Heresiarch
Prophet
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2008
- Messages
- 1,451
After reading the excellent manual, half of the greatly written cluebook, I've begun to play it for 4 hours straight.
And now I've deleted all my saves in disgust. Why?
For a game which was out one year before Syndicate, it plays like SHIAT. Each time I choose a character in battle, the whole damn screen would jump back to focus on him/her. The programmer must be some nextgen genius from the future of 201X who knows nextgen RTS players will be too lazy to use ctrl-left click to focus-select a unit, so he made it auto-focus-select.
This also means, if I want to let all 4 guys shoot at the bandits one screen away, I need to choose guy 1 -> scroll screen (with a fucking SHIFT key, not mention how FAST the damn screen scrolls) -> choose target -> choose guy 2 -> scroll screen again -> repeat. At the end I just stopped using javelins or even MOVING at all and just let the bad guys come straight to me and hack them to pieces.
Almost ALL of the UI is disastrous. One the bargaining scroll you can see only FOUR items. The receipe of alchemy doesn't show up unless you specifically choose it, which means you must manually check up if you've enough ingredient each time you brew something, or keep a damn cluebook/notebook next to you. And there's no seperate list of owned alchemy ingredient either. They all just got mixed up with your tons of weapons and armor and love letter and other shit. Why can't they just learn from like, Ultima?
Some of the settings are just ridiculous. In every town, sure there are 3 shops selling alchemy stuff (pharmacy shop, the healer, the alchemist guy), but WTF they all sell the SAME stuff, and whatsmore, they often will only sell TWO or THREE stuff. So in order to make some potion you need to run all around the Germany to gather the ingredients not unlike gathering the broken pieces of an ancient mcguffin to save world.
Did I say the game UI is disastrous? For example, the way it mixes mouse control with keyboard is beyond facepalm. For example, I couldn't find the damn "camp" key on the UI, then I finally realized from the manual you use F8 for it, because there's NO UI KEY FOR IT. Also, mouse control and keyboard control during battle is beyond tedious. There's just hardly any control on anything at all. Your characters would often attack some guy farther from you, or they'll blindly charge into a bunch of guys. Also, the movement is ridiculously slow. I can't imagine how horrible it is to play through the multi-leveled (gasp!) dungeon crawling quests.
The quest system is just a tragedy. For one some of the design are beautiful, like the Sabbat adventures, and the many random encounters. But the regular random quests are just so repetitive. And the quests are so damn predictable. It looks on paper, seeing so many C&C through the game, but in the end they're all the same. In all the cities there are the choice to go to the market, the religious part, etc, all with the same services - learn a Saint, maybe getting a robber knight quest which has been mentioned by FOUR other cities. Or sometimes you'll get a Fedex quest as far as requiring you to moving across the whole Germany to reach the target. Even the random encounters turn old FAST. I've met FOUR bishop party robbing me of money, THREE friars trying to curse me because I don't buy his shit, TWO pilgrim parties which I accompany with to the city right next to me which took me TWO days, FOUR wolf ambushes, etc.
Last but not the least, the graphics and sound SUCKS CLEVE BALLS. I can't believe it looks even worse than Ultima 6. Compared to Syndicate the latter looks absolutely nextgen. The sound is beyond terrible. The clink-clanking of the weapons makes me feel I'm watching a bunch of toys wacking each other. The soundtrack is ok but the quality is just bad, even with Roland. And there's NO DAMN BATTLE MUSIC. So you've the ultimate boring battle of video gaming ever - clumsy control, shitty UI, stuipid AI, crawling movement, childish sword-banging noises and PURE SILENCE.
Worst game ever. The only good thing about this game is the manual, very good reading material, but only for the history information part, because the part explaining the gameplay is a pure mess.
Since there's no Darklands reviews on the Codex yet I dare you guys put this on it.
And now I've deleted all my saves in disgust. Why?
For a game which was out one year before Syndicate, it plays like SHIAT. Each time I choose a character in battle, the whole damn screen would jump back to focus on him/her. The programmer must be some nextgen genius from the future of 201X who knows nextgen RTS players will be too lazy to use ctrl-left click to focus-select a unit, so he made it auto-focus-select.
This also means, if I want to let all 4 guys shoot at the bandits one screen away, I need to choose guy 1 -> scroll screen (with a fucking SHIFT key, not mention how FAST the damn screen scrolls) -> choose target -> choose guy 2 -> scroll screen again -> repeat. At the end I just stopped using javelins or even MOVING at all and just let the bad guys come straight to me and hack them to pieces.
Almost ALL of the UI is disastrous. One the bargaining scroll you can see only FOUR items. The receipe of alchemy doesn't show up unless you specifically choose it, which means you must manually check up if you've enough ingredient each time you brew something, or keep a damn cluebook/notebook next to you. And there's no seperate list of owned alchemy ingredient either. They all just got mixed up with your tons of weapons and armor and love letter and other shit. Why can't they just learn from like, Ultima?
Some of the settings are just ridiculous. In every town, sure there are 3 shops selling alchemy stuff (pharmacy shop, the healer, the alchemist guy), but WTF they all sell the SAME stuff, and whatsmore, they often will only sell TWO or THREE stuff. So in order to make some potion you need to run all around the Germany to gather the ingredients not unlike gathering the broken pieces of an ancient mcguffin to save world.
Did I say the game UI is disastrous? For example, the way it mixes mouse control with keyboard is beyond facepalm. For example, I couldn't find the damn "camp" key on the UI, then I finally realized from the manual you use F8 for it, because there's NO UI KEY FOR IT. Also, mouse control and keyboard control during battle is beyond tedious. There's just hardly any control on anything at all. Your characters would often attack some guy farther from you, or they'll blindly charge into a bunch of guys. Also, the movement is ridiculously slow. I can't imagine how horrible it is to play through the multi-leveled (gasp!) dungeon crawling quests.
The quest system is just a tragedy. For one some of the design are beautiful, like the Sabbat adventures, and the many random encounters. But the regular random quests are just so repetitive. And the quests are so damn predictable. It looks on paper, seeing so many C&C through the game, but in the end they're all the same. In all the cities there are the choice to go to the market, the religious part, etc, all with the same services - learn a Saint, maybe getting a robber knight quest which has been mentioned by FOUR other cities. Or sometimes you'll get a Fedex quest as far as requiring you to moving across the whole Germany to reach the target. Even the random encounters turn old FAST. I've met FOUR bishop party robbing me of money, THREE friars trying to curse me because I don't buy his shit, TWO pilgrim parties which I accompany with to the city right next to me which took me TWO days, FOUR wolf ambushes, etc.
Last but not the least, the graphics and sound SUCKS CLEVE BALLS. I can't believe it looks even worse than Ultima 6. Compared to Syndicate the latter looks absolutely nextgen. The sound is beyond terrible. The clink-clanking of the weapons makes me feel I'm watching a bunch of toys wacking each other. The soundtrack is ok but the quality is just bad, even with Roland. And there's NO DAMN BATTLE MUSIC. So you've the ultimate boring battle of video gaming ever - clumsy control, shitty UI, stuipid AI, crawling movement, childish sword-banging noises and PURE SILENCE.
Worst game ever. The only good thing about this game is the manual, very good reading material, but only for the history information part, because the part explaining the gameplay is a pure mess.
Since there's no Darklands reviews on the Codex yet I dare you guys put this on it.
