sorry, you must go on this quest'.

Combat is a bit of a joke, or at least thats my impression. I ran into groups of enemies, with the theory that clicking is good, but little real idea of what I was doing. They all died, I was... barely scratched. I had some sort of magic attack thing that didn't cost me any of the local equivalent of mana, and it didn't seem to matter if I was at a distance or in melee. Zombies just sort of flopped over and died. And occassionally dropped items, which apparently emit 'gas'. So you can see them. Yeah. Instead of sparkles, clouds of gas. Because thats somehow... better.

Skills were, under brief impression, fairly limited and pointless. How many magical attacks do I need? Three tabs of melee skills (~ 12 skills to a tab), three magic skill tabs. (Elemental, Light and Shadow, of course. (Guess which does healing, and which does vampiry things). Then racial abilities, tech skills and nature skills. And of course, the total jack of all trades, heres some skill points every level, learn to do anything and everything! Fighter-Wizard-Thief for the win!

Also, it apparently isn't tech vs. magic, its tech vs. nature. Complete with a slider for your affliation. The nature/tech skills all seem to require you to already be affliated with one or the other, maybe you can get that through quests. I can't be asked to find out. Because it just isn't interesting.

Because, at least through for the elf characters, undead are attacking. And you're in a refuge camp, and they're coming through some portal, and some guys dad was apparently their only competent defender, and he's dead or missing or something. So you have to kill 10 zombies, come back to the dude, and get sent off to the nearby elven village for aid. After, you know, doing all the side-quests in the camp, because its... urgent and stuff.

Yeah. Fugly, half-assed diablo clone. Here today, utterly forgotten next month.

Though it isn't all bad, thinking about it. The camera is fairly user-friendly and smooth, so, thats... something... fairly positive.